Ah, gentlemen and ladies of the medical profession, you are getting no such results by treating the symptoms arising from perpetually overtaxed stomachs, with a carefully assorted array of remedies, whether these remedies be coarse or whether they be refined!

LECTURE XV.

EVOLUTION OF DISEASE.

SUPERFLUOUS FLESH-APOPLEXY AND SOFTENING OF THE BRAIN
CONSIDERED.

My Friends the Readers :

I have enlarged my audience this morning by an invitation to a few personal friends who are heavily handicapped with overcoats of fat, to be present to hear my views as to the origin and development of disease.

When my attention was called to the very clearly manifest improvement in local diseases without a resort to any local treatments, very naturally I would want to know how this could be. I had, as I told you, solved the question of the loss of weight in dropsical conditions early in the history of my studies, to my own satisfaction.

I appear before you this morning heavily weighted with the importance of my theme, and all the more because of the difficulty I shall have in making my conceptions clear to your lay minds. What more important subject than the origin and development of disease, if it can be made clear that its development is very largely a matter of improvidence of the individual, and not of the providence of God?

It may be assumed as a fact that every human being is born with a tendency to some disease through

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heredity, a tendency, as I have told you, that fixes the natural limit of life. This tendency or constitutional condition determines whether death shall naturally come within one hundred minutes, or one hundred years. To give a more definite conception to what may exist in constitutional tendency, I shall embody the idea in the expression, structural weaknesses, local or general, due to heredity.

It is my conception, then, that one person is born with a structural weakness of the nasal mucous membrane that is to become developed into a catarrh through avoidable evolution. Another person is born with structural weakness of the throat and bronchial tubes that is to become developed into catarrhs associated with the annoying hemming and coughing efforts to relieve. Another is born with structural weakness of the ear-passages, that, duly developed, is to impair or destroy their functional power; and so also of the eye, and you of the heavy overcoats, it is my conception that some of you have been born with structural weakness of the blood vessels that circulate to the utmost cell of the very centers of vital power, only awaiting a due degree, perhaps, of largely avoidable development, when you will go down like beeves beneath the stroke of the ax!!

You may well be startled by this statement, and I will tell you in advance that I am going to do my best to make you believe that there is a great deal more truth behind it than will make it a cheering subject to contemplate.

What do I mean by structural weakness due to heredity? I mean just this: The vessel walls are thinner, the contractile fiber is smaller and weaker, and all the structure of the parts has less tone than have parts not affected through heredity.

The gravity of this condition is always a matter of degree originally. You may understand, then, that it is my conception that these weaknesses are constitutional, enduring, and hence always a menace, according to their gravity, to human comfort or to human life; and that they accurately gauge the constitutional, the life-sustaining force of the individual; that by no human means can they be raised above the hereditary design in strength.

Normal health may be defined as that condition of the body in which the digestive machinery is able to respond to every need arising from destroyed tissue, through mental or physical labor.

The first step in disease, then, is the first loss of balance through whatever has impaired this machinepower, and hence the parts structurally affected are the first to feel the loss. It is my conception that with this first loss of balance, the contractile fiber, weak through heredity, begins at once to lose, through lessened nutrition; this permits a gradual dilation. Now you were told how dilatation, distension of the capillaries and blood-vessels of the stomach, was incited by the irritation of the alcoholics, and the functional power of that organ was thereby diminished by subjecting all the intercapillary intervascular structures, including the gastric glands, to a lifedepressing, strangling pressure. How could this be otherwise when the finely meshed capillaries begin to enlarge through the force of irritation, or through the slower process of passive dilation, from defective nutrition, in other parts of the body?

Now to illustrate by a case. A little daughter and an only child is born with a structural weakness of the bronchial tubes. By a due course of lowered nutrition, by reason of a a continually overtaxed

stomach, that began at birth, and was persistently continued, these parts became subject to an evolution tending to disease that did not become manifest in the usual symptoms, until the third year, when there began to be a hemming that went on unnoticed for a long time. Then came the coughing spells that hung on persistently with each cold, then began to be noticed more or less coughing in the absence of colds, that excited apprehension. Vigorous treatments with home remedies were applied; then the various advertised specifics that, while in use would suppress, but failed to cure the cough. The years of anxiety went on, and the winters of aggravated disease had their nights of broken rest for the child; of broken rest for the mother, attended with the paralyzing apprehension to her of the gravity of the disease. All this was endured up to the eleventh year, and yet danger seemed as far off as ever. Her case had been subjected

to the skill of several of the most experienced and learned of the medical fraternity, but it had proved too obstinate a case for the science of remedial therapeutics.

Now what was the condition of things at the seat of the disease. With the first loss of balance of nutrition that began with the first untimely meal the blood lost a little of its richness and a tax was laid upon vital power. The little blood-vessels began to dilate into pouches, hence subjecting the intervascular structure to the strangling pressure. The blood would circulate much slower in these pouches, and hence, by reason of its abnormal thinness, there would be a tendency of some of its water to escape more easily through the thin walls, to become thickened with the natural secretion of the part, and so form a discharge that was behind the irritating cough. Now let me string these conditions into line.

1. Thinner blood by reason of bad eating habits.