The Natural Cure of Consumption, Constipation, Bright's Disease, Neuralgia, Rheumatism, "Colds" (Fevers), Etc. / How Sickness Originates, and How to Prevent It. A Health Manual for the People.

by C. E. Page

by continuity of tissue, or indirectly through the sympathetic system. All understand something about the practical working of the telegraphic system, by which a touch of the wire at Boston, for example, may not only be felt at any point in our own country, but even in England or Europe. How often, in joy or affliction, the wire constitutes a sympathetic connection between friends, families, nations. The nervous system forms a sympathetic connection between the different parts throughout the organism, only it is more complete, ten thousand times over, than the telegraphic or telephonic system. If in these cases the wires were to take on disease,—become inflamed and so affected as to cause the same states, emotions, or disasters, at the point where an unhappy message is received as at the point of departure,—it would constitute for the nation and the world what the sympathetic nervous system does for the animal organism. Should we not, then, deplore its existence, and grieve that we are so “fearfully and wonderfully made”? Nevertheless, it is directly a great boon, and but for this intimate connection between the different portions of the body—for want of this most efficient set of safety valves, so to say—the organs primarily affected would more often become fatally diseased and life speedily terminated. Indeed, in spite of this most wonderful provision of nature, the violations of law are so constant and severe, or so overwhelming upon occasion, that life is often destroyed with but a moment of warning, as in apoplexy, “heart disease,” and sunstroke, so called.

Strictly speaking, however, even in these cases there have been premonitions without number, dating afar back (see Bright’s Disease), which would have prevented the disaster if only they had been known and heeded.

[7] This disorder, which is supposed often to cause consumption, is rather a disease of indigestion, and is especially apt to attack patients already in consumption, because of their chronically disordered nutritive and respiratory organs.

Says Professor J. C. Zachos (Studies in Science):

“... Such is the present system of telegraphing which if it were multiplied so as to include every town and hamlet in the country, yea, even be within the reach of every individual as an operator, would convey but a feeble illustration of the complication, the number, the power, and the perfect unity of a similar system in the human body.

“We have first in each individual cell a galvanic battery. There are countless millions of such cells in the human body, whose united force has never been estimated, but doubtless a million of tons would not approximate to the force they are exerting at any one instant of time. Each of these cells is provided with two nerves; an afferent and an efferent nerve, a carrier to, and a carrier from, that center; each, endowed with different functions by reason of the duality of force generated in each cell: a force of motion and a force of sensation. A number of such cells and nerves may be combined and at a certain point of the circuit they make there, a concentration and accumulation of power by a plexus and convolution of these nerves, around a central substance called ‘neureline’—a granulated collection of particles that seem to take the place of the soft iron in the helix, for they are always found in the midst of these convoluted masses of

nerves; these masses are called ganglia; they are the centers of nervous power and intelligence, connected each with some special group of functions; associated by connecting nerves with each other, and having their central and common connection in the largest ganglion, called the brain.

“No part of the system fails to be visited by these nerves, and although they are not discoverable in every tissue, yet their presence is inferred, because their function is there—sensation or motion, or both.[8]

[8] Is it possible to overestimate the importance of perfect nutrition by which only this wonderful system can be preserved in health? (See “Saline Starvation.”)

“We can not at present enter into details in enumerating the number, the structure, the special functions of these several ganglia, which might well be called the telegraphic stations of the body; they vary from the size of a grain of sand, to that of the brain which fills the cavity of the skull.