There are healing plants which flee from man, such as Digitalis, Arnica, Primula, Mezereum. They flourish in the wilds. There are others which seek man and which grow and flourish about houses and especially on soil saturated with urine, such as Urtica urens, Bursa pastoris, Aconitum, Belladonna, etc. What is the meaning of this ? Let us look closely at a typical plant which flees from human habitations, let us look at Digitalis.
We find a Digitalis plant in the country, lift it, place it into our garden, tend it carefully, manure it, and it flourished greatly but it ceases to be poisonous and therefore ceases also to be curative. If we collect some Arnica plants from the meadows and put them into our gardens, they may continue growing for a month or two, but then they shrivel up and disappear completely.
The Digitalis plant which has become useless through cultivation can be made poisonous once more not by nourishing it with Manganese or other chemicals, or with manure, but by supplying it with poisons of the soil, either with poisons excreted by the roots of other plants, or by the products of soil decomposition, or by soil poisons. We know that heather poisons the soil by making the soil acid.
Where there is much heather, nothing else with grow except heather, and where it grows it creates an acid soil, a bleaching earth, which is very useful for filtering petroleum and benzene. Beneath the bleaching earth a stone-like layer is formed which has destroyed large forests throughout Europe.
In uncultivated districts Nature causes certain plants to grow which will draw from the soil its poisons. Plants of one kind poison the soil and plants of another kind detoxicate the soil. Obviously poisonous plants have been created for a valuable purpose. They have not become poisonous through chance. They have become poisonous because they grow on a certain soil. Plants react strangely to nutrition. Aconite and Belladonna become more poisonous than they were originally if they are manured with animal or human excreta.
If we study the growth and development of plants and their causes we discover strange relations which connect plants with human beings and animals. This relationship is particularly wonderful with regard to hormones. We can, according to our fancy, either develop the flowers of plants by the use of hormones, or we can increase their green parts by supplying them with Adrenalin.
We were the first to demonstrate the latter fact at our experimental station at Kotzschenbroda. Further, we were able to show that certain drugs, such as Yohimbin and Glonoine, which lower blood pressure in human beings, cause a similar effect in plants, by reducing the growth of greenery. Broadly speaking, the same drugs which affect blood pressure in men similarly affect sap pressure in plants.
In studying would hormones we found that Viscum album, or Mistletoe, prevents the healing of plant wounds and actually enlarges wounds produced on the stems and branches of plants if Mistletoe pulp is applied to them. Mistletoe, if wounded, does not heal its own wounds in the usual fashion of plants. The Mistletoe is a parasite. It grows on various trees and it grows in the wounds of plants, which it must keep open in order to flourish.
That fact explains the strange destructive power possessed by the Mistletoe, which destroys the wound-healing hormones. Viscum album is considered as a remedy which lowers blood pressure and it is used in the treatment of cancer. If we remember the relationship between plant and man and if we remember that Viscum album prevents the healing of wounds on trees, we may conclude that Viscum album should be able to cure at least keloids, those tumour-like, fibrous outgrowths, which usually develop upon scars.
The wonderful herb lore of the past died when it became customary to prescribe healing herbs in the form of teas. The general use of decoctions simplified the use of herbs, but no one enquired whether exposure to a high temperature would damage or destroy the extremely sensitive, curative elements contained in plants. No one enquired whether these healing elements would be dissolved into the boiling liquid or whether the healing plants might not lose their healing power by drying or by faulty methods of keeping them.
I would like to show that there is a curious relation between hormones which create life and poisons which destroy it. Poultry and ducks are very fond of eating earth worms, but at certain periods of the year they will not touch them. This fact is known to every naturalist. The time when poultry and ducks refuse to eat earth worms is the time when worms copulate. At that time the sexual segments of worms are much swollen. If one cuts out these sexual segments and forces them down the throat of poultry, the birds die.
The other parts of earth worms are non-poisonous, even at the time when the sexual segments have become poisonous. If ducks eat whole earth worms at the time of their sexual cycle they get very ill, become partly paralysed, get severe cramps and other symptoms of poisoning, they are very thirsty but they may recover after four or five days. However certain damage has been done.
Female ducks who have eaten these worms with their ripe sex organs cease to lay eggs. The experiments made by Max Paulich show that the absorption of sex hormones in large quantities causes sterility. This may explain the among the bees, the working bees are sexless, and they may have been made sexless by their feeding exclusively on pollen, the sexual products of plants. This pollen food is converted in the body of bees into bee poison and bee poison has a curious effect upon the sex organs of human beings.
Dr. Nash has told us that a woman who had been stung by bees complained of heaviness in her womb. The male bees, the drones which feed on different matter than the working bees have no poison. In other animals also the poison supply is increased and activated at the time of sex activity. For instance, spiders are most poisonous at the time of egg production.
In August of last year the Montefiore Hospital of New York, published a paper by Dr. David Marine, Baughmann, Webster and Cipera on goitre. The authors fed rabbits on the washed out residue of boiled cabbage and red cabbage and the result was that in every case within a fortnight enlargement of the thyroid gland was noticed. These swellings disappeared when the animals were given the juice of the cabbage, of which they had been deprived.
It was impossible to reduce the swelling by giving the animals iodate of potash, but they could be cured by feeding them on plants rich in iodine, such as Symphoricarpus foetidus, provided the plants were gathered in Spring. Those gathered in July had no effect upon the swollen thyroids. This example shows the importance of using the water in which vegetables have been boiled.
Nearly all the vitamins contained in plants are leached out in the water in which they are cooked. This is particularly the case with regard to Vitamin B1, B2, and C. Certain hormones are unfortunately seriously damaged by the cooking process, for instance the wound-healing and growth-producing hormones. Other elements of the greatest biological importance may be harmed similarly. Further, the acid-creating elements are retained in the vegetables on boiling, while the alkaline elements are dissolved into the water in which they are boiled.
It should therefore be strictly forbidden to pour away the water in which vegetables and potatoes have been boiled. Operations are frequently followed by acidosis. This danger can be obviated by feeding patients on raw, expressed plant juices, especially the juice of Plantago lanceolata, particularly in the form of Biogold wines. In these the raw expressed plant juices are preserved not by heating or by the addition of chemicals, but by the addition of an equal quantity of wine.
One of the most urgent questions of the day is the problem of how to manure the soil. Faulty manuring with chemicals causes the disappearance of the important Vitamin A. Artificial fertilizers are selected merely with the view of producing a large crop. Whether the food values are low or high is not considered. Milk also in unscientifically produced.
In many countries, especially on the Continent, milk cows are kept in cow houses all the year, and the animals are very rickety. Such milk becomes a product of degeneration, a very serious matter as milk contains all the known vitamins. The vitamin content of milk is greatly increased by keeping the animals in the open air. The value of vegetables depends on the way they are manured. The modern method of wasting human excreta by burning or emptying town d rains into rivers does untold injury.
The value of human excrements does not consist in their nitrogen contents, as was formerly believed, but in their sex hormones and other invaluable and irreplaceable components. Recognition of this fearful waste and damage to the health of the people is needed, and it is the duty of doctors who understand the principles of biology to point out this waste and damage to legislators and to the people as a whole.
