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CURATIVE AGENCIES. 289
If poison or diseasing matter is taken into the system
in so small quantities as not to call for any violent effort
to expel it, it is treated just like a few persons who
venture into an enemy's country. They
are either
allowed to go quietly out, by the usual avenues, or are
imprisoned and retained. Francke, a German path
has made some curious ob
ologist and hydropathist,
servations on this point. He says, that in all cases where
poison, or morbid matter, is not at once cast out of the
system, it is enveloped in a coating of mucus, to prevent
it from doing injury, and then either carried out by the
usual processes, or, if this can not well be done, it is
retained in the system, each atom being thus "slimed
up" and protected from more doing mischief.
But as these matters accumulate in the system, there
is a constant tendency to drive them out ; and every
cold, every fever, every paroxysm
of disease is such
an effort. The matter is always there, and always lia
ble to be dislodged, and to be the cause of diseased
action, or of the effort toward health ; but when nature
fails, either from the weakness of her own power or
the interference of the doctors, and the introduction of
more poison, unless she gives up the struggle finally,
and retires from the body altogether, she spends her
remaining efforts in again sliming up the materies
morbi.
Sometimes masses of these slimed-up matters, med
icines, and other are poisons, collected along the walls
of the stomach and intestines, covering and rendering
useless large patches of those organs.
Sometimes they
appear in the form of tubercle. In this case they have
got as far as the glands, the lungs, the areolar tissue,
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