APHORISM 7: CAUSE OF THE DISEASE & VALUE OF SYMPTOMS
Now, as in a disease, from which no manifest exciting or maintaining cause ( causa occasionalis) has to be removed. {*It is not necessary to say that every intelligent physician would first remove this where it exists; the indisposition thereupon generally ceases spontaneously He will remove from the room strong smelling flowers, which have a tendency to cause syncope and hysterical sufferings; extract from the cornea the foreign body that excites inflammation of the eye; loosen the over-tight bandage on a wounded limb that threatens to cause mortification, and apply a more suitable one; lay bare and put a ligature on the wounded artery that produces fainting; endeavor to promote the expulsion by vomiting of belladonna berries, etc. that may have been swallowed; extract foreign substances that may have got into the orifices of the body (the nose, gullet, ears, urethra, rectum, vagina); crush the vesical calculus; open the imperforate anus of the new-born infant, etc. *}
We can perceive nothing but the morbid symptoms, it must (regard being had to the possibility of a miasm, and attention paid to the accessory circumstances, Aphorism 5) be the symptoms alone by which the disease demands and points to the remedy suited to relieve it-and, moreover, the totality of these its symptoms, of this outwardly reflected picture of the internal essence of the disease, that is, of the affection of the vital force, must be the principal, or the sole means, whereby the disease can make known what remedy it requires-the only thing that can determine the choice of the most appropriate remedy-and thus, in a word, the totality {* In all times, the old school physicians, not knowing how else to give relief, have sought to combat and if possible to suppress by medicines, here and there, a single symptom from among anumber in diseases-a one-sided procedure, which , under the name of symptomatic treatment, has justly excited universal contempt, because by it, not only was nothing gained, but much harm was inflicted. A single one of the symptoms present is no more the disease itself than a single foot is the man himself. This procedure was so much the more reprehensible, that such a single symptoms was only treated by an antagonistic remedy (therefore only in an enantiopathic and palliative manner) whereby, after a slight alleviation, it was subsequently only rendered all the worse *} of the symptoms must be the principal, indeed the only thing the physician has to take note of in every case of disease and to remove by means of his art, in order that the disease shall be cured and transformed into health.
