The Book of Life

by Upton Sinclair

The explanation takes you over to the "health cranks." They understand that your blood-stream must be clogged, your bodily tone reduced by bad air and lack of exercise, and more especially by over-eating, or by an improperly balanced diet. But then most of them go to extremes, and insist that the automobile ride and the chilled condition of my body had nothing to do with my cold. But I know otherwise—I have watched the thing happen so often. In times when I was run down, the slightest exposure would cause me a cold, literally in a few minutes. I have got myself a sore throat going out to the wood-pile on a winter day with nothing on my head. I have got a cold by sitting still with wet feet, or by sitting in a draft on a warm summer day, when I had been perspiring a little. How to explain this I am not sure, but my guess is that you drive the blood away from the surface of the body at a time when it is weakened and exposed to infection, and you drive away the army of the white corpuscles, and give the battlefield of your body to the germs.

I know there are nature curists who argue that germs have nothing to do with disease; but they have never been able to convince me—germs are too real, and too many, and too easy to watch. If you leave a piece of meat exposed to the air in warm temperature, the germs in the air will settle upon it and begin to feed upon it and to multiply; the meat, being dead, is powerless to protect itself. But your nose and throat are also meat, and just as good food for the germs. The only difference is that this meat is alive, there is a living blood-stream circulating through it, and several score billions of the body's own kind of germs, the blood corpuscles. If these blood corpuscles are sound and properly nourished, and are brought to the place of infection, they are able to destroy all the common germs; so it is that you do not have diseases, but instead have health. But your health always implies a struggle of your organism against other organisms, and it is the business of your reason to watch your body and give all the help you can in protecting it. Coughs and colds, sore throats and headaches, are the first warnings that your defenses are being weakened. As a rule these ailments are not serious in themselves, but they are signs of a wrong condition, and if you neglect this condition, pretty soon you will find that you have to deal with something deadly.

My cure for a cold is to take an enema and a laxative, eat nothing for twenty-four hours, and drink plenty of water. If you have a severe cold or sore throat, you will be wise to lie in bed for a day or two, by an open window. You may also use sprays and gargles if you wish, but you will find them of little use, because the germs are deep in your mucous membranes, and cannot all be reached from the outside. In the old sad days of my ignorance I would get a cold, and go to the doctor, and have my throat and nose pumped full of black and green and yellow and purple liquids, which did me absolutely no good whatever; the cold would stay on for two or three weeks, sometimes for eight or ten weeks, and I would be miserable, utterly desperate. I was dying by inches, and not one of the doctors could tell me why.

The next most common ailment is a headache, and this means poisons in your blood-stream. It may be from improper diet, from alcohol, or drugs, or bad air, or nervous excitement. If it is none of these things, then you should begin to look for some organic difficulty, eye-strain, for example, or perhaps defects in the spine. The osteopaths and the chiropractors specialize on the spine, and have made important discoveries. Their doctrine is, in brief, that the nervous force which directs the blood-stream is carried to the organs of the body by nerves which leave the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. If any of these openings are pinched, you have a diminished nerve supply, which means ill-health in that part of the body to which the nerve leads. That such trouble can be corrected by straightening the bones of the spine, seems perfectly reasonable; but like most people with a new idea, the discoverers proceed to carry it to absurd extremes. I have before me an official chiropractic pamphlet which states that vertebral displacement is "the physical and perpetuating cause of ninety-five per cent of all cases of disease; the remaining five per cent being due to subluxations of other skeletal segments." Naturally people who believe this will devote nearly all their study to the bones and the nervous system. But surely, there are other parts of your body which are necessary besides bones and nerves! And what if some of these parts happen to be malformed or defective? What if your eyes do not focus properly, and you are continually wearing out the optic nerve, thus giving yourself headaches and neurasthenia? What if you have an appendix that has been twisted and malformed from birth, and is a center of infection so long as it remains in the body?

Several years ago I had an experience with the appendix, from which I learned something about one of the commonest of human ailments, constipation, or sluggishness of the bowels. This is a cause of innumerable chronic ailments grouped under the head of auto-intoxication, or the poisoning of the body by the absorption into the system of the products of fermentation and decay in the bowels. The bowels should move freely two or three times every day, and the movements should be soft. I suffered from constipation for some twenty years, and tried, I think, every remedy known both to science and to crankdom. In the beginning the doctors gave me drugs which by irritating the intestinal walls cause them to pour out quantities of water, and hurry the irritating substances down the intestinal tract. That is all right for an emergency; if you have swallowed a poison, or food which is spoiled, or if you have overeaten and are ill, get your system cleaned out by any and every device. But if you habitually swallow mild poisons, which is what all laxatives are, you weaken the intestinal tract, and you have to take more and more of these poisons, and you get less results. We may set down as positive the statement that drugs are not a remedy for constipation.

Next comes diet. Eat the rough and bulky foods, say the nature curists, and stimulate the intestinal walls to activity. I tried that. I listened to the extreme enthusiasts, and boiled whole wheat and ate it, and consumed quantities of bran biscuit, and of a Japanese seaweed which Dr. Kellogg prepares, and of petroleum oil, and even the skins of oranges, which are most uncomfortable eating, I assure you. I would eat things like this until I got myself a case of diarrhea—and so was cured of constipation for a time! Strange as it may seem to you, there are even people who tell you to eat sand. I listened to them, and ate many quarts.

Then there is exercise. MacFadden taught me a whole series of exercises for developing the muscles of the abdominal walls and the back, which are greatly neglected by civilized man. The fundamental cause of constipation is a sluggish life, and to exercise our bodies is a duty; but to me it was always an agony of boredom to lie on a bed and wiggle my abdomen for a quarter of an hour. The same thing applies to hot water treatments, which are effective, but a nuisance and a waste of time. I never could keep them up except when I was in trouble.

Three or four years ago I began to notice a continual irritating pain in my right side, which I quickly realized must lie in the appendix. I tried massage, and hot and cold water treatments, and my favorite remedy, a week's fast. The pain disappeared, but it returned, so finally I decided, to the dismay of my physical culture friends, to have the appendix out. For years I had been reading the statements of nature curists, that the appendix is an important and vital part of the body, which pours an oil or something into the intestinal tract, and so helps to prevent constipation. Well, evidently my appendix wasn't doing its job, so I took it to a good surgeon. What I found was that it had been twisted and malformed from birth, so that it was a center of continuous infection. From the time I had that operation, I have never had to think about the subject of constipation. This experience suggests to me how easy it is for people to make statements about health which have no relationship to facts.

I do not recommend promiscuous surgery, and I perfectly well realize that if human beings would take proper care of their health, the great proportion of surgical operations would be unnecessary. I realize, also, that surgeons get paid by the job, and therefore have a money interest in operating, and it is perfectly futile to expect that none of them will ever be influenced by the profit motive. Nevertheless, it is true that sometimes surgical operations are necessary, and that by standing a little temporary inconvenience you can save yourself a life-time of discomfort.

Take, for example, rupture. The human body has here a natural weakness, from which there results a dangerous and uncomfortable affliction. Hundreds of thousands of men are going around all their lives wearing elaborate and expensive trusses which are almost, if not entirely useless, and trying advertised "cures" which are entirely fakes. An operation takes an hour or two, and two or three weeks in bed, and when our government drafted its young men into the army and found that fourteen in every thousand of them had rupture, it shipped them into the hospitals wholesale and sewed them up. It happens that rupture affords one case where scar tissue is stronger than natural tissue, and there were practically no returns from the great number of army cases.