Nature resisting disease

Meaning

Nature “rebels against her enemies” and makes an effort to defend life. This is her own resistance, a distinct agency within II.3.11’s account of illness and medicine. A remedy is not represented as producing every vital response from nothing; it should assist or restore capacities already at work. The personification also explains the author’s criticism of merely evacuative intervention: removing matter is insufficient if the defending power is left depleted. Its historical notion of Nature’s effort should not be silently identified with a particular modern physiological mechanism.