Philosophy of Osteopathy, Andrew Taylor Still [best book club books for discussion TXT] 📗

we find fibrin and even lung muscle. Does all this array of dangerous symptoms cause an Osteopath to give up in despair? It should not, on the other hand he should go deeper on the hunt of cause. He may find trouble in nerve fiber of pneumogastric nerve, atlas or hyoid, vertebra, rib, or clavicle, may be by pressing on some nerve that supplies mucous membrane of air cells or passages. A cut foot will often produce lockjaw, why not a pressure on some center branch or nerve fiber cause some division—nerve of the lungs that governs venous circulation which would contract and hold blood indefinitely as an irritant, equal to cause, perpetual coughing? NO TIME FOR SURRENDER.

This is not the time for the brainy Osteopath to run up the white flag of defeat and surrender. Open the doors of your purest reason, put on the belt of energy and unload the sinking vessel of life. Throw overboard all dead weights from fascia and wake up the forces of the excretories. Let the nerves all show their powers to throw out every weight that would sink or reduce the vital energies of nature. Give them a chance to work, give them the full nourishment and the victory will be on the side of the intelligent engineer. Never surrender but die in the last ditch.

Let us enter the field of active exploration and note the causes that would lead us to conclude we have the cause that produces "consumption" as it has ever been called.

Begin at the brain, go down the ladder of observation, stop and whet your knives of mental steel sharp, get your nerves quiet by the opium of patience. Begin with the atlas, follow with the search-light of quickened reason, comb back your hair of mental strength, and never leave that bone till you have learned how many nerves pass through and around that wisely formed first part of the neck. Remember it was planned and builded by the mind and hand of the infinite. See what nerve fibers passes through and on to the base center, and each minute cell, fascia, gland and blood vessel of the lungs. Do you not know that each nerve fiber to its place is king and lord of all?

CEREBRAL SPINAL FLUID.

I think consumption begins by closing the channels of cerebro-spinal fluid in neck, which fluid stands as one of, if not the most highly refined elements in animal bodies. Its fineness would indicate that it is a substance that must be delivered in full supply continually to keep health normal; if so, we will for experimental reasons look at the neck ligated, as found in measles, croup, colds and eruptive fevers. Supply is stopped from passing below atlas for three days. During such diseases fever runs high at this time and dries up the albumen, giving cause for tubercles to begin, as fever has dried out the water and left the albumen in small deposits in the lungs, liver, kidneys and bowels. If this view of the great uses of brain fluid is true as cause of glandular growths and other dead deposits; have we not a cause for militis tuberculosis? Have we not encouragement to prosecute with interest, in the hope of an answer to the question, "What is tuberculosis?" Our writers are just as much at sea to-day as a thousand years ago. I will give the reader some of the reasons why I think the mischief was started while fluid was cut off by congestion of neck. How can the fluid be cut off at neck is a very natural question. By the crudest method of reasoning we would conclude that from the form of the neck, many objects are indicated, and the material of which it is composed would give reason to turn all its powers of thought, to ask why it is so formed, as to twist, bend, straighten, stiffen and relax at will, to suit so many purposes? A very tough skin—a sheathe—surrounds the neck with blood vessels, nerves, muscles, bones, ligaments, fascia, glands great and small, throat and trachea. In bones we find a great canal for spinal cord. It is well and powerfully protected by a strong wall of bone, so no outer pressure can obstruct the flow of passing fluids, to keep vitality supplied by brain forces, but with all the guards given to protect the cord, we find that it can be overcome by impact fluids to such degree as to stop blood and other fluids from supplying lungs and all below.

The fluid we speak of comes from the skull, and when in process of formation must not be disturbed until it has passed through all chances of being injured by force, air or light. Thus the great need of walls to hold the enemy outside the safety line. Such truths surely should attract our attention when we explore for causes. We can analyze material bodies but we have to stop at the life line for more knowledge. Our boats have been in port over 6000 years, waiting for knowledge about the whats and whys of life, until barnacles of ignorance have accumulated to such thickness that the conchologist has called that cake of shells "allopathy" which weighed anchor and turned to the great sea of human credulity to expound, with nothing but conjectures to offer. He toots his fog-horn in all lands and on all seas, and says, "age before reason." Thus one generation blindly follows another.

HOW TO DESTROY DEADLY BOMBS OF DECAY.

I think by this time the reader has gotten his mind in line with his exploring needle of thought to get some light or knowledge of why a growth and how a body that has never failed for few or many years, begins and continues to form and plant deadly bombs of decay in that once powerful engine of perfect health, to produce suicide. We see and know this to be the case in thousands of beings annually, and this same question is just as applicable to the herds of animals as to man. Thus we cry piteously for help, but no answer has come in past days; we go on and give place in lungs and other parts of the deadly tubercle. But one answer can be given in "Holy Writ" to suit these questions, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." Turn the waters of life loose at the brain, remove all hindrances and the work will be done, and give us the eternal legacy, LONGEVITY.

BATTLE OF BLOOD FOR LIFE.

In America from the day of Washington and all centuries before his time, man has dreaded diseases of the lungs more universally than any other one disease. If we compare pulmonary diseases with other maladies we find more persons die of consumption, pneumonia, bronchitis and nervous coughs than from smallpox, typhus and bilious fever and all other fevers combined. Many diseases of contagious natures do not stay in city, town, country nor an army, but a short time; kills a few and disappears and may not return for many years. The same is the history of yellow fever, cholera and other epidemics. They slay their hundreds and stop as unceremoniously as they began. But when we think of diseases that begin to show their effects in tonsils, trachea and lining membranes of the air passages, we find we are in a boundless ocean; because we find all seasons of the year, which afford changes of weather: Wet, dry, windy, hot and cold, which mark 30° to 60° in twenty-four hours, chills the lungs and whole system, closes the excretory system against renovating equal to deposits, with all other chances to throw out dead matter and gases that destroy blood and life in proportion to the amount and time of abnormal retention.

It takes no great mind to know from past observation that a common cold often holds on and settles down to chronic inflammation of the lungs, and the patient dies of consumption, croup, diphtheria, tonsilitis, and as catarrhal trouble stays and begins to waste vitality by failing to oxygenize blood while in the lungs, diphtheria paves the way for the young and old to die of consumption. Dance halls, opera houses, churches, school houses, and all crowded assemblies never fail to inspect and deposit the seeds of consumption in weak lungs.

As one delves deeper and deeper into the machinery and exacting laws of life, he beholds works and workings of contented laborers of all parts of the one common whole—the great shafts and pillars of an engine working to the fullness of the meaning of perfection. He sees that great quarter-master the heart, pouring in and loading train after train and giving orders to the wagon-master to line his teams and march on quick time to all divisions, supply all companies, squads and sections with rations, clothing, ammunition, surgeons, splints and bandages, and put all the dead and wounded into the ambulances to be repaired or buried with military honors by Captain "Vein," who fearlessly penetrates the densest bones, muscles and glands, with the living waters to quench the thirst of the blue corpuscles, who are worn out by doing fatigue duty in the great combat between life and death. He often has to run his trains on forced marches to get supplies to sustain his men of life when they have had to contend with long sieges of heat and cold. Of all officers of life, none have greater duties to perform than the quarter-master of blood supply, who borrows the force with which he runs his deliveries from the brain which give motion to all parts of active life.

MILITIS TUBERCULOSIS.

A tubercle is a separate body being enveloped.[4]

As all descriptions of a tubercle in books amount to about this, that the tubercle is an amount of fleshy substance which may be albumen, fibrin, or any other substance collected and deposited at one place in the human body, and covered with a film composed generally of fibrinous substances, and deposited in its spherical form, and separated from all similarly formed spheres by fascia. They may be very numerous, for many hundreds may occupy one cubic inch and yet one is distinct from all others. They seem to develop only where fascia is abundant; in the lungs, liver, bowels and skin. After formation they may exist and show nothing but roughened surfaces, and when the period of dissolution and the solvent powers of the chemical laboratory take possession to banish them from the system, it generally begins its labors at such time as some catarrhal disease is preying upon the human system. Nature seems to make its first effort for the purpose of disposing of such substances as have accumulated at the catarrhal period. At which time it brings forward all the solvent qualities and applies them with the assistance of the motor force to drive out through the bowels, lungs, porous and excretory system all irritable substances. Electricity is called in as the motor force to be used in expelling all unkindly substances. By this effort of nature, which is an increased action of the motor nerves, electricity is brought to the degree of heat usually called fever, which if better understood we would possibly find to be the necessary heat of the furnace of the body being used to convert dead substances into gas which can travel through the excretory system and be thrown from the body much easier than water, lymph, albumen or fibrin.

CONVERSION OF BODIES INTO GAS.

During this process of gas burning, a very high temperature is obtained by the increased action of the arterial system through the motor nerves, permeating those tubercles and causing an inflammation of