Mr. Upton Sinclair and Mr. Michael Williams
Resting from their favorite exercise.
I have sketched the path by which I was led into these studies; there remains to outline the story of my collaborator. Williams is the son of a line of sailors, and inherited a robust constitution; but as a boy and youth he was employed in warehouses and department stores, and when he was twenty he went to North Carolina as a tuberculosis patient. Returning after two years, much benefited by outdoor life, he entered newspaper work in Boston, New York, and elsewhere, and kept at it until four years ago, when again he fled South to do battle with tuberculosis, which had attacked a new place in his lungs. After a second partial recuperation, he went to San Francisco. At the time of the earthquake he held a responsible executive position, and his health suffered from the worry and the labors of that period. A year later there came the shock and exposure consequent upon the burning of Helicon Hall. Williams found himself hovering upon the brink of another breakdown, this time in nervous energy as well as in lung power. A trip to sea failed to bring much benefit; and matters were seeming pretty black to him, when it chanced that a leading magazine sent him to New Haven to study the diet experiments being conducted at Yale University by Professors Chittenden, Mendel and Fisher. He found that these experiments were based upon the case of Horace Fletcher, and had resulted in supporting his claims. This circumstance interested him, suggesting as it did that he himself might have been to blame for his failure with Mr. Fletcher’s system. So he renewed the study of Fletcherism, and later on the same magazine sent him to Dr. Kellogg’s institution at Battle Creek, with the result that he became a complete convert to the new ideas. Like a great many newspaper men, he had been a free user of coffee, and also of alcohol. As one of the results of his adoption of the “low proteid” diet, and of the open-air life, he was able to break off the use of all these things without grave difficulty. A bacteriological examination recently disclosed the fact that his lungs had entirely healed; while tests on the spirometer showed that his breathing capacity was far beyond that of the average man of his weight and size. In less than three months, while at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, tests showed a great gain in the cell count of his blood, and in its general quality. Also, his general physical strength was increased from 4635 units to 5025, which latter figure is well above the average for his height, 68.2 inches.
In conclusion, we wish jointly to express our obligation to Mr. Horace Fletcher, to Dr. J. H. Kellogg, to Professor Russell H. Chittenden, to Professor Lafayette B. Mendel, and to Professor Irving Fisher for advice, criticism and generous help afforded in the preparation of some of the chapters of this book. The authority of these scientists, physicians and investigators, and of others like Metchnikoff, Pawlow, Cannon, Curtis, Sager, Higgins and Gulick, whose works we have studied, is the foundation upon which we rest on all questions of fact or scientific statement. They are the pathbreakers and the roadbuilders,—we claim to be simply guides and companions along the journey to the fair land of health. The journey is not long, and the road is a highway open to all.
I
THE BATTLE OF THE BLOOD
The new ideas of living which are the subject of this book have proceeded from investigation of the human body with the high-power microscope. The discoveries made, which have to do, not so much with the body itself as with the countless billions of minute organisms which inhabit the body, may be best set forth by a description of the blood. “The blood is the life,” says Exodus, and modern science has confirmed this statement. From the blood proceeds the life of all the body, and in its health is the body’s health.
If you should prick your finger and extract a drop of your own blood, and examine it under a microscope, you would make the fascinating discovery that it is the home of living creatures, each having a separate and independent existence of its own. In a single ounce of blood there are more of these organisms than there are human beings upon the face of the globe. These organisms are of many kinds, but they divide themselves into two main groups, known as the red corpuscles and the white.
The red corpuscles are the smaller of the two. The body of an average man contains something like thirty million of millions of these corpuscles; a number exceeding the population of New York and London are born in the body every second. They are the oxygen conveyers of the body; the process of life is one of chemical combustion, and these corpuscles feed the fire. No remotest portion of the body escapes their visitation. They carry oxygen from the lungs and they bring back the carbon dioxide and other waste products of the body’s activities. They have been compared to men who carry into a laundry buckets of pure water, and carry out the dirty water resulting from the washing process.
The other variety of organisms are the white cells or leucocytes, and it is concerning them that the most important discoveries of modern investigators have been made. The leucocytes vary in number according to the physical condition of the individual, and according to their locality in the body. Their function is to defend the body against the encroachments of hostile organisms.
We shall take it for granted that the reader does not require to have proven to him the so-called “germ theory” of disease. The phrase, which was once accurate, is now misleading, for the germ “theory” is part of the definite achievement of science. Not only have we succeeded in isolating the specific germ whose introduction into the body is responsible for different diseases, but in many cases, by studying the history and behavior of the germ, we have been able to find methods of checking its inroads, and so have delivered men from scourges like yellow fever and the bubonic plague.