The intelligent reader will readily conceive that he who has found the secret of the degenerations constituting the various forms of disease, will not hesitate before their complications. Ataxia, Basedow's Disease, Diabetes Mellitus, Obesity, Bright's Disease and Arterio-Sclerosis, can be cured. They can be cured by the same methods of which simpler examples have been already given.
No one, who in the struggle for health has surrendered to the attack of constitutional disease, the germ of which may have been implanted in him by his forefathers, needs despair. Let him seek advice before too late, and the strong probability is that in due time he will have regained his health, and will be enabled to fulfil his duties to himself and to posterity.
NOTE.—In reference to the foregoing tables of dietary "Regimen" the reader must clearly understand that the prescriptions are merely indications of diet appropriate to various phases of the complaints to the treatment of which they are attached; but the decision as to how and when these phases occur in individual cases should be left entirely to the discretion of the physician in charge of the case who will, of course, also pronounce upon the diet. Should there be no such authority present, the greatest care and common sense must be devoted to the selection from the said tables of a system of diet suitable to the various stages of disease. Any recommendations therein contained which may appear to be contradictory or conflicting must be ascribed to their complication on a progressive dietary system consistent with the prospective advancement of the case towards recovery.
INFANTILE PARALYSIS.
Amongst the forms of Degeneration of the Muscular Tissue the reader will have noticed that of Infantile Paralysis or Poliomyelitis.
The startling prominence that this complaint quite recently acquired was due to its world-wide ravages in epidemic form and the absolute and confessed inability of the combined sagacity of the whole faculty of the orthodox medical profession to cope with it or to cure it—to fathom its cause and origin or to curtail its increasing rate of mortality. I am therefore constrained, so far as space permits, to give the matter special and particular consideration.
The scientific name, "Poliomyelitis," is derived from the Greek words: polios, grey and myleos, marrow; for its chief feature is a softening of the grey spinal marrow.
First noticed by the medical world no later than the year 1840, statistics show that in the last decade it has appeared in various parts of the world in epidemic form, notably in Sweden and Norway. In America, epidemics occurred in 1907 and 1908 and again in 1916. It was promptly and energetically dealt with by the Rockefeller Institute of New York where the proof was established of the possibility of transmission by a living virus taken from the spinal marrow of a victim; but whether this disseminator may be correctly termed a bacillus, or fungus or a germ, medical-science has been unable lo determine; neither has it succeeded with the most powerful microscope in discovering the individuality of this "carrier," whilst all experiments with re-agents have been bare of results. Thus the researches of science have merely brought us back to the starting point; namely, that there is a "something" which exerts a degenerating influence upon the cellular tissue of the spinal marrow and causes the morbid enlargement of its cells.
The New York Board of Health, cites eight different forms in which the disease may appear and acknowledges a startling failure to determine either any uniform period of incubation (i.e. the time between contagion and the appearance of the symptoms,) or the period of infection (i.e. how long a sick person may be a danger to others).
The New York press accepts the situation philosophically; as follows: