style="font-size:15px;"> It happened that I left home without getting the prescription filled, and, not getting back as soon as expected, the anxious wife procured the medicines and succeeded in getting one dose into the stomach, and also in raising a nervous hurricane that took an hour to allay. She was then informed that such a dose would be cruel even to a horse. Thence on he took nothing into his stomach but the water that thirst compelled, and a little dosage with it to meet the mother's need; and so I stood beside the suffering idol of my heart, with the entire medical world against me – strong enough, only rejoicing in my strength to defend him against the barbarism of authorized treatment. My only comfort was that in his time of supreme need I could give him supreme kindness, and if death must come there would not be the additional laceration of avoidable cruelty inflicted; and Nature, with every possible aid that could add comfort to the suffering body, won the victory.
Since then the medical world has advanced to antitoxin as a specific, leaving me nearly alone to plodding ways that are by sight and not by faith. That the treatment of my sick son in the absence of the only supposed specific was in advance of my time, the medical world cannot now question.
As the months and years went on, it so happened that all my fatalities were of a character as not to involve in the least suggestions of starvation, while the recoveries were a series of demonstrations as clear as anything in mathematics, of evolving strength of all the muscles, of all the senses and faculties, as the disease declined. No physician whose practice has been extensive has failed to have had cases in which the same changes occurred, and in which the amount of food taken did not explain this general increase of strength.
Believing I had made a most important discovery in physiology, one that would revolutionize the dietetic treatment of the sick, if not ultimately abolish it, my visits to the sick became of unsurpassed interest, I watched every possible change as an unfolding of new life, seeing the physical changes only as I would see the swelling buds evolve into the leaves or flowers, reading the soul- and mind-changes in the more radiant lines of expression.
I saw all these things with the naked eye, and more and more marvelled at the bulk of our materia medicas, the size of our drug-stores, and the space given to healing powers in all public and medical prints.
For years I saw my patients grow into the strength of health without the slightest clue to the mystery, until I chanced to open a new edition of Yeo's Physiology at the page where I found this table of the estimated losses that occur in death after starvation:
And light came as if the sun had suddenly appeared in the zenith at midnight. Instantly I saw in human bodies a vast reserve of predigested food, with the brain in possession of power so to absorb as to maintain structural integrity in the absence of food or power to digest it. This eliminated the brain entirely as an organ that needs to be fed or that can be fed from light-diet kitchens in times of acute sickness. Only in this self-feeding power of the brain is found the explanation of its functional clearness where bodies have become skeletons.
I could now go into the rooms of the sick with a formula that explained all the mysteries of the maintenance and support of vital power and cure of disease, and that was of practical avail. I now knew that there could be no death from starvation until the body was reduced to the skeleton condition; that therefore for structural integrity, for functional clearness, the brain has no need of food when disease has abolished the desire for it. Is there any other way to explain the power to make wills with whispering lips in the very hour of death, even in the last moments of life, that the law recognizes as valid?
I could now know that to die of starvation is a matter not of days, but of weeks and months; certainly a period far beyond the average time of recovery from acute disease.
III
There fell to my care a very much worn-out mother, who took to her bed with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, with the joints so involved as to require the handling of a trained nurse. The agony was such that the hypodermic needle was required to make existence endurable, and it was used with the idea that the brain would be less injured by the remedy than by the agony with its inevitable loss of sleep.
I know of no disease in which treatment has been more savage than in this. The remedies in common use at that time were mainly new and of supposed specific powers; but they were so violent, and proved to be so futile, that they have all been given up since by the majority of the profession.
As the days went on the disease declined in spite of the enforced comfort through the needle; there were easier movements, a clearing of the skin from sallow to a tint of redness, and finally, after a month, the armchair could be used for a change.
On the morning of the forty-sixth day there was revealed in the face the perfect color of health, and happiness marked every line of the expression. There was ability to walk through several rooms of her home. But it was not until the afternoon that the first food was desired and taken, and never before was plain bread and butter, the supreme objects of desire, so relished. In the following few months there was an actual gain of forty pounds.
My next marked case is a wonderful illustration of the self-feeding power of the brain to meet an emergency, and a revelation, also, of the possible limitations of the starvation period. This was the case of a frail, spare boy of four years, whose stomach was so disorganized by a drink of solution of caustic potash that not even a swallow of water could be retained. He died on the seventy-fifth day of his fast, with the mind clear to the last hour, and with apparently nothing of the body left but bones, ligaments, and a thin skin; and yet the brain had lost neither weight nor functional clearness.
In another city a similar accident happened to a child of about the same age, in whom it took three months for the brain to exhaust entirely the available body-food.
I will now enter upon a study of the brain and its powers along these lines, to be enlivened by illustrative evidence. What reason and physiology had I with me that I should use methods in the sick-room wherein the entire medical world was against me, and with severest condemnation?
The head is the power-house of the human plant, with the brain the dynamo as the source of every possible human energy. We think, love, hate, admire, labor with our hands, taste, hear, smell, see, and feel through the brain. Broken bones and wounds heal, diseases are cured through energy evolved in the brain or the brain system as a whole. The other so-called vital organs and the muscles are only as so many machines that are run by the brain power, with the stomach an exceedingly important machine. That powers so rare do not originate in the bones, ligaments, muscles, or fats, does not need argument; that when the nerve-trunks that supply the arm or leg are severed power of movement and feeling is lost, is known to all; and equally would the power of the stomach be abolished were the nerve-trunks cut off. In a general way, then, it may be stated that the strength of the body is directly as the strength of the brain.
With this physiology, who in or out of the medical profession can fail to see clearly that the digestion of even an atom of food is a tax upon the strength of the brain for whatever of power needed by the stomach, the machine, for this purpose? Unless it can be proved that the stomach has powers not derived from the brain system, this will have to be admitted.
How is the strength kept up in the light of this physiology? The universal belief is that it is kept up by the daily food. In proportion to the prostration of sickness, so are physicians anxious to conserve the energies by working the stomach to the limit of its powers.
The impression that there must be something digested to support the vitality of the system is a belief, a conviction that has always been too self-evident to suggest a doubt.
If the well need food to keep up the strength, the sick need it all the more; this is the logic that has been displayed upon
