It is not an uncommon thing for people who have suffered from an acute septic fever to find albumen temporarily present in the urine. This is due to the irritant action of the toxins and other poisons (which the fever is the means of ejecting) upon the structure of the kidneys. The kidneys are filters and they remove the bulk of the soluble waste of the body.
The practitioner frequently finds albumenuria in cases of scarlet fever, typhoid fever, diphtheria, etc., and the object of his treatment is to prevent this condition of kidney irritation from becoming an established disease (Bright's disease).
Flesh foods, and especially meat extracts and meat soups, are the worst possible wherewith to feed these fever cases, because they throw so much extra work upon the kidneys. Meat is composed mainly of proteids. It also contains the urinary wastes and the toxins (due to fear) which were in the animal's body and on the way to elimination when it was killed.
This sufferer should take one meal per day consisting of fresh fruit only; the rest of the diet should consist of salad vegetables and finely grated raw roots, home-made curd cheese, dextrinised cereals (such as Melarvi biscuits, Shredded Wheat, “P.R.” crackers, Granose biscuits, Grape-Nuts, twice-baked standard bread, etc.) and fresh or nut butter.
PHOSPHORUS AND THE NERVES.
W.H.H. writes:—I should be very grateful if Dr Knaggs could help me with any information or hints regarding phosphaturia. I suffer much from this troublesome complaint.
We have to remember that the nervous system is two-fold. The one, or conscious portion, consists of the brain and spinal cord, from which all the nerves or branches travel to all parts of the body and give us dominion over them. The other, or subconscious, called the sympathetic nervous system, lies on either side of the front of the spine as two long chains with centres, or ganglia, at intervals. This second system is not within our control and has to do with the regulation of our vegetative functions, including the bulk of the digestive process.
All nerves, whether they come from the brain or from the sympathetic system, ranging to their smallest terminals, are built alike of cells, and these cells secrete a complex fatty substance, called lecithin, whose dominant element is phosphorus. This phosphorus has to be supplied to the body with food, and as food, and it cannot be properly utilised or assimilated by the body or used by the nerves to build up their lecithin unless it is eaten in the form of organic compounds.
The tissues of the body are continually dying, as a result of work done, and are continually being replaced by fresh young tissues as needed. It is the function of the nerves to manage this work for us as well as to similarly arrange for reproduction.
In order to control the functions of the various organs and tissues and to regulate the rate at which they reproduce themselves, the nerves extend their terminal branches, not only into every tissue, but into every microscopical unit of such tissue, and the part of the cell which represents the nerve terminal is the inner structure called the nucleus.