The Book of Life

by Upton Sinclair

The scene is a laboratory, with rows of raised seats at one side for the physicians who attend the clinic. There is a table, with the instruments of measurement, and Dr. Abrams sits beside it, and before him stands a young man stripped to the waist. The doctor is tapping upon the abdomen of this man, and listening to the sounds. You will find this the weirdest part of the whole procedure, for you will naturally assume that this young man is being examined, and will be dazed when some one explains that the patient is in Toronto or Boston or New Orleans, and that this young man's body is the instrument which the doctor uses in the determining of the vibration rates of the patient's blood. Dr. Abrams tried numerous instruments, but has been able to find nothing so sensitive to electronic activity as a human body. He explains to his classes that the spinal cord is composed of millions of nerve fibres of different vibration rates; hence a certain rate communicated to the body, is automatically sorted out, and appears on a certain precise spot of the body in the form of increased activity, increased blood pressure in the cells, and hence what all physicians know as a "dull area," which can be discovered by what is known as "percussion," a tapping with a finger. To map out these areas is merely a matter of long and patient experiment; and Abrams has been studying this subject for some twenty years—he is author of a text-book on what is known as the "reactions of Abrams." So now he provides the world with a series of maps of the human body; and he sits in front of his "subject," and his assistant places a specimen of blood in a little electrically connected box, and sets the rheostat at some vibration number—say fifty—and Dr. Abrams taps on a certain square inch of the abdomen of his "subject," and announces the dread word "cancer." Then he places the electrode on another part of the "subject's" body, and taps some more, and announces that it is cancer of the small intestine, left side; some more tapping, and he announces that its intensity is twelve ohms, which is severe; and pretty soon there is speeding a telegram to the physician who has sent this blood specimen, telling him these facts, and prescribing a certain vibration rate upon the "oscilloclast," the instrument of radio-activity which Dr. Abrams has devised.

Now, you watch this thing for an hour or two, and you say to yourself: "Here is either the greatest magician in the history of mankind, or else the greatest maniac." You may have come prepared for some kind of fraud, but you soon dismiss that, for you realize that this man is desperately in earnest about what he is doing, and so are all the physicians who watch him. So you seek refuge in the thought that he must be deluding himself and them, perhaps unconsciously. But you talk with these men, and discover that they have come from all over the country, and always for one reason—they had sent blood specimens to Abrams, and had found that he never made a mistake; he told them more from a few drops of the patient's blood than they themselves had been able to find out from the whole patient. And then into the clinic come the doctor's own patients—I must have heard sixty or eighty of them tell their story and many of them have been lifted from the grave. People ten years blind from syphilis who can see; people operated on several times for cancer and given up for dying; people with tumors on the brain, or with one lung gone from tuberculosis. It is literally a fact that when you have sat in Abrams' clinic for a week, all disease loses its terrors.

This, you see, is really the mastery of life. If we can measure and control the minute universe of the electron and the atom, we have touched the ultimate source of our bodily life. I might take chapters of this book to tell you of the strange experiments I have seen in this clinic—showing you, for instance, how these vibrations respond to thought, how by denying to himself the disease the patient can for a few moments cancel in his body the activity of the harmful germs; showing how the reactions differ in the different sexes and at different ages, and how they respond to different colors and different drugs. Abrams' method has revealed the secret of such efficacy as drugs possess—their work is done by their radio-activity, and not by their chemical properties. Also the problem of vaccination has been solved—for Abrams has discovered a dread new disease, which is bovine syphilis, originally caused in cattle by human inoculation, and now reintroduced in the human being by vaccination, and becoming the agent which prepares the soil of the body for such disorders as tuberculosis and cancer. And it appears that we can all be rendered immune to these diseases, by a few electronic vibrations, introduced into our bodies in childhood; so is opened up to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race, purified and made fit for life. So here at last is science justified of her optimism, and our faith in human destiny forever vindicated. Take my advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out about this new work and help to make it known to the world.

There are many romances of medical science, some of them fascinating as murder mysteries and big game hunting. Turn to McMasters' "History of the People of the United States" and read his account of the terrible epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia a hundred years ago; I have already referred to the weird and incredible things the people did in their effort to ward off this plague—sponges of vinegar under their noses and "fever fires" burning in the streets; and then a mosquito would fly up and bite them, and in a few hours they would be dead! Or what could be stranger than the tracing of the bubonic plague, which has cost literally billions of human lives, to a parasite in the blood of fleas which live on the bodies of rats! Or what could be more unexpected than the tracing of our rheumatic aches and twinges to the root canals of the teeth!

One of the common ailments which afflict poor humanity is rheumatism, a cause of endless suffering. It was supposed to be due to damp climate and exposure, and this is true to a certain extent, in the same way that colds are due to exposure. But the investigators realized that there must be some bodily condition rendering one susceptible, and they set to work to trace this condition down. The pains of rheumatism are caused by uric acid settling in the joints of the body. What causes the uric acid? Well, there is uric acid in red meat, so let us forbid rheumatic people to eat it! But this is overlooking the fact that the human body itself is a uric acid factory; and also the fact that uric acid taken into the stomach may not remain uric acid by the time it gets to the blood-stream. We know that you may eat a great deal of fruit acid without necessarily making acid blood. On the other hand, you can make acid blood by eating a lot of sugar! So you see it isn't as simple as it sounds.

Rheumatism has been traced to its lair, which is found to be the roots of the teeth. Here is a part of the body difficult to get at, and as a consequence of bad diet and unwholesome ways of living, infections will start there, and pus sacs be formed, and the poisons absorbed into the blood-stream and distributed through the body. The first thought is to draw the infected teeth; but that is a serious matter, because you need your teeth to chew your food. So the dentist has to go through a complicated process of opening up the tooth and cleaning out the root canals, and treating the infected spots at the roots. Then he has to fill the tooth all the way down to the roots, leaving no place for infection to gather. This, of course, takes time and costs money, and is one more illustration of the fact that there is one health law for the rich and another health law for the poor.

All the time that I write these chapters about health I feel guilty. I know that the wholesome food I recommend costs money, and I know that surgery and dentistry cost money—yes, even sunlight and fresh air and recreation; even a fast, because you have to rest while you take it, and you have to have a roof over your head, and warmth in winter time, and somebody to wait upon you when you are weak. I know that for a great many of the people who read what I write, all these things are impossible of attainment; I know that for the great majority of the common people the benefits of science do not exist. Science discovers how to prevent disease, but the discoveries are not applied, because the profit system controls the world, and the profit system wants the labor of the poor, regardless of what happens to their health. If the people fall ill, they are thrown upon the scrap heap, and the profit system finds others to take their place.

Take, for example, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a germ infection, but it practically never gets hold upon a human body except when the body is reduced by undernourishment and lack of fresh air. Tuberculosis, therefore, is a disease of slums and jails. It is definitely and indisputably a disease of poverty. It could be wiped off the face of the earth in a single generation; and the same is true of typhus and typhoid. There is another whole host of ailments which could be wiped out by measures of public hygiene, plus education. This includes all the infant diseases, and the deadly venereal diseases. But the profit system stands in the way; and so, in these closing paragraphs of this Book of the Body, I say that there is one disease which is the deadliest of all, and the source of all others, and that disease is poverty.

I know a certain physician to the rich, who is an honest and conscientious man. He said, "I loath my work. I am wasting my time. I am called in by these fat, over-fed rich people in their leisure class hotels, and what am I to say to them? Shall I say to them, 'You are living an abnormal life, and you can never be well until you cut out root and branch all your habits of self indulgence which are destroying you?' But no, I can't say that—not one time in a thousand. I am expected to be polite and serious, and to listen to them while they tell the long tiresome story of their symptoms, and I have to encourage them, and give them some temporary device that will remove some of the symptoms of their trouble."

And what should one say to this honest physician? Should one tell him to go and be a physician to the poor? Would he be any happier there? He could tell the poor the causes of their diseases, and they would listen patiently—they are trained to listen, and to accept what they are told. Here is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and working ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and she is ill with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she needs plenty of fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and milk in her diet. He tells her that, and he knows that she has as much chance of carrying out his orders as of flying to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid epidemic, and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago, that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by the political leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case of venereal disease, in a young man who was drafted into the army and turned loose amid the joys of Paris. Maybe it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full of school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is the case in New York City, and the parents out of work a part of the time, and with no possibility in their lives of ever earning enough to feed the children properly. When you confront these universal facts of our present social order, you realize that the problem of disease is not merely a problem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole way of thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of health which did not point out these facts would be, not a book of health, but a book of sham.