yet unable to
endow the machinery with latent powers of reparation; secret resources
against accident or decay, treasured up for the hour of necessity, and
not even detectable, if existent, before the emergency that evoked them.
Not so with the objects of creation. _They_ are each and all, according
to various laws, provided with such powers; their operations, whether
from deficient energy or misdirection, constituting what we call
disease. What is dropsy, for instance, save the resolution of an
inflammatory action that would almost inevitably prove fatal? Formidable
as the malady is, it yet affords time for treatment; its march is
comparatively slow and uniform, whereas the disease that originated
it would have caused death, if effusion of fluid had not arrested the
violence of the inflammation.

Take the most simple case--a wounded bloodvessel, a cut finger: by all
the laws of hydraulics, the blood must escape from this small vessel,
and the individual bleed to death as certainly, though not so speedily,
as from the largest artery. But what ensues? after a slight loss
of blood, the vessel contracts--a coagulum forms--the bleeding is
arrested--the coagulum solidifies and forms a cicatrix; and the whole of
these varied processes--a series of strange and wonderful results--will
follow, without any interference of the Will, far less any aid from
the individual himself, being powers inherent in the organisation, and
providentially stored up for emergency.

The blood poured out upon the brain from an apoplectic stroke, must, and
does, prove fatal, save when the _vis medicatrix_ is able to interpose
in time, by encircling the fluid, enclosing it with a _sac_, and
subsequently by absorption removing the extraneous pressure. All these
are vital processes, over which the sufferer has no control--of which he
is not even conscious.

The approach of an abscess to the surface of the body, by a law similar
to that which determines the approach of a plant to the surface of
the earth--the reparation of a fractured bone, by the creation and
disposition of elements not then existing in the body--and many similar
cases, warranted him in assuming that all these processes were exactly
analogous to what we call disease, being disturbances of the animal
economy accompanied by pain; and that disease of every kind was only
a curative effort, occasionally failing from sufficient
energy--occasionally, from the presence of antagonistic agency