Many drugs--epsom salts, ipecac, strychnine, calomel, common table salt, etc.--will occasion vomiting or emesis. The ordinary action of the stomach is reversed and the drug is cast up. When the stomach throws up a poisonous drug the action is so obviously defensive--life and health saving--that no one will dispute it. It is "vital action in relation to things abnormal," and not drug action. The drug is passive.

When a drug occasions vomiting it is called an emetic. Emetics are said to act on the stomach. The reverse is true--the action is organic. The drug is acted upon--it is the living body that acts and in self-defense. The body rejects poisons and irritants by vomiting, but, except under certain circumstances, does not reject wholesome substances in this manner. The undepraved stomach rejects table salt, but not spinach or celery. It will cast up calomel or strychnine, but not bread or cabbage, nor apples or oranges. Such "abnormal" actions are directed against the foes of life, not against her friends. Trall says, if there is no power to vomit "the emetic is no emetic at all." In other words, the promptness and vigor with which the stomach vomits poison is a reliable index to its integrity and functional strength. The weakened and depraved stomach may not be able to vomit. He also says:

"Perhaps I can give an illustration of the leading problems of my subject still more obvious and satisfactory. I read in a newspaper the other day, that a boa-constrictor, while on exhibition in one of the theatres in Paris, having been kept without food for a long time,

'Began to feel, as well he might,

The keen demands of appetite.' and took it into his fancy to swallow a bed-blanket. The snake was two or three days in getting the blanket down; and after retaining it for some four or five weeks, the blanket, after another two or three days struggle, was found in its former position, and not much the worse for the vain attempt of the monster to digest it.

"Now the questions to be answered are: Did the blanket act on the snake, or did the snake act on the blanket? Again, to expel a bed-blanket from the stomach is not physiological. No boa-constrictor in the normal state ever did it. Then it must be pathological, and pathology is disease. The blanket was the cause of the disease--the obstructing material, and the disease itself was the process--the vomiting, which expelled it. Should this process of ejecting the blanket have been counteracted, suppressed, or subdued, or killed, or cured; or regulated and directed?"--True Healing Art.

Vomiting of food is equally with the vomiting of poisons, a curative act. When food cannot be digested, when it is irritating, when it ferments and putrifies, when worry or grief suspend digestion, when one indulges in heavy work in the hot sun after a hearty meal, when a wound (nervous shock) is sustained, and food is vomited, the emesis serves to defend the body against food poisoning.

In acute gastritis, the mucous membrane lining the stomach is red and swollen, it secretes little or no gastric juice and this contains very little acid and much mucous. There is discomfort in the abdomen, headache, lassitude, some nausea, a coated tongue, foul taste in the mouth, bad breath, lack of appetite and often vomiting. Vomiting removes mucous and food and gives relief from the distress. If the decomposing, fermenting, irritating mass is not vomited, it passes out in a diarrhea.

The vomiting of food in such conditions is obviously curative. The lack of appetite is designed to prevent taking more food into a stomach that cannot digest it.

In typhoid fever--acute enteritis--the condition of both the stomach and intestine is worse than that of the stomach in acute gastritis. Vomiting and lack of appetite in this condition serve the same purpose as in the prior condition.

Frequently in cases of bowel obstruction the peristaltic wave, from the point of obstruction to the mouth, is reversed, and the feces are vomited. This is an extraordinarly unusual effort on the part of the body to defend itself and preserve its integrity--an effort that would probably succeed more often than it does, did physicians but stop foolishly forcing more food upon such patients.