Aphorism 17

Now, as in the cure effected by the removal of the whole of the perceptible signs and symptoms of the disease the internal alteration of the vital force to which the disease is due consequently the whole of the disease is at the same time removed,(Note: A warning dream, a superstitious fancy, or a solemn prediction that death would occur at a certain day or at a certain hour, has not unfrequently produced all the signs of commencing and increasing disease, of approaching death and death itself at the hour announced, which could not happen without the simultaneous production of the inward change (corresponding to the state observed externally); and hence in such cases all the morbid signs indicative of approaching death have frequently been dissipated by an identical cause, by some cunning deception of pursuation to a belief in the contrary, and health suddenly restored, which could not have happened without the removal, by means of this moral remedy, of the internal and external morbid change that threatened death.) it follows that the physician has only to remove the whole of the symptoms in order, at the same, to abrogate and annihilate the internal change, that is to say, the morbid derangement of the vital force consequently the totality of the disease, the disease itself.(Note: It is only thus that God, the preserver of mankind, could reveal. His wisdom and goodness In reference to the cure of the disease to which man is liable here below, by showing to the physician what he had to remove in diseases in order to annihilate them and thus re-establish health. But what would we think of His wisdom and goodness if He had shrouded in mysterious obscurity that which was to be cured in diseases (as is asserted by the dominant school of medicine, which affects to possess a supernatural insight into the inner nature of things), and shut it up in the hidden interior, and thus rendered it impossible for man to know the malady accurately, consequently impossible for him to cure it ) But when the disease is annihilated the health is restored, and this is the highest, the sole aim of the physician who knows the true object of his mission, which consists not in learned-sounding prating, but in giving aid to the sick.