(Discusses some of the commoner human ailments, and what is known about their cause and cure.) I begin with the commonest of all troubles, known as a "cold." This name implies that the cause of the trouble lies in exposure or chill. All the grandmothers of the world are agreed about this. They have a phrase—or at least they had it when I was a boy: "You will catch your death." Every time I went out in the rain, every time I played with wet feet, or sat in a draft, or got under a cold shower, I would hear the formula, "You will catch your death."
And, on the other hand, there are the "health cranks," who declare vehemently that the name "cold" is a misnomer and a trap for people's thoughts. Cold has nothing to do with it, they say, and point to arctic explorers who frequently get frozen to death, but do not "catch cold" until they get back into the warm rooms of civilization. As for drafts, the "health cranks" aver that a draft is merely "fresh air moving"; which is supposed to settle the matter. However, when you come to think about it, you realize that a cyclone is likewise merely "fresh air moving," so you have not decided the question by a phrase.
While I was writing these chapters on health I contracted a severe cold—which was a joke on me. The history of this cold is as clear in my mind as anything human can be, and it will serve for an illustration, showing how much truth the grandmothers have on their side, and how much the "health cranks" have.
To begin with, I had been overworking. All sorts of appeals come to me; hundreds of people write me letters, and I cannot bear to leave them unanswered. I accepted calls to speak, and invitations where I had to eat a lot of stuff of which my reason disapproves; so one morning I woke up with a slight sore throat. I fasted all day, and by evening felt all right. But there came another call, and I consented to take a long automobile ride on a cold and rainy night, and when I got back home, after five or six hours, I was thoroughly chilled, and my "cold" came on during the night.
This explanation will, I imagine, be satisfactory to all the grandmothers of the world. All the dear, good grandmothers know that an automobile ride on a cold, rainy night is enough to give any man "his death." But listen, grandmothers! I have lain out watching for deer all night in the late fall, with only a thin blanket to cover me, and gotten up so stiff with cold that I could hardly move; yet I did not "catch cold." When I was a youth, I have ridden a bicycle twenty miles to the beach in April, with snow on the ground, and plunged into the surf and swam, and then ridden home again. I have bathed in the sea when I had to run a quarter of a mile in a bathing suit along a frost-covered pier, and with an icy wind blowing through my bones; yet I never took cold from that, and never got anything but a feeling of exhilaration. So it must be that there is some reason why exposure causes colds at one time and not at another.
The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise—I have watched the thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.
I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do with disease; but they have never been able to convince me—germs are too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will settle upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat, being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose and throat are also meat, and just as good food for the germs. The only difference is that this meat is alive, there is a living blood-stream circulating through it, and several score billions of the body's own kind of germs, the blood corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they are able to destroy all the common germs; so it is that you do not have diseases, but instead have health. But your health always implies a struggle of your organism against other organisms, and it is the business of your reason to watch your body and give all the help you can in protecting it. Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first warnings that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule these ailments are not serious in themselves, but they are signs of a wrong condition, and if you neglect this condition, pretty soon you will find that you have to deal with something deadly.
My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of the doctors could tell me why.
The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs, or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which directs the blood-stream is carried to the organs of the body by nerves which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply, which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of infection so long as it remains in the body?
Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, from which I learned something about one of the commonest of human ailments, constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. This is a cause of innumerable chronic ailments grouped under the head of auto-intoxication, or the poisoning of the body by the absorption into the system of the products of fermentation and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move freely two or three times every day, and the movements should be soft. I suffered from constipation for some twenty years, and tried, I think, every remedy known both to science and to crankdom. In the beginning the doctors gave me drugs which by irritating the intestinal walls cause them to pour out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating substances down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an emergency; if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned out by any and every device. But if you habitually swallow mild poisons, which is what all laxatives are, you weaken the intestinal tract, and you have to take more and more of these poisons, and you get less results. We may set down as positive the statement that drugs are not a remedy for constipation.
Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say the nature curists, and stimulate the intestinal walls to activity. I tried that. I listened to the extreme enthusiasts, and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and consumed quantities of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr. Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins of oranges, which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure you. I would eat things like this until I got myself a case of diarrhea—and so was cured of constipation for a time! Strange as it may seem to you, there are even people who tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many quarts.
Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole series of exercises for developing the muscles of the abdominal walls and the back, which are greatly neglected by civilized man. The fundamental cause of constipation is a sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty; but to me it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing applies to hot water treatments, which are effective, but a nuisance and a waste of time. I never could keep them up except when I was in trouble.
Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body, which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no relationship to facts.
I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great proportion of surgical operations would be unnecessary. I realize, also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a life-time of discomfort.
Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness, from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction. Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when our government drafted its young men into the army and found that fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.
Likewise you find extreme statements repeated concerning the evils of vaccination; but if you will read Parkman's "History of the Jesuits in North America," you will see the horrible conditions under which the Indians lived in the United States—noble savages, you understand, entirely uncontaminated by civilized white men, and whole populations regularly wiped out every few years by epidemics of smallpox. That these epidemics ceased was due to the discovery that by infecting the body with a mild form of the disease, it could be made to develop substances which render it immune to the deadly form. Here in California we have a law which makes vaccination for school children optional, and so we may some day have another epidemic to test the theories of the anti-vaccinationists.
I know, of course, the dreadful stories of people who have been given syphilis and other diseases by impure vaccines. I don't know whether such stories are true; but I do know that people who live in houses are sometimes killed by earthquakes and by lightning, yet we do not cease to live in houses because of this chance. It seems to me that the remedy for such vaccination evils is not to abolish vaccination, but to take more care in the manufacture of our vaccines.
This danger is removed by using vaccines which are sterile, and are made especially for each person. Germs are taken from the sick person, and injected into an animal. The body of the animal develops with great rapidity the "anti-bodies" necessary to resistance to the germs; and as these "anti-bodies" are chemical products, not affected by heat, we can take a serum from the animal, sterilize it, and then inject it into the system of the patient, thus increasing resistance to the disease. I admit that the best way to increase such resistance is to take care of your health; but sometimes we confront an emergency, and must use emergency remedies. We have serums that really cure diphtheria and meningitis, and one that will prevent lock-jaw; anyone who has ever seen with his own eyes how the deadly membranes of diphtheria melt away as a result of an injection, will be less dogmatic about the efforts of science to combat disease.
Of course it is much pleasanter if you can destroy the source of the disease, and keep it from getting into the human body. Every few years the southern part of our country used to be devastated by yellow fever epidemics. Every kind of weird and fantastic remedy was tried; people would go around with sponges full of vinegar hung under their noses; they would burn the clothing and bedding of those who died of the disease; they would wear gloves when they went shopping, so as not to touch the money with their hands. But at last medical experimenters traced the disease to a certain kind of mosquito, and now, if we drain the swamps and screen our houses and stay in doors after sundown, we do not get yellow fever, nor malaria either. In the same way, if we keep our bodies clean with soap and hot water, we do not get bitten by lice, and so do not die of typhus. If we take pains with our drains and water supply, so that human excrement does not get into it, and if we destroy the filth-carrying housefly, we do not have epidemics of typhoid.
But under conditions of battle it is not possible for men to take these precautions, and so when they go into the army they get a dose of typhoid serum. And this illustrates the difference between a true or hygienic remedy for disease, and a temporary or emergency remedy. If you say that you want to abolish war, and with it the need for typhoid vaccination, I cheerfully agree with you in this. All that I am trying to do is to point out the folly of flying to extremes, and rejecting any remedy which may help. What is the use of making the flat statement that vaccinations and serums never aid in the cure of disease, when any man can see with his own eyes the proof that they do? In the Spanish war, before typhoid vaccination, many times more soldiers died of this disease than died of bullets; but in the late war there was practically no typhoid at all in the army camps. On the other hand, it was noticed that the men who had just come in, and who therefore had just been vaccinated, were considerably more susceptible to influenza; which shows that vaccination does reduce the body condition for a time. The reader may say that in this case I am trying to sit on both sides of the fence; but the truth is that I am trying to keep an open mind, and to consider all the facts, and to avoid making rash statements.
One of the statements you hear most frequently is that drugs can never remedy disease, or help in remedying it. Now, I abhor the drugging system of the orthodox medical men; I have talked with them, and heard them talk with one another, and I know that they will mix up half a dozen different substances, in the vague hope that some one of them will have some effect. Even when they know definitely the effects they are producing, they are in many cases merely suppressing symptoms. On the other hand, however, it is a fact that medical science has had for a generation or two a specific which destroys the germs of one disease in the blood, without at the same time injuring the blood itself. That disease is malaria, and the drug is quinine. Of course, the way to avoid malaria is to drain the swamps; but you cannot do that all at once, nor can you always screen your house and stay in at sundown. When you first go into a country, you have no house to screen, and some emergency will certainly arise that exposes you to mosquito bites. So you will need quinine, and will be foolish not to use it, and know how to use it.
Recently medical chemists discovered another remedy, this time for syphilis. It is called salvarsan, and while it does not always cure, it frequently does. In laboratories today men are working over the problem of constructing a combination of molecules which will destroy the germ of sleeping sickness, without at the same time injuring the blood. If they find it, they will save hundreds of millions of lives. I do not see why we cannot recognize such a possibility, while at the same time making use of physical culture, of diet and fasting.
When the manuscript of this book was sent to the printer, there appeared in this place a paragraph telling of the work of Dr. Albert Abrams of San Francisco, in the diagnosis and cure of disease by means of radio-active vibrations. As the book is going to press, the writer finds himself in San Francisco, attending Dr. Abrams' clinics; and so he finds it possible to give a more extended account of some fascinating discoveries, which seem destined to revolutionize medical science. If I were to tell all that I have seen with my own eyes in the last twelve days, I fear the reader would find his powers of credulity overstretched, so I shall content myself with trying to tell, in very sober and cautious language, the theory upon which Abrams is working, and the technic which he has evolved.
Modern science has demonstrated that all matter is simply the activity of electrons, minute particles of electric force. This is a statement which no present-day physicist would dispute. The best evidence appears to indicate that a molecule of matter is a minute reproduction of the universe, a system of electrons whirling about a central nucleus. No eye has ever beheld an electron, for it is billions of times smaller than anything the microscope makes visible; but we can see the effects of electronic activity, and all modern books of physics give photographs of such. It is possible to determine the vibration rates of electrons, and to Dr. Abrams occurred the idea of determining the vibration rates of diseased tissue and disease germs. He discovered that it was invariably the same; not merely does all cancerous material, for example, yield the same rate, but the blood of a person suffering from cancer yields that rate, at all times and under all circumstances. The vibration of cancer, of tuberculosis, of syphilis—each is different, uniform and invariable. Likewise in the blood are other vibrations, uniform and dependable, which reveal the sex and age of the patient, the virulence of the disease and the period of its duration—yes, and even the location in the body, if there be some definite infected area. So here is a modern miracle, an infallible device for the diagnosis of disease. Dr. Abrams does not have to see the patient; all he has to have is a drop of blood on a piece of white blotting paper, and he sits in his laboratory and tells all about it, and somewhere several thousand miles away—in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans—a surgeon operates and finds what he has been told is there!
And that is only the beginning of the wonder; because, says Abrams, if you know the vibration rate of the electrons of germs, you can destroy those germs. It used to be a favorite tric............