Preventable Diseases

by Woods Hutchinson

Even the man who is suffering from a "mind diseased," and confined in one of our merciful asylums for the insane, is in that condition and position on account of physical disease, not merely of his brain, but of his entire body. The lunatic is insane, in the for once correct derivative sense of unhealthy, to the very tips of his fingers. Not merely his mind and his brain, but his liver, his stomach, his skin, his hair and fingernails, the very sweat-glands of his surface which control his bodily odor, are diseased and have been so usually for years before his mind breaks down.

Tell a competent expert to pick out of a crowd of a thousand men and women the ten who are likely to become insane, and his selection will be found almost invariably to include the two or three who will actually become so.

In fact, from even the crudest and scantiest knowledge of the actual growth of our own bodies from the ovum to the adult, it will be difficult to conceive how this relation could be otherwise, The nerve-cells and their long processes, which form the nerve-trunks, are simply one of a score of different specialized cells which exist side by side in the body. Primarily all our body-cells had the power of responding to stimuli, of digesting and elaborating food, of moving by contraction, of reproducing their kind. The nerve-cells are simply a group which have specialized exclusively upon the power of receiving and transmitting impulses. They still take food, but it has to be prepared for them by the other cells; and here, as we shall see later, is one of the dangers to which they are exposed. They still reproduce their kind, but in very much smaller and more limited degree. They still, incredible as it may seem, probably have slight powers of movement or contraction, and can draw in their processes. But they have surrendered many of their rights and neglected some of their primitive accomplishments, in order to devote themselves more exclusively and perfectly to the carrying out of one or two things.

In spite of all this, however, they still remain blood-brothers and comrades to every other cell in the body. In the language of Shylock, "If you cut them, they will bleed; if you tickle them, they will laugh; if you starve them, they will die." In all this development, which continued up to a late hour last night, and is still going on, the nerve-tissue has lain side by side with every other tissue in the body, fed by the same blood, supplied with the same oxygen, saturated with the same body-lymph.

It is of course perfectly clear that any influence, whether beneficial or injurious, affecting the body, will also be likely to affect the nervous system, as a part of it; and this is precisely the fact, as we find it. If the body be well fed, well warmed, sufficiently exercised, without being overworked, and allowed a liberal allowance of that recharging of the human battery which we call sleep, then the nervous system will work smoothly and easily, at peace with itself and with all mankind. Its sense-organs will receive external impressions promptly and accurately. Its conducting fibres will transmit them to the centre with neither delay nor friction. The brain clearing-house will receive and dispose of them with ease and good judgment. And then, just because his nervous system is working to perfection, we say that such an individual "has no nerves."

If the triumph of art be to conceal art, then the nerves have achieved this. They have literally effaced themselves in the well-being of the body.

If on the other hand, the food-supply is inadequate, if the sleep allowance has been cut short, whether by the demands of work or by those of fashion, if the body has been starved of oxygen and deprived of sunlight, if the whole system has been kept on the rack, whether in the sweatshop, or in the furnace of affliction, what is the effect on the nervous system? Just what might have been expected. The sense-organs shy, like a frightened horse, at every shadow or fluttering leaf. The conducting wires break, and cross, and tangle in every imaginable fashion. The central exchange, half wild with hunger, or crazed with fatigue-toxins, shrieks out as each distorted message comes in, or sulks because it can't understand them. And then, with charming logicality, we declare that such an one is "all nerves."

The brain, by which we mean the biggest one near the mouth,—we have little brains, or ganglia all over our bodies,—so far from being an absolute monarch, is not even a constitutional one, or a president of a republic, but a mere house of congress of the modern type, which can do little but register and obey the demands of its constituents. The brain originates nothing. Impulses are brought to it from the sense-organs by the nerves. They set up in it certain vibrations, or chemical disturbances. It responds to these much as blue litmus paper turns red when a weak acid is dropped on it, or as lemonade fizzes when you put soda in it. If more than one of these vibrations are set up simultaneously, it "chooses" between them, by responding to the strongest. If the response differs from the stimulus, it is because of its huge deference to precedent as established by the records of previous stimuli with which its tissues are stored.

This brings us to the interesting and important question, What are the causes of these disturbances of the nerve-tissues? Probably the most important single result that has been reached in our study of nervous diseases in the last fifteen years, is that the cause of them in easily eighty per cent of all cases lies entirely outside of the nervous system.

The stomach burns, the nerve-tissues send in the fire alarm and order out the engines. The liver goes on a strike, and the body-garbage, which it has failed to burn to clean ashes and clear smoke, poisons the nerve-cells, and they remonstrate accordingly, on behalf of the other tissues. The heart, or blood-vessels, fails to supply a certain muscle with its due rations of blood and the nerves of the region cry out in the agony of cramp.