Two valuable additions to diagnostic science are now offered to us in osteopathy and in the Diagnosis from the Eye.
Osteopathy furnishes valuable information concerning the connection between disease conditions and misplacements of vertebrae and other bony structures, contractions or abnormal relaxation of muscles and ligaments, and inflammation of nerves and nerve centers.
The Diagnosis from the Eye is as yet a new science, and much remains to be discovered and to be better explained. We do not claim that Nature's records in the eye disclose all the details of pathological tendencies and changes, but they do reveal many disease conditions, hereditary and acquired, that cannot be ascertained by any other methods of diagnosis.
Omitting consideration of everything that is at present speculative and uncertain, we are justified in making the following statements:
The eye is not only, as the ancients said, "the mirror of the soul," but it also reveals abnormal conditions and changes in every part and organ of the body. Every organ and part of the body is represented in the iris of the eye in a well-defined area. The iris of the eye contains an immense number of minute nerve filaments, which through the optic nerves, the optic brain centers and the spinal cord are connected with and receive impressions from every nerve in the body. The nerve filaments, muscle fibers and minute blood vessels in the different areas of the iris reproduce the changing conditions in the corresponding parts or organs. By means of various marks, signs, abnormal colors and discolorations in the iris, Nature reveals transmitted disease taints and hereditary lesions. Nature also makes known, by signs, marks and discolorations, acute and chronic inflammatory or catarrhal conditions, local lesions, destruction of tissues, various drug poisons and changes in structures and tissues caused by accidental injury or by surgical mutilations. The Diagnosis from the Eye positively confirms Hahnemann's theory that all acute diseases have a constitutional background of hereditary or acquired disease taints. This science enables the diagnostician to ascertain, from the appearance of the iris alone, the patient's inherited or acquired tendencies toward health and toward disease, his condition in general and the state of every organin particular. Reading Nature's records in the eye, he can predict the different healing crises through which the patient will have to pass on the road to health. The eye reveals dangerous changes in vital parts and organs from their inception, thus enabling the patient to avert any threatening disease by natural living and natural methods of treatment. By changes in the iris, the gradual purification of the system, the elimination of morbid matter and poisons, and the readjustment of the organism to normal conditions under the regenerating influences of natural living and treatment are faithfully recorded.
This interesting subject will be treated more fully in a separate volume (~Iridiagnosis,~ published in 1919 by Dr. Lindlahr). In this connection I shall confine myself to relating briefly the story of the discovery of this valuable science.
The Story of a Great Discovery
Dr. Von Peckzely, of Budapest, Hungary, discovered Nature's records in the eye, quite by accident, when a boy ten years of age.
Playing one day in the garden at his home, he caught an owl. While struggling with the bird, he broke one of its limbs. Gazing straight into the owl's large, bright eyes, he noticed, at the moment when the bone snapped, the appearance of a black spot in the lower central region of the iris, which area he later found to correspond to the location of the broken leg.
The boy put a splint on the broken limb and kept the owl as a pet. As the fracture healed, he noticed that the black spot in the iris became overdrawn with a white film and surrounded by a white border (denoting the formation of scar tissues in the broken bone).