The principle indicated in the extract will some day be adopted by
Christianity in its treatment of the moral life. Mere palliatives are
insufficient:
The aim of reasonable people should be to keep themselves in
health rather than to be always straying, as it were, upon
the confines of disease and seeking assistance from drugs in
order to return to conditions from which they should never
have suffered themselves to depart. The various alkaline
salts and solutions, for example, the advertisements of which
meet us at every turn, and which are offered to the public as
specifics, safely to be taken, without anything so superfluous
as the advice of medical men, for all the various evils which
are described by the advertisers as gout or heartburn, or
as the consequences of “uric acid,” do unquestionably, in a
certain proportion of cases, afford temporary relief from some
discomfort or inconvenience. They do this notwithstanding
persistence in the habit or in the indulgence, whatever it
may be, the overeating, the want of exercise, the excessive
consumption of alcohol or of tobacco, which is really underlying
the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and
which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while
they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to
degeneration of tissue and to premature death. (Text.)--_The
Lancet._
(2295)