I hope through these illustrations to make it clear that nature generally cures disease. When she does not, it is generally incurable. There is a small residuum left for the doctor. We have a function as physicians or nurses. We have a function, and that function is intermediate between two extremes. In disease or in other misfortune, there are three types of fortune, two extremes and a mean: (1) The people who will get out of their troubles whatever you do, get out of their misfortunes, rally to meet their griefs, pull themselves out of financial difficulties, get over their disease. Then (2) there are people on the other side, who will die whatever you do. Some cases of pneumonia, for instance, seem to be doomed from the start. It is the same with many other cases of disease and with some people's misfortunes. We have to face the fact in social work that there are many people whose mental twists and agonies we cannot help in the least, and many people who will be in money difficulties as long as they live. But (3), intermediate between these two extremes--and our happiness and our success depend on our finding that group--are those cases where what we do makes the difference between success and failure. This triple division indicates a point of view which makes, not only for individual understanding of the situation, but for practical success.
Take the case of those maimed by war or accident. There are three classes of them: first, the people who will get back their jobs and get back into industry unaided; they are probably the majority. Then the people who cannot be put back by any process. Finally, there is the rather small intermediate class who, with our help, with a little extra education, with a hand in the back, will get back into work, but who never would succeed, humanly speaking, without our help.
So it is in disease. _The vast majority of diseases get well without any help from anybody_, and that is the thing we must teach most often and to most people, in season and out of season. In our day and generation few people get a chance of observing that fact, because somebody comes along and gives them a drug. And unless one has seen people get well without any drugs, one continues to believe that it was the last drug given that cured every case of illness one has known to get well. On the other hand, the majority of illnesses that do not get well without drugs will not get well at all. I have mentioned before the figures which seem approximately true in relation to the cure of disease by drugs. Drugs will cure about six or eight diseases out of about one hundred and fifty diseases known to science. Anybody who fails to give a drug for one of those six or eight diseases is criminally negligent. We should press that drug upon the patient. I do not want anybody to think that I do not believe in drugs. I believe in them tremendously, in the particular cases where they are of use. But I do not stand for the habit of bolstering up people's beliefs that we have drugs all ready to cure most diseases.