How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false.
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins.
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
Who, inwardly searched, have been white as milk.
Shakespeares Merchant of Venice.
That organ of the body situated in the right side of the abdomen immediately below the diaphragm is known in English by the name of the liver. The word is of doubtful origin. One school of etymologists hold that the Anglo-Saxon word lifer, German leber, Icelandic lifr, Scandinavian lever, come from the same root as English life, German leben; possibly meaning the liver as the seat of life. Another school contends that the word has its origin from the Greek, word hepar from which came old German leper, English liver. The Greeks, however, were not interested in the anatomy and histology of the liver but they viewed it psychologically.
To the organ they assigned the seat of two of the great emotions, love and anger. They doubtless had observed the relation existing between a mans outlook upon life in general and the state and functioning of his liver. The Romans in their scientific works simply transcribed the word, the Greek hepar, genitive hepatos, becoming the familiar Latin word hepatica. And that dainty little flower which bursts forth in rich woods after the first April showers, a harbinger of Spring, the joy of every school child gathering wild flowers, is called hepatica from a fancied resemblance of the shape and outline of its leaf to the outline and contour of the liver.
Throughout the ages the liver has been associated wit the occult, the divination, with peeping into the future. The custom was to kill an animal, generally a sheep or goat; the wise men examined the liver, and, according to its appearance, color, markings, etc., the outcome of important events, such as war, was predicted. To them it was an oracle giving an infallible answer. Even that great and mighty king. Nebuchadnezzar, did not hesitate to invoke the ancient rite before he made his historical expedition against Jerusalem in which the city was captured, the magnificent temple ransacked and destroyed, and the children of Judah carried captive for long years to Babylon. With due reverence we will quote the words of Holy Writ: “For the king of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he made his arrows bright, he consulted with images, he looked in the liver”. Ezekiel 21:21.
Among the excavations of the far eastern cities are found vast numbers of tablets of the shape of the liver and upon them are marked verses and also what each lobe and area represents in this art of divination. Centuries afterward, especially among the Greeks, birds were used in place of animals. The birds were kept and carefully guarded and fed in the royal household. At the present time, for superstition dies hard, the rite is practised by the natives of Borneo, who use a pigs liver. If the color of the liver is pale, then the natives skulk in their tents, the time is not propitious; but, if the liver has a blood red appearance, then they sally forth with murder and rapine in their hearts, fully conscious of the fact that, although their numbers may be fewer and their javelins shorter than the hostile tribes, yet victory is theirs as the fates are fighting on their side.
A custom common in European countries is to take fowl, generally geese, and put them on a roost, thus off their feet. Then they are greatly overfed with the result that there are produced enormously large juicy and succulent livers. From these are made that delicious dish of continental cafes, pate-de-foie- gras. The eating of livers obtained from animals fed in a special and de luxe manner has left its impress upon the language of the Latin countries. The French word “foie”, Italian “fegato”, are the shortened or derived forms of “jecur ficatum”, the liver of an animal fattened on figs.
It is always interesting to study the shades of meaning of words used in the ancient languages. One of the oldest of all books is the Hebrew Old Testament and in it is recorded the giving of the Ten Commandments as a basis of human conduct. These Commandments, in their historical origin, were written upon two tablets of stone. Upon the one tablet was written a mans duty to God and upon the other tablet was written a mans relation and true conduct toward his fellowman. But, there was an intermediary Commandment, one that was written partly upon the one tablet and partly upon the other-one that conjoined the two. That Commandment is “Honour the Father and thy Mother”, etc.
The first word of that Commandment is “honour” and the word for honour and the word for liver, in the Hebrew text, are the same word. By way of comparison, it may be said that in the Hebrew text “womb” and “mercy” have a common word. Now one must be guarded on drawing conclusions from these observations, but if one adheres to general principles there is no harm in wandering into the field of philosophy and conjecture. All the blood from the stomach, pancreas, spleen, etc., laden with the products of digestion, etc., is freighted for the one port and that port is the portal vein and liver. The end and purpose of this is that the digested food shall be purified and built up into a fluid suitable for nourishing the tissues of the body, which is blood.
The lower must be stepped up to a higher. That is the duty and function of the liver. Bile is only a by-product in this process, a by- product which, of course, nature puts to important uses. This can be illustrated by the lamprey cells of the class cyclostomata. These are the kind that adhered to the body of the marathon swimmers as they ploughed through the cold and placid waters of Lake Ontario in their Herculean struggle to win the Wrigley trophy. These eels, so called, have, in adult life, no bile duct, it simply withers away, and the live functions as a blood making organ without the need of the bile secretion and purification.
When a child is born the liver is the heaviest organ in the body, slightly exceeding the brain in weight. When one considers the very low percentage of iron in milk and yet the high haemoglobin content of blood in a healthy breast fed baby, one wonders at the chemistry. Undoubtedly there is a reserve account in the liver. The reserve, however, may become quickly exhausted and marked anaemia will sometimes develop in milk fed babies.
In comparative anatomy an interesting point is that the horse and deer have no gall bladder.
Among the medicines used by the dominant school for their action either directly or indirectly upon the liver may be mentioned calomel, podophyllin, sodium salicylate, sodium phosphate, sodium sulphate, ammonium chloride, nitro-muriatic acid, iridin and eunomyn. Ammonium chloride, at one time a great favorite among a certain group of medical men, seems now to be enjoying a revival of popularity, while calomel, long the sheet anchor to unload a lazy and sluggish liver, seems to be losing in favor. Sodium phosphate which enters largely into saline hepatic mixtures is a constituent of normal bile.
In the realm of homoeopathic therapeutics the truth of the indicated remedy based upon the totality of the general symptoms still rules. Among the remedies that are frequently indicated in liver disorders may be mentioned that great trinity of medicines, Sulphur, Calcarea and Lycopodium; then Cinchona, Bryonia, Phosphorus, Carduus marianus and Chelidonium, together with nearly all the agents mentioned above as being used, by the old school.
Sulphur is undoubtedly very closely related tote function of the liver. As iodine is related to the thyroid gland so sulphur is related to the liver. We find sulphur indicated in pernicious anaemia, in diabetes and in chronic liver disorders, alcoholism, etc. Elementary chemistry teaches us that the two main elements of the air are nitrogen and oxygen. Now, the nitrogen series of chemical elements, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony and bismuth-are all destructive of liver cells, producing necrosis or fatty degeneration. The chemical allies of oxygen are sulphur and selenium. When arsenic is given as diarsenol in the treatment of syphilis, a danger arises of the arsenic being deposited in the liver with resultant injury.
But a sulphur containing substance, sodium, thio-sulphate, will liberate the arsenic from the liver cells and the arsenic thus liberated will again have an action upon the syphilitic lesions. One of the functions of the liver is to store up in its cells carbo-hydrate in the form of glycogen to be used for the tissues of the body. That which controls and regulates this function is a sulphur containing substance called insulin. And it is of interest that while insulin contains much sulphur it contains no phosphorus. Selenium in the oxygen chemical group will vulcanize rubber from its relation to sulphur. Farrington states that Selenium is sometimes indicated in chronic liver affections resulting from alcoholism, etc.
