"Disease is a condition that prevents this full, free and regular action. All that is necessary to bring relief and establish order, is to remove obstacles to this action, and excite the organs to their proper motions. Whatever will invariably, promptly, powerfully and permanently relax, contract and stimulate, will remove all obstructions to vital action, and cure all forms of disease, is a true medicine. As stimulation is nothing more than rapidly alternating relaxation and contraction [an interchange of activity as in the storage battery], it follows that the two motions in different ways and degrees of rapidity, sometimes relaxing, sometimes contracting, with greater or less velocity, are all that is necessary.
"We may discover new methods and means of carrying them out, and new modes of application, but the principles are the laws of man's nature and they cannot progress. Let these be adopted and consistently obeyed, and no longer is there any trouble about the 'secondary' action of the remedies for disease; no longer is the physician compelled to guess at the circumstances in which his remedies may be converted into poisons, nor poisons into breast-milk; no longer to lift his club and
26 THOMSONIAN SYSTEM
strike, nor to raise his gun and fire at random, thus multiplying diseases and increasing their mortality. No longer must he grope without a clue, like Homer's Cyclops around his cave. But emancipated from the tyranny of the schools of physic and guided by the Physio-Medical principles, he sees at a glance, the character and conditions of disease; knows for a certainty the requirements and processes by which it may be routed, and proceeds to work in a scientific manner, with the same fixedness of principles and certainty of success that he would bring to bear upon the practice of any other art derived from the principles of its appropriate science. He cannot, indeed, expect to prolong human life forever, nor to reconstruct the organs of the body that may have been fatally marred; nor restore the functions of organs that are totally deprived of the power to perform them; but he can learn how to restore that which is capable of restoration, and he is blameworthy if he does anything to hasten dissolution, or entail upon his patient any chronic malady.
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