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The Avoidable Causes of Disease, Insanity and Deformity
The Avoidable Causes of Disease Insanity and Deformity Author:John Ellis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IL NATURAL CAUSES OF DISEASE.—A GENERAL VIEW. The causes of disease have been divided, by medical writers into predisposing, exciting and proximate... more » causes. But as the proximate cause as represented by writers, is but the pathological condition, or the change of structure which is the immediate cause of the symptoms, it is but a part of the disease itself, and, of course, it cannot be classed with the causes of disease, as it is only a cause of the symptoms. I shall then discard the term, "proximate cause," in our present inquiry. We have only to consider the predisposing and exciting causes of disease. The co-operation of both the predisposing and exciting causes, is generally required to produce disease. The entire community are exposed to a sudden change of atmospheric temperature; one is attacked with a cold in the head, another with pneumonia, or pleurisy, another with diarrhoea, another with acute rheumatism, and still another with an inflammatory fever, and by far the largest number escape entirely, without any disease ; and yet all are exposed to the same cause, but each of the different individuals attacked, were predisposed to a different disease from the others, which manifested itself as soon as the exciting cause was applied; while the majority had no predisposition, and the exciting cause was harmless without a predisposition to some particular disease; and the predisposition was insufficient until the exciting cause was applied. But the predisposing cause may be sufficiently strong, to develop disease without, or with but a very slight exciting cause; thus a person with a very weak stomach will have indigestion, however careful he may be in his diet, and does not need any exciting cause to develop it. So likewise an exciting cause may be strong en...« less