Philosophy of Osteopathy Part 4
CHAPTER V.
DISEASES OF THE CHEST.
Where Confined--Consumption--Can Consumption Be Cured--Consumption Described--No Time for Surrender--Cerebral Spinal Fluid--How to Destroy Deadly Bombs of Decay--Battle of Blood for Life--Militis Tuberculosis--Conversion of Bodies Into Gas--Forming a Tubercle--Breeding Contagion--The Seeds of Disease--Generating Fever--Whooping Cough--Clouds and Lungs Are Much Alike--The Wisdom of Nature--Water Formed in Lungs--The Law of Fives--Feeble Action of Heart--The Heart--From Neck to Heart--Dyspepsia or Imperfect Digestion.
WHERE CONFINED.
Diseases of the chest are generally confined to heart, lungs, pleura, the pericardium, mediastium, blood vessels, with nerves and lymphatics.
As we open the breast we behold the heart, a very large machine or engine, situated conveniently to throw blood to all parts of the body.
To it we see hose or pipes that go to each organ, all muscles, the stomach, bowels, liver, spleen, kidneys, bladder and womb, all bones, fibers, ligaments, membranes, and its body, lungs and brain. When we follow this blood through its whole journey to feed the dependent parts, be they organ or muscle, we find just enough unloaded at each station to supply the demand as fast as consumed. Thus life is supplied at each stroke of the heart, which gives blood to keep digestion in full motion while other supplies of blood are being made and put in channels to carry to the heart, blood is freely given to keep those channels strong, clean and active. Thus much depends on the heart, and great care should be given to that study, because a healthy system depends almost wholly on a normal heart and lung. Thus to study well the frame work of the chest should be with the greatest care. Every joint of the neck and spine has much to do with a healthy heart and lung, because all vital fluids from crown to sacrum do or have pa.s.sed through heart and lungs, and any slip of bone, strain or bruise will affect to some degree the usefulness of that fluid in its vitality, when appropriated in the place or organ it should sustain in a good healthy state. To the Osteopath, his first and last duty is to look well to a healthy blood and nerve supply. He should let his eye camp day and night on the spinal column; to know if the bones articulate truly in all facets and other bearings, and never rest day or night until he knows the spine is true and in line from atlas to sacrum, with all ribs known to be in perfect union with processes of spine. In reasoning for probable causes of diseases of chest, we are met with the fact that the heart and lungs are housed up, and out of reach of the hand and eye. We hear a cough, see blood and other substances after they pa.s.s out of the lungs; we learn of general and local pain and misery, feel heat and cold on skin, note abnormal breathing, but here we are at a stop, for want of facts. We know something is wrong, but cannot say what, until after death has done the work, then we open the chest and find tubercles, cancers, ulcers and abcesses. How came they there? is the unanswered question. The servant of that breast who failed to keep his room clean, is the one to find and punish.
CONSUMPTION.
I believe so much death by consumption will soon be with the things of the past, if the cases are taken early and handled by a skilled mind,--one trained for that responsible place. He or she must be taught this as a special branch. It is too deep for superficial knowledge or imperfect work. Life is in danger, and can be saved by skill, not by force and ignorance. He who sees only the dollar in the lung, is not the man to trust with your case.
It is such men as have the ability to think, and the skill to comprehend and execute the application of nature's unerring laws, that obtain the results required. We believe the day has come, and long before noon, the fear of consumption will greatly pa.s.s from the minds of people. We have long since known and proven that a cough is only an effect. If an effect then a wise man will set his mental dogs on the track, which is (effect) to hunt the skunk, (cause). He has all the evidence by the cough, location of pain, tenderness of spine, neck, and quality of the substances coughed up to locate the cause, and to know, when he has found it, how to remove the cause, and give relief; will grow more simple as he reasons and notes effect. We do not think this result will be obtained every time by even an average mind, unless he has a special training for that purpose. He must not only know that the lungs are in the upper part of the chest close to the heart, liver and stomach, but he must know the relation all sustain to each other, that the blood must be abundantly supplied, support and nourish three sets of nerves, namely sensory, motor and nutrient; also voluntary and involuntary. If the supply should be diminished on the nutrient nerves, weakness would follow; reduce the supply from the motor and it will have the same effect. Motion becomes too feeble to carry blood to and from lungs normally, and the blood becomes diseased and congested, because it is not pa.s.sed on to other parts with the force necessary for health of lungs.
At this time the nerves of sensation become irritated by pressure and lack of nutriment, and we cough, which is an effort of nature to unload the burden of oppression that congestion causes with sensory nerves. If this be effect, then we must suffer and die, or remove the cause, put out the fire and stop waste of life, without which all is lost. Nature will do its work of repairing in due time. Let us reason by comparison.
If we dislocate a shoulder, fever and heat will follow. The same is true of all limbs and joints of the body. If any obstructing blood or other fluid should be deposited in quant.i.ties great enough to stop other fluids from pa.s.sing on their way, Nature will fire up its engine to remove such deposits by converting fluids into gas. As heat and motion have much to do as remedies, we may expect fever and pain until nature's furnace produces heat, forms and converts its fluids into gas and other deposits, and pa.s.ses them through the excretories to s.p.a.ce, and allows the body to work normally again.
HOW CONSUMPTION USUALLY BEGINS.
We believe consumption causes the death of thousands annually who might be saved. We must not let stupidity veil our reason, and we are to blame if we let so many run into "Consumption" from a simple hard cough. The remedy is natural, and we believe from results already obtained 75 per cent can be cured if taken in time. What we generally call "Consumption" begins with a cough, chilly sensations, and lasts a day or two. Sometimes fever accompanies with cough, either high or low. The cold generally relaxes in a few days, lungs get "loose," and much is raised and continues for a period, but the cough appears again and again with all changes of weather, and lasts longer each time, until it becomes permanent, then it is called "Consumption," because of this continuance. Medicines are administered freely and often, but the lungs grow worse, cough more continued and much harder, till finally blood begins to come from lungs with wasting of strength. Change of climate is suggested and taken, but with no change for the better; another and another travels to death on the same line. Then the doctor in council reports "hereditary consumption" and with his decision all are satisfied, and each member of the family feels that a cold and cough means a coffin, because the doctor says the family has "hereditary consumption." This shade tree has given comfort and contentment to the doctors of the whole past.
CAN CONSUMPTION BE CURED?
If you have a tiresome and weakening cough at the close of the winter, and wish to be cured, we would advise you to begin Osteopathic treatment at once, so the lungs can heal and harden against next winter's attack.
This is the first I have written on "Consumption" because I wanted to test my conclusions by long and careful observations on cases that I have taken and successfully treated. I kept the results from public print until I could obtain positive proof that "Consumption" could be cured. So far the discovered causes give me little doubt, and the cures are a certainty in very many cases. An early beginning is one of the great considerations in incipient consumption.
CONSUMPTION DESCRIBED.
For fear you do not understand what I mean by "Consumption" I will write on a descriptive line quite pointedly. I will give start and progress to fully developed consumption. We often meet with cases of permanent cough, with expectorations of long duration, dating back two, five, ten, even thirty years, to the time they had measles. The severity of the cough and strain had congested even the lung substances, and a chronic inflammation was the result. If we a.n.a.lyze the sputa we find fibrin and even lung muscle. Does all this array of dangerous symptoms cause an Osteopath to give up in despair? It should not, on the other hand he should go deeper on the hunt of cause. He may find trouble in nerve fiber of pneumogastric nerve, atlas or hyoid, vertebra, rib, or clavicle, may be by pressing on some nerve that supplies mucous membrane of air cells or pa.s.sages. A cut foot will often produce lockjaw, why not a pressure on some center branch or nerve fiber cause some division--nerve of the lungs that governs venous circulation which would contract and hold blood indefinitely as an irritant, equal to cause, perpetual coughing?
NO TIME FOR SURRENDER.
This is not the time for the brainy Osteopath to run up the white flag of defeat and surrender. Open the doors of your purest reason, put on the belt of energy and unload the sinking vessel of life. Throw overboard all dead weights from fascia and wake up the forces of the excretories. Let the nerves all show their powers to throw out every weight that would sink or reduce the vital energies of nature. Give them a chance to work, give them the full nourishment and the victory will be on the side of the intelligent engineer. Never surrender but die in the last ditch.
Let us enter the field of active exploration and note the causes that would lead us to conclude we have the cause that produces "consumption"
as it has ever been called.
Begin at the brain, go down the ladder of observation, stop and whet your knives of mental steel sharp, get your nerves quiet by the opium of patience. Begin with the atlas, follow with the search-light of quickened reason, comb back your hair of mental strength, and never leave that bone till you have learned how many nerves pa.s.s through and around that wisely formed first part of the neck. Remember it was planned and builded by the mind and hand of the infinite. See what nerve fibers pa.s.ses through and on to the base center, and each minute cell, fascia, gland and blood vessel of the lungs. Do you not know that each nerve fiber to its place is king and lord of all?
CEREBRAL SPINAL FLUID.
I think consumption begins by closing the channels of cerebro-spinal fluid in neck, which fluid stands as one of, if not the most highly refined elements in animal bodies. Its fineness would indicate that it is a substance that must be delivered in full supply continually to keep health normal; if so, we will for experimental reasons look at the neck ligated, as found in measles, croup, colds and eruptive fevers. Supply is stopped from pa.s.sing below atlas for three days. During such diseases fever runs high at this time and dries up the alb.u.men, giving cause for tubercles to begin, as fever has dried out the water and left the alb.u.men in small deposits in the lungs, liver, kidneys and bowels. If this view of the great uses of brain fluid is true as cause of glandular growths and other dead deposits; have we not a cause for militis tuberculosis? Have we not encouragement to prosecute with interest, in the hope of an answer to the question, "What is tuberculosis?" Our writers are just as much at sea to-day as a thousand years ago. I will give the reader some of the reasons why I think the mischief was started while fluid was cut off by congestion of neck. How can the fluid be cut off at neck is a very natural question. By the crudest method of reasoning we would conclude that from the form of the neck, many objects are indicated, and the material of which it is composed would give reason to turn all its powers of thought, to ask why it is so formed, as to twist, bend, straighten, stiffen and relax at will, to suit so many purposes? A very tough skin--a sheathe--surrounds the neck with blood vessels, nerves, muscles, bones, ligaments, fascia, glands great and small, throat and trachea. In bones we find a great ca.n.a.l for spinal cord. It is well and powerfully protected by a strong wall of bone, so no outer pressure can obstruct the flow of pa.s.sing fluids, to keep vitality supplied by brain forces, but with all the guards given to protect the cord, we find that it can be overcome by impact fluids to such degree as to stop blood and other fluids from supplying lungs and all below.
The fluid we speak of comes from the skull, and when in process of formation must not be disturbed until it has pa.s.sed through all chances of being injured by force, air or light. Thus the great need of walls to hold the enemy outside the safety line. Such truths surely should attract our attention when we explore for causes. We can a.n.a.lyze material bodies but we have to stop at the life line for more knowledge.
Our boats have been in port over 6000 years, waiting for knowledge about the whats and whys of life, until barnacles of ignorance have acc.u.mulated to such thickness that the conchologist has called that cake of sh.e.l.ls "allopathy" which weighed anchor and turned to the great sea of human credulity to expound, with nothing but conjectures to offer. He toots his fog-horn in all lands and on all seas, and says, "age before reason." Thus one generation blindly follows another.
HOW TO DESTROY DEADLY BOMBS OF DECAY.
I think by this time the reader has gotten his mind in line with his exploring needle of thought to get some light or knowledge of why a growth and how a body that has never failed for few or many years, begins and continues to form and plant deadly bombs of decay in that once powerful engine of perfect health, to produce suicide. We see and know this to be the case in thousands of beings annually, and this same question is just as applicable to the herds of animals as to man. Thus we cry piteously for help, but no answer has come in past days; we go on and give place in lungs and other parts of the deadly tubercle. But one answer can be given in "Holy Writ" to suit these questions, "Cleanliness is next to G.o.dliness." Turn the waters of life loose at the brain, remove all hindrances and the work will be done, and give us the eternal legacy, LONGEVITY.
BATTLE OF BLOOD FOR LIFE.
In America from the day of Washington and all centuries before his time, man has dreaded diseases of the lungs more universally than any other one disease. If we compare pulmonary diseases with other maladies we find more persons die of consumption, pneumonia, bronchitis and nervous coughs than from smallpox, typhus and bilious fever and all other fevers combined. Many diseases of contagious natures do not stay in city, town, country nor an army, but a short time; kills a few and disappears and may not return for many years. The same is the history of yellow fever, cholera and other epidemics. They slay their hundreds and stop as unceremoniously as they began. But when we think of diseases that begin to show their effects in tonsils, trachea and lining membranes of the air pa.s.sages, we find we are in a boundless ocean; because we find all seasons of the year, which afford changes of weather: Wet, dry, windy, hot and cold, which mark 30 to 60 in twenty-four hours, chills the lungs and whole system, closes the excretory system against renovating equal to deposits, with all other chances to throw out dead matter and gases that destroy blood and life in proportion to the amount and time of abnormal retention.
It takes no great mind to know from past observation that a common cold often holds on and settles down to chronic inflammation of the lungs, and the patient dies of consumption, croup, diphtheria, tonsilitis, and as catarrhal trouble stays and begins to waste vitality by failing to oxygenize blood while in the lungs, diphtheria paves the way for the young and old to die of consumption. Dance halls, opera houses, churches, school houses, and all crowded a.s.semblies never fail to inspect and deposit the seeds of consumption in weak lungs.
As one delves deeper and deeper into the machinery and exacting laws of life, he beholds works and workings of contented laborers of all parts of the one common whole--the great shafts and pillars of an engine working to the fullness of the meaning of perfection. He sees that great quarter-master the heart, pouring in and loading train after train and giving orders to the wagon-master to line his teams and march on quick time to all divisions, supply all companies, squads and sections with rations, clothing, ammunition, surgeons, splints and bandages, and put all the dead and wounded into the ambulances to be repaired or buried with military honors by Captain "VEIN," who fearlessly penetrates the densest bones, muscles and glands, with the living waters to quench the thirst of the blue corpuscles, who are worn out by doing fatigue duty in the great combat between life and death. He often has to run his trains on forced marches to get supplies to sustain his men of life when they have had to contend with long sieges of heat and cold. Of all officers of life, none have greater duties to perform than the quarter-master of blood supply, who borrows the force with which he runs his deliveries from the brain which give motion to all parts of active life.
MILITIS TUBERCULOSIS.
A tubercle is a separate body being enveloped.[4]
[Footnote 4: Chambers.]
As all descriptions of a tubercle in books amount to about this, that the tubercle is an amount of fleshy substance which may be alb.u.men, fibrin, or any other substance collected and deposited at one place in the human body, and covered with a film composed generally of fibrinous substances, and deposited in its spherical form, and separated from all similarly formed spheres by fascia. They may be very numerous, for many hundreds may occupy one cubic inch and yet one is distinct from all others. They seem to develop only where fascia is abundant; in the lungs, liver, bowels and skin. After formation they may exist and show nothing but roughened surfaces, and when the period of dissolution and the solvent powers of the chemical laboratory take possession to banish them from the system, it generally begins its labors at such time as some catarrhal disease is preying upon the human system. Nature seems to make its first effort for the purpose of disposing of such substances as have acc.u.mulated at the catarrhal period. At which time it brings forward all the solvent qualities and applies them with the a.s.sistance of the motor force to drive out through the bowels, lungs, porous and excretory system all irritable substances. Electricity is called in as the motor force to be used in expelling all unkindly substances. By this effort of nature, which is an increased action of the motor nerves, electricity is brought to the degree of heat usually called fever, which if better understood we would possibly find to be the necessary heat of the furnace of the body being used to convert dead substances into gas which can travel through the excretory system and be thrown from the body much easier than water, lymph, alb.u.men or fibrin.
CONVERSION OF BODIES INTO GAS.
During this process of gas burning, a very high temperature is obtained by the increased action of the arterial system through the motor nerves, permeating those tubercles and causing an inflammation of them by the gaseous disturbance so produced; another effort of nature to convert those tubercles into gas and relieve the body of their presence and irritable occupancy.
As an ill.u.s.tration we will ask the reader if it would be reasonable to expect to pa.s.s a common towel through a pipe stem. Nevertheless nature can easily do it. Confine the towel in a cylinder and apply fire, which in time will convert the towel into gas or smoke, and enable it to pa.s.s through the stem. Is it not just as reasonable to suppose those high temperatures of the body are nature's furnaces, making fires out of those dead bodies, while pa.s.sing them through the skin in order to get rid of these great and small towels which are packed all through the human fascia, and can only be pa.s.sed from the body in a gaseous form; the gas generated by heat.
The blackened eye of the pugilist soon fires up its furnaces and proceeds to generate gas from the dead blood that surrounds the eye.
Though it may be considerable quant.i.ties under the skin, the blood soon disappears leaving the face and eye normal to all appearances. No pus has formed, nor deposit left, fever disappears, the eye is well. What better effort could nature offer than through its gas generating furnace. I will leave any other method for you to discover. I know of none that my reason can grasp.
FORMING A TUBERCLE.
When reason sees a white corpuscle in the fascia not taken up as a nutrient, it attaches itself to the fascia with all its uterine powers during the time of measles or other eruptive diseases, and soon takes form and is a vital and durable being whose name is tubercle; in form a sphere, and place of foetal life is a cell in the fascia of life giving power to all forms of flesh. Thus all tubercles are unappropriated substances whom mother fascia has clothed and ordered in camp for treatment and repairs, and placed them on the list of enrolled pensioners, to draw on the treasury of the fascia, until death shall discharge them.