resort to extraordinary abnormal impressions for the relief of disease.

The reaction of the living system is the essence of both. Food is
nothing, if there is no digestive act to respond to it. We cannot raise
a blister on a dead man, or hope that a carminative forced between his
lips will produce its ordinary happy effect.

Disease, dis-ease,--disturbed quiet, uncomfortableness,--means imperfect
or abnormal reaction of the living system, and its more or less permanent
results.

Food, in its largest sense, is whatever helps to build up the normal
structures, or to maintain their natural actions.

Medicine, in distinction from food, is every unnatural or noxious agent
applied for the relief of disease.

Physic means properly the Natural art, and Physician is only the Greek
synonyme of Naturalist.

With these few explanations I proceed to unfold the propositions I have
mentioned.

Disease and death, if we may judge by the records of creation, are
inherently and essentially necessary in the present order of things. A
perfect intelligence, trained by a perfect education, could do no more
than keep the laws of the physical and spiritual universe. An imperfect
intelligence, imperfectly taught,--and this is the condition of our
finite humanity,--will certainly fail to keep all these laws perfectly.
Disease is one of the penalties of one of the forms of such failure. It
is prefigured in the perturbations of the planets, in the disintegration
of the elemental masses; it has left its traces in the fossil organisms
of extinct creations. [Professor Agassiz has kindly handed me the
following note: "There are abnormal structures in animals of all ages
anterior to the creation of mankind. Malformed specimens of Crinoids are
known from the Triassic and Jurassic deposits. Malformed and diseased
bones of tertiary mammalia have been collected in the caverns of
Gailenreuth with traces of healing."]

But it is especially the prerogative, I had almost said privilege, of
educated and domesticated beings, from man down to the potato, serving to
teach them, and such as train them, the laws of life, and to get rid of
those who will not mind or cannot be kept subject to these laws.

Disease, being always an effect, is always in exact proportion to the sum
of its causes, as much in the case of Spigelius, who dies of a scratch,
as in that of the man who recovers after an iron bar has been shot
through his brain. The one prevalent failin