No doubt the mechanism of these phenomena will be more closely investigated some day. But it is improbable that research will alter the view that the adrenal is the the quartermaster-general of the body, responsible for the provision and equipment of the forces in times of danger. The phenomena attendant upon and preparatory to attack and defence depend upon adrenalin. The organism requires abundant reserves for defence or flight as the case may be – the abdominal brain arranges increased activity of the heart, deeper respiration, abundant provisioning of the blood with sugar (for the requirements of the muscles).
All forces must be concentrated for the one aim, and so the adrenalin causes the bladder and intestines to suspend their work; the danger must be psychically properly appraised and not minimized – and so the adrenalin causes fear, palpitation of the heart, and gooseskin, makes the hair stand up on end, and cold perspiration break out; the fight may lead to wounds – hence the adrenalin makes the blood run more freely so that any wounds received may cicatrize rapidly.
The brain decides upon the declaration of war, but the adrenal makes the prosecution of it possible. It carries out mobilization with the most careful forethought, supervises the commissariat, tranquilizes the interior of the country, rouses the desire for defence, and even makes preparations for possible injuries. Can it still be said that the head is wiser than the stomach?.
THE HUMAN MACHINE AND IST ITS FAILURES
It might be supposed that two machines that are build exactly alike would achieve the same results. The right hand and the left are made alike-but do they do the same work? Kent Elze has shown conclusively how each of the two hands contains twenty-seven bones, connected with one another by thirty-six joints and moved by thirty-nine muscles, and that there is a correspondence in detail between the shape of the articulating surfaces, the arrangements of the muscles, and the function.
Nevertheless, from the shape of the joints, movements would be deduced that are not actually carried out, and the multiplicity of individual movements is not to be explained only by the structure of the hand. The limit is soon reached of obvious connections between form and performance. As soon as the material foundation for the varying degrees of dexterity manifested by different people is investigated, or even those of the right and left hands of the same person, the end of any purely anatomical analysis has been reached. For there is no visible difference of structure that might serve to explain why the right hand should work differently from the left. They look exactly alike and are entirely unlike.
Physiology is found to be no more reliable than anatomy. It has been shown by its means that the processes of the body are carried on in individual organs and that each has its particular functions; further, separate functions for separate parts of the organs had been recognized. When the matter was looked into more closely, however, it was seen that every part is inextricably bound up with every other.
No part can be considered separately, and the idea of the isolated activity of any organ reveals itself as an artificial product of our analytical way of thought. Actually there is not “heart,” there are no “kidneys,” and what we call by these names are nothing but conventional symbols, working hypotheses, scaffolding put up to enable us to erect the structure. Once this is finished, the scaffolding must be taken down; and though its presence was essential for the workman, it is even more essential that he should mistake the scaffolding for the building itself. Thus the false synthesis of physiology must be re-examined and analysed anew.
Physiology has, indeed, shown us how the stomach acts; but a fat man and a thin man have the same gastric physiology, and yet the one mans stomach works quite differently from that of the other. There are degrees of soundness in persons who seem equally robust; some families that turn to strong stomachs, others to weak ones.
If such relativity is true of healthy people, it is true to a very much higher degree of the sick. The doctrine of the localization of diseases has shown incontestably that the seat of a valvular defect of the heart is in the shortening or the faulty closing of the valves of the heart; and it is not so many years since the whole art and mystery of the heart specialist lay in his ascertaining which were the defective valves and wherein the defect lay.
And now it is found that, of two people suffering from exactly the same defect, one is almost incapable of speaking without getting short of breath, while the other can go up four flights of stairs and only breathe very slightly more rapidly. No. less unequivocal is the appearance, for example of the lung of a tubercular person. “Nevertheless, or two people the condition of whose lungs is exactly similar, one will be accounted healthy and the other will be seriously ill. Have not twenty per cent. of all persons over a certain age got gall- stones? Yet in most cases they do not cause their owner the slightest discomfort.
The fact is that every disease has not only its particular seat, but also its particular characteristics in each individual; there is an essential difference between the sore throat of a film start and that of her understudy; the same softening of the brain takes different forms in a book-keeper and in a Nietzsche,a nd an equally violent intestinal catarrh bears a totally different aspect-and it is still open to doubt which is the more unpleasant-in the case of weakling and in that of an athlete. It is not always obvious whether a tumour of the stomach has caused a degeneration of the whole person, or whether such degeneration is not the cause of the tumour, but it can very clearly be seen how different is the course of diseases that are anatomically identical in the cases of men and of women, or of Jews and of Eskimos.
Even a process that is so unconnected with anything personal as the action of medicines-which are, after all, subject to the immutable laws of chemistry and should therefore proceed identically in every human organism-varies from individual to individual.
If even chemistry may no longer, be counted on for definite reactions, if even medicines demonstrate a party spirit so that they effect Smith in one way and Robinson in another, how can any further confidence be placed in Virchows organic theory? His views were, after all, no in effect objective reactions, but views taking their origin in the subjective eye of the anatomical pathologist.
Neither in the dissecting-room nor under the microscope could he have seen anything of a “general illness”; he only saw a diseased lung, or a degenerate heart, or an impaired kidney. The technical operation of analysing the body into its component parts was almost bound to lead to the assumption- to mislead him into the error of supposing-that with the understanding of these parts the laws of their behaviour would also the made plain.
Every change in functioning is determined by a change in the appearance. Virchow must have argued, and found his theory wonderfully corroborated every time he discovered greater or less disorders in the tissues or cells of a liver that was functioning badly.
Hence he reasoned that this was where the seat of the sickness must be. And so it is. Unfortunately, however, he carried his deductions further, and allowed himself to be led to the erroneous belief that the sickness was only here, only at the spot where it had been found, where the symptoms had on the skin and was accompanied by any other general symptoms, that meant that the skin was diseased, and so it is due to Virchows localist theory that dermatology, specialization in independent skin disease, came into being.
In view of this, who would listen to the old childrens doctor, Henoch, according to whom skin diseases did not mean only that there was something wrong with the skin, but with the whole person. Who would believe him when he said that childish eczema must be slowly and carefully cured, lest it should “strike inwards?” Modern ideas, however, are more inclined to agree with his view.
Skin diseases really do seem to be, general diseases, and scarlet fever, measles, and smallpox are obviously less virulent when they are accompanied by a severe rash. It may be that the skin is a means of defence, competent to weaken the disease, which is borne out by the historic course of syphilis. For many years it has been considered the proper thing to allow the dermal symptoms to appear so that the disease might to some extent vent itself in the skin and thus the serious after-effects be avoided.
Above all, the experience of specialist in tropical diseases establish that in places where syphilis is not treated at all and in consequence runs its course unchecked in the skin, locomotor ataxia and general paralysis are practically unknown. In such cases the skin seems to take the whole of the virus unto itself.
HAHNEMANN AND HOMOEOPATHY
The founder of homoeopathy was a Meissen doctor named Samuel Hahnemann, who has been aptly called a mystical realist because clear-sighted realism and speculative philosophy wrestled for the mastery in his mind. He made his discovery something over a hundred years ago when, in the course of researches into the effect of Quinine, he tried the Peruvian bark on himself.
