The power of nature in disease / by J. Wallace Anderson, M.D., formerly physician to the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow, and lecturer on medicine, Queen Margaret College.

  • Anderson, J. Wallace (James Wallace)
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The power of nature in disease / by J. Wallace Anderson, M.D., formerly physician to the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow, and lecturer on medicine, Queen Margaret College. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    mencement of deformity, and may forestall the action of the surgeon himself. But we do not think that this is any more truly an instance of Nature's power and action in disease than are the aches and pains of commencing fever. The weariedness and shivering (for these in their purpose are simply pain) of the initial period of fever compel to rest and warmth, and the anorexia, often so grievously interfered with, equally declares, as we have said, the need for rest. The untutored savage, with his shivering fit upon him, with his nausea and his aching head and limbs, betakes himself to such warmth and rest as a corner of his rude dwelling affords. If Nature will only further leave him strength enough to wet his lips betimes in the nearest stream, she leaves him all he wants and haply all he needs. With these he can bide his time, like the best of us. He has his rest; let him wait till his strength returns. We need not stop to enquire what would happen were it not for this rest that pain enforces. We know that without it the fracture of the arm would never unite, that the ulcer of the ileg would never heal. Rest is the first essential for the process of all repair. There is another respect in which pain may be a vis medica- trix that has never, we think, been definitely set forth except by Sydenham. In speaking of gout, he says, the pain was the sharp remedy of Nature. By that he clearly meant the pain per se; not the pain as the expression and the measure of the local structural changes, but the pain absolutely, the pain with- out which these changes might be of little or no avail as a relief to the general economy. We have no doubt this is Sydenham's meaning, and this interpretation is borne out by his further observation that the worse the pain, the shorter the fit. ^ Nor can there be any doubt that pain may be of itself bene- ficial. We speak of the relief of tears; there is as truly the relief of pain. The malady of whooping cough is relieved, as we have already noted, by its expression on the nerves of the throat, and no less effectually though it is a purely functional manifestation. So in epilepsy there is a something which we cannot gauge, yet which accumulates towards instability ; and when this accumulation is expended, stability returns. And we call it a nerve explosion. In gout we have the same accumula- tion, though its origin is in something more material. The force is expended in the form of pain, and it is that pain which is ^ Sydenham's Works (Syd. Soc), ii. 128.