Bright’s Disease is one that never attacks those who live on coarse food, live abstemiously, and drink water chiefly. It is rather a disease of “high livers.” But a man does not need a large income to ensure this affection: any one who can get all he wants to eat and drink, and who eats and drinks all he “wants” (even without indulgence in wine, or alcohol in any form, which is a prolific cause of this disorder), may safely reckon on some of the symptoms, if not upon the worst form of the disease; and whether it be the understood cause of his death or not, it will surely be a contributing cause. The possession of typically healthy kidneys is a rare circumstance in this climate. The excessive micturition so universal in infancy, occasioned by excess in diet, is the beginning of renal disease.
Dr. Bright immortalized his name by discovering the fact that, when a man’s last sickness is attended with a certain class of symptoms, as albumen in the urine, final suppression of the urine, and uremic poisoning, they are occasioned by a peculiar disease or degeneration of the kidney. From a practical stand-point we care nothing about the kind of change taking place in the kidney, but rather ask what kind of change in our habits will keep this, and all the organs of the body, in a healthy condition? The former study is all well enough for those who desire it, but if _too much time_ is devoted to it, and to the _relation of drugs thereto_, by an individual, he may be, probably will be, the very least fitted to advise an inquirer who desires to know what he can do to be saved from disease and the supposed necessity of taking medicine. Says Dr. Dickinson (ibid., chap. VI.): “There are few disorders which are more under the influence of medicine than is the catarrhal inflammation of the kidneys.” And the very next sentence is one worth pondering on by those who are accustomed to take medicine whenever they come to grief through ignorance or neglect of the laws of life: “Under some plans of treatment,” says this celebrated authority, in continuing, “plans which formerly were almost universally adopted, and _still have their advocates_, the disorder is one of heavy mortality. Under other circumstances the danger is so small, that if once the complaint be recognized, a recovery may be reckoned upon in a large _proportion_ of cases. Without treatment of any kind there is reason to suppose that a large _majority_ of the subjects of it would recover.” (The italics are my own.) From this it will be observed that it depends on one’s luck whether he shall fall into the hands of a practitioner who belongs to a class still adhering to the plan ensuring a “heavy mortality,” or of one whose modified form of treatment is less fatal; and upon his good sense, whether he shall come under the influence of either, or adopt the methods indicated herein, viz., the abandonment of disease-producing, and the adoption of _ease_-producing, habits, which would be an immense gain over the “no treatment” plan which, according to a rational interpretation of Dr. Dickinson’s language, is the safest of the three referred to by him. From the three-hundred-page treatise before me, which is fresh from the mint (1881), and is a most valuable book for those who wish to study the pathology of the disease (Bright’s), but which is little calculated to aid any one healthward, except he be already pretty well informed in hygienic matters, I cull, in addition to the paragraphs already quoted, the following little nugget of pure gold: “We must avoid the use of any drugs which, under the name of stimulating diuretics, might exasperate the existing congestion; and we must enforce such diet as to reduce to a minimum that nitrogenous excess which finds its way out chiefly by the kidneys, and provides in many shapes effective means of irritation. Physiological repose is to be sought, not by debarring the gland of the harmless and necessary solvent, but by cutting off the materials of urea and uric acid.” How naturally, then, do we look for the continuing sentiments: “‘Spare diet and spring water clear’ may often be found sufficient though simple remedies. _Of all diuretics water is the best._”[45] But how can we reconcile, with such counsel, the treatment that he himself commonly adopts?