If "disease" is an antagonistic element of any nature, and has succeeded in making a successful "attack" upon the body and obtained so firm a hold that the powers of life are unable to throw it off; if, from this time onward, from day to day, it should continue to grow stronger, and extend its dominion deeper and wider, while the powers of life are, to the same extent, overpowered and. driven before it, until there is the merest breath of life left, and in some cases hardly that, what possible chance would there be for the little remnant of life that remains to rally and regain its so thoroughly devastated dominion? Obviously there would not be the slightest chance for recovery in the absence of saving treatment, and yet. if such cases ever recover, it is after hope is abandoned and treatment forsaken.

Nearly ninety years since, Dr. Hawthorn, a standard medical author of that day, in a treatise on Epidemic Cholera, after recommending much and varied heroic treatment for the prevention of collapse, admitted that patients did occasionally revive and return to health after this stage has been reached, but added: "Almost all the recoveries from collapse I have ever witnessed, were of persons who refused to take any medicine whatever, and who recovered through the Vis Medicatrix Naturae-- healing power of nature!"

If there was a "tendency to death" in those cases, if cholera is a real antagonistic principle, which carries on a relentless warfare against the powers of life, why did it yield the conflict and permit its victims to escape, when they were so completely in its power? How, if disease is antagonistic to life, did patients who were already in a state of collapse, rally the forces of life and, unaided by treatment of any kind, throw off their foes and return to health? If the current theories of disease are correct, it should be obvious to the least discerning that such recoveries would be impossible.

In a preceding chapter we have supplied evidence that the human body is a self-protective vital mechanism, capable of purposive activity and possessing power to produce within itself its own remedial agents and to preserve or restore its own functional and structural integrity. Let us begin our study of "disease" by analyzing some of its phenomena.