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You think that matter comes first, and then what we call mind. Where is this matter? Where have you ever seen matter? You see oak, fir, slate, and granite, and all sorts of other materies, as the old architects called them, never matter. Matter is the creation of the mind, not the reverse. Our entire world is thought, not wood and stone.
That form of the disease, however, in which there is swelling from a subtile and liquid material deposited in the soft parts is the more quickly cured. Hence swelling is the best sign of curability. This is most evidently true in podagra, unless the materies morbi, by reason of its scarcity, produces no enlargement of the affected part."
Quoting the words of Rhazes, Gilbert tells us that the materies morbi of gout is, for the most part, crude and bloody phlegm. Rarely is it bilious, and still more rarely, melancholic. The mixture of black bile and blood or bile is very rare, and still rarer a mixture of all the humors according to their proportion in the body.
The evil, or superabundant, humors were discharged and this view of a special materies morbi, to be got rid of by a natural processor a crisis, dominated pathology until quite recently. Hippocrates had a great belief in the power of nature, the vis medicatrix naturae, to restore the normal state.
Generations ago physicians had a glimmering of what we now term the germ theory of disease, as was shown by their use of such expressions as materies morbi and morbid poisons. Even the definite relationship of special microscopic organisms to individual diseases was foreshadowed by Salisbury nearly fifty years ago.
Indeed we ought to require derivation of the materies to another part whenever the affected locality contains one of the nobler organs, towards which the material is directing, or may direct its course. For instance: A person is suffering pain in the joints of the right hand, but has also an acute swelling in the bladder, the kidneys or the womb.
We are in trouble just now, on account of a neglected hereditary melanosis, as Monsieur Trousseau might call it. When we recover from the social and political convulsion it has produced, and eliminate the materies morbi, and both these events are only matters of time, perhaps we shall have leisure to breed our own milliners.
If the color shades away into black, it does not signify necessarily that the materies is simply black bile, for such a color occurs at the close of acute abscesses, or from strangulation of the blood. But if, together with the black color, we find the tissues cold and no increase of heat in the affected part, this indicates that the materies is black bile.
Obviously, a "day" with reference to the planet for which the term is used, means the period occupied by one rotation of the planet on its own axis. The rotation of the earth is antecedent to anything mentioned in the narrative we are considering. In the nature of things, it would have been coeval with the introduction of the prima materies at least if any nebular hypothesis can be relied on.
And this is one of the reasons why one ought to divert the material to another part, especially when the pain is so located that it may be increased at the beginning. For under such conditions we ought to refrain from bleeding, frictions and other treatment which may attract the materies morbi to the part.
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