Often I remind patients that a calf two months old knows more than a man old enough to vote. I he calf may safely be turned loose to nibble for his needs, and avoid incompatibilities. The average man at twenty-one is ignorant of his needs and indifferent to his mistakes. That this is by Divine Law does not alter the fact. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth becomes more than a religious precept, if pondered in the shadow of human sufferings that science cannot fathom nor remedy.
But to continue with the common Cold. We were once given a statistical resume of the epidemic of 1918 by our city health officer, in which was emphasized the simultaneous, volcanic-like eruption of the malady in , all conditions of life, among people isolated and segregated, which prompted me to ask the speaker if he could not see in that something more occult, more spontaneous, than physical communication? To which he replied with undebatable vehemence, “No sir! Youve got to have the hen or the egg”; that witless vaudeville joke proving itself sophistry, for either the hen or the egg had to be a primary spontaneous product; and the radio and the wireless were already demonstrating apparently supernatural presence and power of intangibles.
How naturally people use the term epidemic, of fire, crime, religion, and other outbreaks, without concerning themselves with the scientific axiom: All things are governed by law, and nothing by chance. It has long been a comment among observing physicians that ailments come in crops that rotate any vary like unto field crops, and are likewise scanty or excessive, normal or perverse. A confrere once observed that his obstetrical cases seemed strangely and persistently hoodooed, so that he declined them for over a year, then resumed them without further trouble. He was led to relate this by another experience.
One fine October day I saw him passing my office, wearing green goggles; later I called on him. He said he had been unable to read for weeks by painfully congested eyes, which resisted every indicated remedy. He had consulted two oculists, and the only light they could offer was a flashlight, which he could not stand. Having the necessary data, I was prepared to give him a needed demonstration and told him that, regardless of medics or mechanics, he would continue in limbo until about April 15, then come out of it as does the sun through rifting clouds of a passing storm.
Winter passed, April came; and the doctor passed, sans goggles, and I waited. I met him in May. “Lets see, didnt you tell my eyes would clear up about April 15?” “Yes.” “Funny thing, thats just what happened.” Any scofflaws present may one he was told before, not after, the event.
Last fall floods prevailed alarmingly the world over; millions in crops were destroyed, with other property and lives. By January the same influence had passed from a watery sign into a fiery one, and an equally significant record is being made in fires; not the incidental, occasional, incipient fires, although these are multiplied, but the wiping out of great industrial plants and trading centers like Brewster, Bangor, Malden, Providence, and the one to come in Portland. In the zodiacal influence on man, the same sign rules the hips, and the majority of patients are referring to hip pains and sciatica.
Incidentally, scientists are timing earthquakes, as the weather man qualifies the weather, seeing significance in sun-spots, but giving no consideration to the obvious interaction of the rest of the solar system. It seems a timid reasoning that can see in shadows on the sun an appalling force that can rend the earth and spill its internal fires out of mountain tops, yet sneer at the suggestion that it can disturb the health of man, the most vital, receptive and sensitive organism on this same convulsed earth.
And yet it is even better known that the sun is the giver of physical life and that all life on the earth would vanish if its light and heat were shut off as we switch our local light and heat. Worse than that, the earth itself would probably crumble and scatter into space. The moon;s influence, less vital but well defined, has long been observed in the tides, the crops, in childbirth, its twenty-eight-day cycle timing the menstrual nisus, its periodicity in epilepsy, lunacy and hallucinations, and even in the proving of remedies, to wit, Calc. c., Graph., Phyt., Sil. and others.
Equally obvious influences are checked up to the other members of our solar system, in scientific observation, not so open to the lay mind or to the child of Nature, yet noticeable even to them. They notice, too, that they come into the world without volition and similarly pass out of it, and rightly reason that it is an ambiguous law that determines both ends and relinquishes its vital function interim.
Man daily demonstrates and recognize that he bristles with electricity, likewise apprehends electrical storms, and that cyclones, though lacking thunder and lightning, are even more electrical, in ripping off metal roofs, lifting 150-ton locomotives and setting them crosswise on the tracks, curling the rails into ringlets, and leaving untouched fragile and insulated things, are freaks no wind performs, however violent and destructive it may be. Note again the perception of a child of Nature, seated on a bench outside his shack; within the shack Maria at work; off against the blackened sky a building somersaulting, gyrating across the plain; and the unmoved farmer chirps in to his wife, “Looks like we might have a twister, Maria, that goes Jenks barn”.
That twist is not a freak but a mode of law. Note the weather charts tracing the weather across the country, its arrows pointing in every direction, but always gyrating in spirals so that storms, though appearing by cloud effect to be moving steadily forward, are gyrating, waltzing, parting and uniting, causing comment that two storms are meeting, and then split, one going down river, the other whirling out to sea, muddling and belying expert prediction. The same law of gyration attends the aspiration of heat, of smoke; even within us, peristalsis, and more wonderful still, the tremulations of the vital force. Then as it is seen that man himself is vibrant with all that makes weather and violence and fire and flood, and being so charged, a unit in his environment, responding with barometric integrity to the varying electrical tension of the atmosphere, we have a clue to forces that elude the laboratory, yet “penetrate two feet of solid masonry”.
This is made more significant if repeatedly demonstrated that community disease is forecast in date and duration as mathematically as earthquake and weather; and individual diathesis and longevity determined years ahead, or even from birth; and whether death will be lingering or sudden, by disease or accident, scientific or malicious murder, lamentable or everybody pleased.
Astronomers have accurately located unknown planets by their influences long before the means arrived to visualize them, and true to reckoning they were there awaiting recognition, Likewise the Genius Epidemicus has long been discerned, a changeable cuss like his cousin the weather, with family traits familiar to those knowing his progenitors; and of his influence Boger writer: “Study carefully the symptom complex of the first few cases in epidemic form, and the rest will be easy and the remedy group small”.
Nothing also Similia in a given remedy to varied ailments at such times, I sought is confirmation from a studious observer in a wider, and I am now treating several colds, a diphtheria, a typhoid, several rheumatics, sciatics and pleurodynia with Rhus tox.; and to this obvious relation Hahnemann applied his term Genius Epidemicus”.
In the winter of about 1888, I treated a man in Minne-apolis with apparent rheumatic aching and lameness in general, and more acutely in the bowels, weakening watery stools, colic before stool-symptoms peculiar to Rhus tox., which promptly cured. I called it rheumatic diarrhoea. Other cases appeared and within a month an obvious epidemic; no precedent, no remedy, but a general alarm that a bug had got loose which must be cornered at once. Minneapolis pumps its city water from the Mississippi River, the intake extending about one-third into the river. Analysis of the water found the bud (?).
The press flared with censure of the water management for jeopardizing 300,000 people by its stupidity. Thirty-five thousand dollars was immediately busy in extending the intake to the middle of the river beyond the germ area, and the malady was named winter cholera; it recurred in fading form two or three winters, ad occult influence waned.
My doubt of the accepted solution naturally, excited the retort, “Why, dam it, man, they found the bug!” But very soon the papers were obliged to report that from East to West, in country or city, with river or without, watered by well, spring, lake or brewery, they were having “winter cholera”. The stream of abuse was plugged and fear changed to and comfort was found in “everybodys having it.” My simple, being last, kept good all winter.
