If you only break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill the person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them.

Whence it is plain that the first thing to do is to find out where the head lies.
Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of intemperance.

What is the head of it, and where does it lie?
For you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has not a head of its own,--an intelligence,--a meaning,--a certain virtue, I was going to say,--but that might, perhaps, sound paradoxical.

I have heard an immense number of moral physicians lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all, but was all body and tail.

So I have found a very common result of their method to be that the string slipped, or that a piece only of the creature was broken off, and the worm soon grew again, as bad as ever.