CHAPTER VI ELECTRICAL DERANGEMENT OF THE BODILY ORGANISM PRODUCES SICKNESS AND DEATH
I contend that man's body is an electric machine or organism, and electricity is its vital force and governing power, and all sickness is caused by the electrical derangement of the bodily organism. Electricity is the force which organized the body machine, which runs the body machine, and whose loss or deficiency cripples and finally destroys it.
Sickness is the impairment of some of the parts or functions of the body by reason of its failure to get its necessary and natural supply of electrical energy. This may be caused by an injury to some of its parts or by lack of proper air, food and nutrition containing the electric properties required. For air is an electric element from the life-giving sun, and vegetable food is the embalmed rays of the sun, and animal food is vegetable food embalmed in animal organism and brought one step nearer to electrical digestion, and both air and nutriment are necessary to supply vital electricity to the living organism. And while man can live without food forty days, he cannot live without air four minutes. The great force and power which run the human or animal machine is the vitalizing air we breathe, the electric atmosphere in which "we live, move and have our being." It is as much a substance as the water in which the fish swim, though it is transparent to light, while water is only partially so.
The lungs are the great electric reservoirs of the body and take the electric current of the sun from the atmosphere as constantly and naturally as the electric wire takes the current from the battery or the dynamo.
Then it imparts electric energy to the blood and sends it as an electric current and fluid coursing through every part of the body, producing vitalizing life and growth, causing the heart valves to beat and pump with marvelous power, the pulse to throb, and the whole machine to pulsate, thrill and whir with electric life and energy.
Flammarion says three-fourths of a man's life energy and nourishment comes from the air. And Nicola Tesla says the time may come when man may learn to live on air alone, as do some kinds of vegetable and animal organisms. Man in time may learn to so mix the elements of the atmosphere to supply the needs of the body, that he may, by breathing it into his lungs, obtain all the essential elements to preserve its life and organism.
The oxygen of the air keeps alive the fire of physical life, and the body may be compared to a flame fed unceasingly by electric fire from the sun and atmosphere, according to the laws of electric combustion. The want of oxygen or this electric energy from the air extinguishes the flame of life as it extinguishes the flame of a lamp.
The blood could not course through the veins with such marvelous speed if it were not for the electric energy imparted to it in the electric reservoir of the lungs; the heart valves could not throb with such wonderful force or the pulse keep its steady, unceasing beat but for the electric power imparted by the wireless electricity of the air.
Besides, the electricity of the air passes through and through the pores of the body at every point, giving additional life and force, and every angle of the body draws electricity like the point of a lightning rod, and the legs, the arms, the toes and the fingers with the space between them, constitute horseshoe magnets of great efficiency.
A man's strength and endurance is measured by the electric atmosphere he draws into his lungs and the fuel or food he takes into his stomach or boiler. A man's stomach bears a similar relation to the body that the boiler and furnace does to the machine, and should be treated in very much the same way. It should receive only the fuel necessary to its usefulness, and the ashes and debris should be cleaned out every morning before building a fresh fire, as is done with every well kept furnace. The lungs take in pure electricity from the air, while the stomach takes in compound electric elements, vegetable and animal, and converts them by the electric process of digestion and assimilation into blood and bone, nerves and tissue, and the two functions give vitality and growth to the whole body.