Excerpt from Experimental Investigation of the Action of Medicines, Vol. 1: Circulation

Pathology. - In order to choose a drug which will have the effect that we desire to obtain, we must know where the morbid changes are taking place, and what their nature is and we must be sure that our medicine will act on the affected part, and in such a way as to counter act the disease. We must trace every symptom which we see, back to its unseen source; every flush on the cheek, every quickening of the pulse, back to the vaso-motor or cardiac nerves, which have allowed the capillaries to become dilated, and thus produced the redness, or have permitted the heart to beat more rapidly than its wont. We must then inquire what has produced this alteration in the nervous system, and so on, till at last we discover, if possible, the hidden cause of the mischief. We will then give that remedy which will act in the proper way'on the part which we believe to be the seat of the morbid process; and, if the expected result does not ensue, we shall, at any rate, have discovered what the pathology of the disease is not; and, by trying a remedy which will act in a different way or on a different structure, we may find out what it really is.

When I Speak of the pathology of a disease, I do not mean those obvious alterations in the structure of an organ which we meet with in post mortem examinations, but the so-called functional changes which precede and are the cause of both them and the symptoms. For ex ample, the disorganisation of a man's liver by the presence of an abscess, or of his kidneys by fatty degeneration, is not the disease from which he suffered, any more than a field strewn with slain or crowded with heaps of wounded is a battle. The disease was the alteration in the nervous and vascular systems, and in the nutrition of tissues, which we call the inflammatory process, and which produced the abscess and degeneration, and the disturbance of the same systems to which these lesions in their turn give rise just as an army may not only lose the battle for want of the assistance which its slain and wounded would have given, but its retreat may be embarrassed by their presence.

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