THE UNITY OF THE BODY
(Discusses the body as a whole, and shows that health is not a
matter of many different organs and functions, but is one problem
of one organism.)
The reader who has followed our argument this far will understand that
we are seldom willing to think of the body as separate from the mind.
The body is a machine, to be sure, but it is a machine that has a
driver, and while it is possible for a sound machine to have a drunken
and irresponsible driver, such a machine is not apt to remain sound very
long. Frequently, when there is trouble with the machine, we find the
fault to be with the driver; in other words, we find that what is needed
for the body is a change in the mind.
If you wish to have a sound body, and to keep it sound as long as
possible, the first problem for you to settle is what you want to make
of your life; you must have a purpose, and confront the tasks of life
with energy and interest. What is the use of talking about health to a
man who has no moral purpose? He may answer--indeed, I have heard
victims of alcoholism answer--"Let me alone. I have a right to go to
hell in my own way."
I am aware, of course, that the opposite of the proposition is equally
true. A man cannot enjoy much mental health while he has a sick body. It
is a good deal like the old question, Which comes first, the hen or the
egg? The mind and the body are bound up together, and you may try to
deal with each by turn, but always you find yourself having to deal with
both. Most physicians have a tendency to overlook the mind, and
Christian Scientists make a religion of overlooking the body, and each
pays the penalty in greatly reduced effectiveness.
My first criticism of medical science, as it exists today, is that it
has a tendency to concentrate upon organs and functions, and to overlook
the central unity of the system. You will find a doctor who specializes
in the stomach and its diseases, and is apt to talk as if the stomach
were a thing that went around in the world all by itself. He will
discuss the question of what goes into your stomach, and overlook to
point out to you that your stomach is nourished by your blood-stream,
which is controlled by your nervous system, which in turn is controlled
by hope, by ambition, by love, by all the spiritual elements of your
being. A single pulse of anger or of fear may make more trouble with the
contents of your stomach than the doctor's pepsins and digestive
ferments can remedy in a week.
Of course, you may do yourself some purely local injury, and so for a
time have a purely local problem. You may smash your finger, and that is
a problem of a finger; but neglect it for a few days, and let blood
poison set in, and you will be made aware that the human body is one
organism, and also that, in spite of any metaphysical theories you may
hold, your body does sometimes dominate and control your mind.
Some one has said that the blood is the life; and certainly the blood is
both the symbol and the instrument of the body's unity. The blood
penetrates to all parts of the body and maintains and renews them. If
the blood is normal, the work of renewal does not often fail. If there
is a failure of renewal--that is, a disease--we shall generally find an
abnormal condition of the blood. The distribution of the blood is
controlled by the heart, a great four-chambered pump. One chamber drives
the blood to the lungs, a mass of fine porous membranes, where it comes
into contact with the air, and gives off the poisons which it has
accumulated in its course through the body, and takes up a fresh supply
of oxygen. By another chamber of the heart the blood is then sucked out
of the lungs, and by the next chamber it is driven to every corner of
the body. It takes to every cell of the body the protein materials which
are necessary for the body's renewal, and also the fuel materials which
are to be burned to supply the body's energy; also it takes some thirty
million millions of microscopic red corpuscles which are the carriers of
oxygen, and an even greater number of the white corpuscles, which are
the body's scavengers, its defenders from invasion by outside germs.
There are certain outer portions of the body, such as nails and the
scales of the skin, which are dead matter, produced by the body and
pushed out from it and no longer nourished by the blood. But all the
still living parts of the body are fed at every instant by the stream of
life. Each cell in the body takes the fuel which it needs for its
activities, and combines it with the oxygen brought by the red
corpuscles; and when the task of power-production has been achieved, the
cell puts back into the blood-stream, not merely the carbon dioxide, but
many complex chemical products--ammonia, uric acid, and the "fatigue
poisons," indol, phenol and skatol. The blood-stream bears these along,
and delivers some to the sweat glands to be thrown out, and some to the
kidneys, and the rest to the lungs.
All of this complicated mass of activities is in normal health perfectly
regulated and timed by the nervous system. You lie down to sleep, and
your muscles rest, and the vital activities slow up, your heart beats
only faintly; but let something frighten you, and you sit up, and these
faculties leap into activity, your heart begins to pound, driving a
fresh supply of blood and vital energy. You jump up and run, and these
organs all set to work at top speed. If they did not do so, your muscles
would have no fresh energy; they would become paralyzed by the fatigue
poisons, and you would be, as we say, exhausted.
All the rest of the body might be described as a shelter and accessory
to the life-giving blood-stream; all the rest is the blood-stream's
means of protecting itself and renewing itself. The stomach is to digest
and prepare new blood material, the teeth are to crush it and grind it,
the hands are to seize it, the eyes are to see it, the brain is to
figure out its whereabouts. Man, in his egotism, imagines his little
world as the center of the universe; but the wise old fellow who lives
somewhere deep in our subconsciousness and looks after the welfare of
our blood-stream--he has far better reason for believing that all our
consciousness and our personality exist for him!
Now, disease is some failure of this blood-stream properly to renew
itself or properly to protect itself and its various subsidiary organs.
When you find yourself with a disease, you call in a doctor; and unless
this doctor is a modern and progressive man, he makes the mistake of
assuming that the disease is in the particular organ where it shows
itself. You have, let us say, "follicular tonsilitis." (These medical
men have a love for long names, which have the effect of awing you, and
convincing you that you are in desperate need of attention.) Your throat
is sore, your tonsils are swollen and covered with white spots; so the
doctor hauls out his little black bag, and makes a swab of cotton and
dips it, say in lysol, and paints your tonsils. He knows by means of the
microscope that your tonsils are covered and filled with a mass of
foreign germs which are feeding upon them; also he knows that lysol
kills these germs, and he gives you a gargle for the same purpose, puts
you to bed, and gradually the swelling goes down, and he tells you that
he has cured you, and sends you a bill for services rendered. But maybe
the swelling does not go down; maybe it gets worse and you die. Then he
tells your family that nature was to blame. Nature is to blame for your
death, but it never occurs to anyone to ask what nature may have had to
do with your recovery.
I do not know how many thousands of diseases medical science has now
classified. And for each separate disease there are complex formulas,
and your system is pumped full of various mineral and vegetable
substances which have been found to affect it in certain ways. Perhaps
you have a fever; then we give you a substance which reduces the
temperature of your blood-stream. It never occurs to us to reflect that
maybe nature has some purpose of her own in raising the temperature of
the blood; that this might be, so to speak, the heat of conflict, a
struggle she is waging to drive out invading germs; and that possibly it
would be better for the temperature to stay up until the battle is over.
Or maybe the heart is failing; then our medical man is so eager to get
something into the system that he cannot wait for the slow process of
the mouth and the stomach, he shoots some strychnine directly into the
blood-stream. It does not occur to him to reflect that maybe the heart
is slowing up because it is overloaded with fatigue poisons, of which it
cannot rid itself, and that the effect of stimulating it into fresh
activity will be to leave it more dangerously poisoned than before.
We are dealing here with processes which our ancient mother nature has
been carrying on for a long time, and which she very thoroughly
understands. We ought, therefore, to be sure that we know what is the
final effect of our actions; more especially we ought to be sure that we
understand the cause of the evil, so that we may remove it, and not
simply waste our time treating symptoms, putting plasters on a cancer.
This is the fundamental problem of health; and in order to make clear
what I mean, I am going to begin by telling a personal experience, a
test which I made of medical science some twelve or fourteen years ago,
in connection with one of the simplest and most external of the body's
problems--the hair. First I will tell you what medical science was able
to do for my hair, and second what I myself was able to do, when I put
my own wits to work on the problem.
I had been overworking, and was in a badly run down condition. I was
having headaches, insomnia, ulcerated teeth, many symptoms of a general
breakdown; among these I noticed that my hair was coming out. I decided
that it was foolish to become bald before I was thirty, and that I would
take a little time off, and spend a little money and have my hair
attended to. I did not know where to go, but I wanted the best authority
available, so I wrote to the superintendent of the largest hospital in
New York, asking him for the name of a reliable specialist in diseases
of the scalp. The superintendent replied by referring me to a certain
physician, who was the hospital's "consulting dermatologist," and I went
to see this physician, whose home and office were just off Fifth Avenue.
He examined my scalp, and told me that I had dandruff in my hair, and
that he would give me a prescription which would remove this dandruff
and cause my hair to stop falling out. He charged me ten dollars for the
visit, which in those days was more money than it is at present. Being
of an inquiring turn of mind, I tried to get my money's worth by
learning what there was to learn about the human hair. I questioned this
gentleman, and he told me that the hair is a dead substance, and that
its only life is in the root. He explained that barbers often persuade
people to have their hair singed, to keep it from falling out, and that
this was an utterly futile procedure, and likewise all shampooing and
massage, which only caused the hair to fall out more quickly. It was
better even not to wash the hair too often. All that was needed was a
mixture of chemicals to kill the dandruff germs; and so I had the
prescription put up at a drug store, and for a couple of years I
religiously used it according to order, and it had upon my hair
absolutely no effect whatever.
So here was the best that medical science could do. But still, I did not
want to be bald, so I went among the health cranks--people who
experiment without license from the medical schools. Also, I
experimented upon myself, and now I know something about the human hair,
something entirely different from what the rich and successful
"consulting dermatologist" taught me, but which has kept me from
becoming entirely bald:
First, the human hair is made by the body, and it is made, like
everything else in the body, out of the blood-stream. It is perfectly
true that the dandruff germ gets into the roots, and makes trouble, and
that the process of killing this germ can be helped by chemicals; but it
does not take a ten-dollar prescription, it only takes ten cents' worth
of borax and salt from the corner grocery. (Put a little into a saucer,
moisten it, rub it into the scalp, and wash it out again.) But
infinitely more important than this is the fact that healthy hair roots
are a product of healthy blood, and that unhealthy blood produces sick
hair roots, which cannot hold in the hair. Most important of all is the
fact that in order to make healthy hair roots the blood must flow fully
and freely to these hair roots; whereas I had been accustomed for many
hours every day of my life to clap around my scalp a tight band which
almost entirely stopped the circulation of the life-giving blood to my
sick hair roots. In other words, by wearing civilized hats, I was
literally starving my hair to death.
As soon as I realized this I took off my civilized hat, and have never
worn one since. As a rule, I don't wear anything. On the few occasions
when I go into the city, I wear a soft cap. Now and then I experience
inconvenience from this--the elevator boy in some apartment house tells
me to come in by the delivery entrance, or the porter of a sleeping-car
will not let me in at all. I remember discussing these embarrassments
with Jack London, who went even further in his defiance of civilization,
and wore a soft shirt. It was his custom, he said, to knock down the
elevator boys and sleeping-car porters. I answered that that might be
all right for him, because he could do it; whereas I was reduced to the
painful expedient of explaining politely why I went about without the
customary symbols of my economic superiority.
The "consulting dermatologist" had very solemnly and elaborately warned
me concerning the danger of moving my hair too violently, and thus
causing it to come out; but now my investigations brought out the fact
that moving the hair, that is, massaging the scalp, increases the flow
of blood to the hair roots, and further increases resistance to disease.
As for causing the hair to fall out, I discovered that the more quickly
you cause a hair to fall out, the greater is the chance of your getting
another hair. If a hair is allowed to die in the root, it kills that
root forever, but if it is pulled out before it dies, the root will make
a new hair. Every "beauty parlor" specialist knows this; she knows that
if a hair is pulled, it grows back bigger and stronger than ever, and so
to pull out hair is the last thing you must do if you want to get rid of
hairs!
I know a certain poet, who happens to have been well-endowed with
physical graces by our mother nature. He finds it worth while to
preserve them--they being accessory to those amorous experiences which
form so large a part of the theme of poetry. Anyhow, this poet values
his beautiful hair, and you will see him sitting in front of his
fireplace, reading a book, and meanwhile his fingers run here and there
over his head, and he grabs a bunch of hair and pulls and twists it. He
has cultivated this habit for many years, and as a result his hair is as
thick and heavy as the "fuzzy-wuzzies" of Kipling's poem. It is a
favorite sport of this poet to lure some rival poet into a contest. He
will mildly suggest that they take hold of each other's hair and have a
tug of war. The rival poet, all unsuspecting, will accept the challenge,
and my friend will proceed to haul him all over the place, to the
accompaniment of howls of anguish from the victim, and howls of glee
from the victor, who has, of course, a scalp as tough as a rhinoceros
hide.
I am not a poet, and it is not important that I should be beautiful, and
I have been too busy to remember to pull my hair; but by giving up tight
hats, and by limiting the amount of my overworking, I have managed to
keep what hair I had left when the hair specialist had got through with
me. I tell this anecdote at the beginning of my discussion of health,
because it illustrates so well the factors which appear in every case of
disease, and which you must understand in seeking to remedy the trouble.
We have a phrase which has come down to us from the ancient Latins,
"vis medicatrix naturae," which means the healing power of nature. So
long ago men realized that it is our ancient mother who heals our
wounds, and not the physician. Out of this have grown the cults of
"nature cure" enthusiasts; and according to the fashion of men, they fly
to extremes just as unreasonable and as dangerous as those of the "pill
doctors" they are opposing. I have in mind a man who taught me probably
more than any other writer on health questions, and with whom I once
discussed the subject of typhoid, how it seemed to affect able-bodied
men in the prime of their physical being. This, of course, was contrary
to the theories of nature cure, and my friend had a simple way of
meeting the argument--he refused to believe it. He insisted that, as
with all other germ infections, it must be a question of bodily tone; no
germ could secure lodgment in the human body unless the body's condition
was reduced.
"But how can you be sure of that?" I argued. "You know that if you go
into the jungle, you are not immune against the scorpion or the cobra or
the tiger. There is nothing in all nature that is safe against every
enemy. What possible right have you to assert that you are immune
against every enemy which can attack your blood-stream?"
We shall find here, as we find nearly always, that the truth lies
somewhere between the extremes of two warring schools. Our race has been
existing for a long time in a certain environment, and its very
existence implies superiority to that environment. The weaklings, for
whom its hardships were too severe, were weeded out; hostile parasites
invaded their blood-stream and conquered and devoured them. But those
who survived were able to make in their blood-stream the substances
known as anti-bodies, the "opsonins," to help the white blood corpuscles
devour the germs. As the result of their victory, we carry those
anti-bodies in our system, which gives us immunity to those particular
diseases, or at any rate gives us the ability to have the diseases
without dying. Every time we go into a street car, we take into our
throat and lungs the germs of tuberculosis. Examination proves that we
carry around with us in our mouths the germs of all the common throat
and nose diseases, colds, bronchitis, tonsilitis. No matter what
precautions we might take, no matter if we were to gargle our throats
every few minutes, we could never get rid of such germs. And they wage
continual war upon the body's defenses; they batter in vain upon the
gates of our sound health. But take us to some new environment to which
we are not accustomed; take us to Panama in the old days of yellow
fever, or take us to Africa, and let the tsetse fly bite us, and infect
us with "sleeping sickness." Here are germs to which our systems are not
accustomed; and before them we are as helpless as the ancient
knights-at-arms, who had conquered everything in sight, and ruled the
continent of Europe for many hundreds of years, but were wiped off the
earth by a chemist mixing gunpowder.
In the Marquesas Islands, in the South Seas, there lived a beautiful and
happy race of savages, believed to have been descended, long ages ago,
from Aryan stock. From the point of view of physical perfection, they
were an ideal race, living a blissful outdoor life, which you may read
about in Melville's "Typee," and in O'Brien's "White Shadows in the
South Seas." This race conformed to all the requirements of the nature
enthusiast. They went practically naked, their houses were open all the
time, they lived on the abundant fruits of the earth. To be sure, they
were cannibals, but this was more a matter of religious ceremony than of
diet. They ate their war captives, but this was only after battle, and
not often enough to count, one way or the other, in matters of health.
They had lived for uncounted ages in perfect harmony with their
environment; they were happy and free; and certainly, if such a thing
were possible to human beings, they should have been proof against
germs. But a ship came to one of these islands, and put ashore a sailor
dying of tuberculosis, and in a few years four-fifths of the population
of this island had been wiped out by the disease. What tuberculosis left
were finished by syphilis and smallpox, and today the Marquesans are an
almost extinct race.
But there is another side to the argument--and one more favorable to the
nature cure enthusiast. We civilized men, by soft living, by
self-indulgence and lack of exercise, may reduce the tone of our body
too far below the standard which our ancestors set for us; and then the
common disease germs get us, then we have colds, sore throats,
tuberculosis. The nature cure advocate is perfectly right in saying that
there is no use treating such diseases; the thing is to restore the body
to its former tone, so that we may be superior to our normal environment
and its strains.
You know the poem of the "One Hoss Shay," which was so perfectly built
in every part that it ran for fifty years and then collapsed all at once
in a heap. But the human body is not built that way. It always has one
or more places which are weaker than the others, and which first show
the effects of strain. In one person it will take the form of dyspepsia,
in another it will be headaches, in another colds, in another decaying
teeth, in another hardening of the arteries or stiffening of the joints.
But whatever the symptoms may be, the fundamental cause is always the
same, an abnormal condition of the blood-stream, and a consequent
lowering of the body's tone. Therefore, studying any disease and its
cure, you have first the emergency question, are there any germs lodged
in the body, and if so, how can you destroy them? As part of the
problem, you have to ask whether your blood-stream is normal, and if
not, what are the methods by which you can make it normal and keep it
so? Also you have to ask, what are the reasons why your trouble
manifests itself in this or that particular organ? Is there some
weakness or defect there, and can the defect be remedied, or can your
habits be changed so as to reduce the strain on that organ? Are there
any measures you can take to increase the flow of blood to that organ,
and to promote its activity? In the study of your health, you will find
that circumstances differ, and the importance of one factor or the other
will vary; but you will seldom find any problem in which all these
factors do not enter, and you will seldom find an adequate remedy unless
you take all the factors into consideration.