Ours is a universe of law and order. Every law is the expression of a force--every force must act lawfully, being unable to act in any other way. Every organ in man's body is designed for particular functions and is controlled by laws as immutable and inviolable as the law of gravitation. Every involuntary power exhibited in man's body constantly and ceaselessly obeys the laws of its constitution. In the very nature of things it cannot do otherwise. The organs must perform the functions for which they are designed. They can no more violate the laws governing their operations than the earth can reverse its motion, or stones cast themselves upward.

So long as an organ or part is alive it will strive to fulfil its functions in harmony with natural laws. The heart will beat, the lungs breathe, the nerves feel, the glands secrete, so long as they possess even a measure of life. However feeble and insufficient may be their attempts, however defective the materials with which they have to work, they will continue to function according to law--the effort to live does not cease, so long as life lasts. These, efforts, however feeble are not to be regarded as wrong actions.

Violent actions are no less lawful than feeble ones. The dynamic actions of the body in "disease" are subject to the same laws and controlling forces as are the actions of health.

The actions of the body are always right, lawful, and in "disease" are as true to the pole-star of health as the needle is to the magnetic pole. The so-called symptoms of "disease", which puzzle physicians, are not destructive processes; they are not evils to be resisted, combated, suppressed, subdued, or subverted. They are merely external evidences of a body's striving under control of law to preserve its integrity and existence; and the physician who regards them as anything else, reveals his abject ignorance of the most fundamental facts of life. The laws and forces controlling the body are the same in "disease" as in health, and their action is always for the same purpose--harmony, betterment, improvement.

When cohesive attraction splits rocks; when magnetism arranges needles parallel with the equator; when gravitation casts stones upward; when water runs up-hill of its own tendency, then will we expect to see the organs of man's body disobey the laws of their constitution and act wrongly. So long as they act they must act lawfully--their action must always be "upward", and right, it can never be "downward" and wrong. And this principle of right action in "disease" is what is meant by the term orthopathy. "Disease action", no less than "health action" is "right action". Orthopathy expresses the conception of the reign of law in physiology. In "disease" the individual suffers and functions are increased or decreased, not because the action of the body is wrong, but because the body under control of law, is struggling in the only way it can struggle to free itself from impending dangers resulting from bad habits--misuse and abuse.

The living organism may not always be able to overcome the causes of pathology and to repair damages done to its structures, and restore the healthy condition; but, if after a vigorous effort to accomplish these ends, the organism must give way to the pathogenic forces, this does not change the essentially lawful nature and useful tendency of the irritation, pain, inflammation, fever and other measures by which it seeks to meet the threat to its integrity and existence.

Whether vital action in "disease" is "right action" or "wrong action" is fundamental--the correct answer to such a question must underlie all proper care of the sick and form the basis of all scientific progress in means of care. If the dynamic and passive vital manifestations of "disease" are regarded as evils in themselves, efforts will be made to suppress or counteract them. It makes all the difference in the world whether fever, pain, inflammation, vomiting, etc., are efforts of the body to remove offending agents, or are, themselves, the things to be removed.

All functions, however imperfect these may be, due to impairing influences, are vital acts or processes and are always and of necessity in strictest harmony with the laws of life. Vital acts and processes are not designed to be destructive, else could vitality be correctly accused of self-destruction. At all times and under all conditions the organs and processes of the body do the best they can and obey the laws of life. Organs may be damaged and functions feeble, but functions are never wrong. Crippled function is not wrong function.

Trall's question, "is disease vital action or the opposite", answers itself if we limit the term to the symptoms. They are acts belonging to vitality and cannot be produced by any other power, and their imperfectness is a consequence of the impairment of the vital powers and not due to any want of disposition or tendency to do right. It is of greatest importance that we always keep this principle in mind; for it places before us the fact that pathology is a condition and not an action, and enables us to discriminate between the operations of life and those of pathogen.

Even the strongest Heteropath will usually concede that when the symptoms of a "disease" are obviously improving, the action is right action; but when the symptoms appear to be growing worse--pain more intense, fever higher, restlessness greater, excretions (fluxes) more copious, etc.--he will insist that this is wrong action.

The orthopathic principle has this great advantage--that it is not a mere doctrine, nor a mere theory, nor a mere hypothesis, but a visible and demonstrable fact. Nobody can deny or dispute it. A true pathology will teach that the so-called symptoms of "disease" represent a valiant attempt of the organism to eliminate toxins and repair damages.

The principle of right action permeates the whole of our theory and practice. While this principle is really self-evident in the light of physiology and true pathology; the pathological doctrines that have long ruled and now rule the medical professions--based on the principle that "disease" is wrong action--are at variance with the laws of biology, and the therapeutic practices based thereon, are in essence, a warfare upon life itself. Only a true understanding of the nature of "disease" will enable doctors of all schools to cease fighting with the body under the vain delusion that they are fighting a monster called disease; only this will stop them from killing their patients to cure them.

The many uniform needs of the body constitute a unity of function in organs of the widest dissimilarity of form so that however different these may be in shape, structure or position, they all serve the ends of the animal economy, and enable the body to adjust itself to the varying conditions of its environment. The forces and processes of the body are all subordinate to a system of adaptation and adjustment.

The immense number and variety of adjusted changes in the many different organs of the body, co-operating with each other, and all nicely adjusted to the improved functional actions in which they must all partake, which are seen in health are seen in biogony also. The correlations and adjustments of the body in health are not merely analogous to those of biogony, but identical with them. The correlated changes in the body in biogony are so numerous and some of them are so remote that the greater part of them are not even known; much less can they be described. In the face of innumerable and complicated adjustments, such as these, I can see nothing but a grand harmony in the apparent turmoil of biogony ("disease"). Biogony is physiology modified, or intensified, or reduced or re-directed, but not deranged. The course of a biogony constitutes a chain of actions which follow one another in an orderly sequence as the result of a necessity to preserve life.

Suppressive measures of treatment cannot fail to interfere with all of the adjustive measures the body has set in motion. Increased heart action and increased temperature are both vital phenomena and, are, in no proper sense, any real portion of the pathology, though they are evidences of the existence of pathological conditions. The pathological conditions are certainly to be remedied (by removing their causes), but the functional modifications, biogonies, sequent to these, are not, on that account, to be suppressed or extinguished by the physician.

Circulation cannot be slowed and temperature reduced without correspondingly lessening every increase of physiological action sequent to these. A law of physiological compensation forms the basis of all biogonies and to reduce one of the efforts of nature to restore the original condition of health, which has been impaired by wrong living, is to reduce all correlated activities.