NH: INHS classic - HM Shelton - Disease is remedial activity

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[Disease Is Remedial Activity - HM Shelton

 

Hygienic Review

Vol. XXXIV July, 1978 No. 11

Disease Is Remedial Activity

by Herbert M. Shelton

 

" Polio has struck twice within six days in the family of.... " These

words formed the first part of a statement in a news item published a

few years ago, and bring up the question once again: " What is

disease? " This language implies that disease is an entity, a thing

that has an existence, per se, that is capable of striking. It struck

one child and, not being satisfied with the havoc it wrought, it

struck another child in the same family six days later. In this

instance, the disease was the variety or species known as

poliomyelitis.

 

The ancient idea that the sick are possessed of devils lingered on in

the minds of the people and in the practices " of the priests and

physicians for ages after it should have passed into oblivion. All

during the Middle Ages and even today in some sects of America and

Europe, this doctrine of demonic possession was held to be abundantly

proved by the Bible. Jesus is said to have cast out devils and during

the Middle Ages it was held that to doubt demonical possession was to

overthrow the entire structure of Christian doctrine. The doctrine of

demonic possession was as well grounded in the Scriptures as was a

belief in witches and witchcraft. This belief in demons that infest

the air and take possession of the bodies of man and beast is far

older than the Bible.

 

Paracelsus, the vagabond quack of a little over four hundred years

ago, whose star of popularity is again rising, held that the air was

so full of devils that you could not get a hair between them.

Paracelsus was a Cabalist and held to a lot of other ancient and

mystical nonsense. He believed devils to be more plentiful than his

modem medical successor believes microbes to be.

 

During the long dark night of Christian ascendancy, it was held that

the insane are possessed of devils and the only care these miserable

beings received was intended to scare away or drive out the devils

that had taken possession of them. They were chained in loathsome

dungeons and tortured and beaten with a brutality that we do not

understand today. Sometimes they were kept awake for a week or more

in the effort to exorcize the demon. The demons were cursed in the

most elaborate theological blasphemy ever devised, and the mentally

sick were compelled to drink the most nauseating and disgusting

compounds.

 

Exorcizing devils was done by priests, cabalists, physicians and

others. The Jesuits of Vienna, in 1583, boasted that they had cast

out no less than 12, 652 devils. Devil-chasers were common in those

benighted days and devil-chasing was as popular as microbe slaying is

today. Historically and psychologically, the words possession and

infection represent only different rationalizations of the same

superstition; they stand for identical delusional mental processes

and deluding etiological speculations. The medieval wizard who chased

devils has evolved into the modem serologist who chases microbes.

 

The belief in devils or demons is by no means dead. Millions pf

people in Africa, China, India, Burma, Tibet, and other parts of the

world believe in the existence of these " unseen powers and

principalities of the air, " and the practice of devil-chasing is as

popular among these people as it was two thousand years ago. But we

do not have to go to the more backward sections of the earth to find

a belief in devils and witchcraft still surviving. We have plenty of

people in America who believe in witchery or " hexing, " in haunted

houses, spirit communications, and in the existence of great numbers

of demons that infest earth's atmosphere and seek to gain control of

the bodies and minds of man. The founder of one of the newer sects,

some years ago published a book on spiritism, in which he showed from

the Scriptures, that spirit mediums do not talk with the spirits of

the departed dead, but with demons or " fallen angels " that inhabit

the atmosphere. In this book, he describes the procedures adopted by

him to exorcize devils from the bodies of those who were possessed.

This man was a well-educated ex-atheist, who lived and wrote in the

early years of this century. He lived, not in far away superstition-

ridden Tibet, but in enlightened America. I am assured by one of the

members of this sect, which now numbers many thousands of adherents

throughout the world, that its members still believe in demons and in

demonical possession. This reminds me of the little Sunday-school

boy's statement that, " Faith means believing what you know ain't

true. "

 

This very old idea that disease is an entity that attacks the body

and wreaks as much havoc therein as possible has taken several forms

through the ages and is incarnated in the germ theory that holds sway

today. Hippocrates was the first to break away from the theory that

disease is a divine punishment, but he was unable to fully emancipate

himself from the belief that it is an attacking entity. His humoral

pathology was a crude biochemistry and he sought for the cause of

disease in an unbalanced chemistry of the body, but at the same time,

he held that disease is a positive entity or substance which has to

be expelled by hammer and tongs.

 

According to Pliny, Acron was the first to apply philosophical

reasoning to the problems of disease. He held that there is

an " active cause " of disease possessed of a riotous disposition.

Galen regarded disease as " additional forces, foreign and inimical to

the animal, with a birth, prime, and decline, like those of a

physiological nature. " He is supposed to have borrowed the idea from

Plato, but, since the idea was ancient when Plato was born, this

presumption seems unnecessary.

 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the idea still prevailed

that disease is a positive and organized entity. Hufland said: " The

intestinal canal is, in the great majority of cases, the battle-field

where the issue of most disorders is decided. " Hufland declared: " We

must introduce the only medicine of which we are thoroughly convinced

that it possesses the power of efficiently striving with the enemy,

who, by subtle means, has now effected an entrance within our

stronghold. " Stille asserted that " the whole of life is a perpetual

struggle with an enemy to whom we must at last succumb. " The present

day physician would say: " The whole of life is a perpetual struggle

with malignant microbes that will eventually destroy us. "

 

A hundred years ago it was freely admitted that the nature and

essence of disease was unknown. Many leaders of medical thought

frankly expressed the opinion that its nature can never be

understood. Prof. George B. Wood, of Jefferson Medical College said

in Wood's Practice of Medicine: " Efforts have been made to reach the

elements of disease; but not very successfully; because we have not

learned the essential nature of the healthy actions, and cannot

understand their derangements. " There is inherent in this statement

the idea that disease is " disordered physiology. " It was so defined

by certain medical authorities in Wood's time.

 

The present views of the profession on the nature of disease are not

easy to determine. The subject is never discussed in their text-books

of pathology, nor in their works on the practice of medicine. By

common consent they seem to have agreed to ignore the subject.

Disease is now listed among the " seven modern mysteries. " Sir James

McKenzie, one of the greatest clinicians of modem times, said a few

years ago: " The knowledge of disease is so incomplete that we do not

yet even know what steps should be taken to advance our knowledge. "

 

In spite of this, medical men do have some idea of what disease is,

as may be gained from their statements concerning it. It is said to

attack us, to run its course, to be very malignant, or quite mild, to

ravish the patient, to persistently resist all treatment, to yield

readily to treatment, to be seated within us, to be self-limited, to

supervene, to retreat, to set in, to travel from part to part, to

stimulate each other, to change type, to sweep over the country like

a fire, to travel from one place to another, to ride the air lanes,

to be carried about, etc. They talk of banishing a disease, of wiping

it out, of conquering it, or of destroying it. They meet its

onslaught with active measures.

 

All of these expressions and many more like them refer to disease as

an entity or thing that exists per se. They are consistent with the

ancient theory that disease is an organized substance or force

existing outside the organic domain and that is at war with life.

Even if, at present, they be regarded as metaphorical they indicate

the kinds of operations sought to be carried out in treating the

sick. Medical men are still at war with unseen principalities and

powers of the air.

 

The medical historian, Shyrock, tells us in his The Development of

Modern Medicine, that a new etiology based on bacteriology " showed

that the cause of tuberculosis-if not the malady itself-were indeed

definite realities. It proved that there was, in the case of

tuberculosis, some thing there that acted as if it were an entity. "

He also points out that today a diphtheria epidemic in a community is

interpreted by the board of health to indicate the presence of a

definite intruder. Thus the old idea of disease as an entity is still

with us, and the foregoing expressions about disease are not to be

regarded as metaphors today, any more than they were when they were

first used. They accurately express prevailing medical views of the

nature and essence of disease.

 

The medical profession never had a theory of the essential nature of

disease that would bear criticism. It never had one that it could

stand by. It never had a theory of disease that somebody did not

explode. No sooner did some distinguished professor present them with

a new theory, which had cost him the work of half a lifetime to

evolve, than some ambitious rival would demolish it in a criticism

that required but half an hour to write. The profession seems content

today to " rock along " without any well-defined theory of the

essential nature of disease, while continuing to treat the patient as

though he is the victim of an attack by malignant entities.

 

The nearest approach to an explanation of the nature of disease that

has been offered by medical men within recent years is the one that a

few years ago came out of Russia. Although it represents a step in

the right direction, this one is very incomplete. The Russian

experimenters have found that the disease is the body's own actions-

they say " reaction. " But, having failed to discern the purposive or

remedial character of these actions, they are working on the

development of a mode of treatment that represents a return to the

deadly narcotic practice of a hundred years ago. Instead of malignant

spirits or malignant bacteria, they are fighting malignant reflexes.

Mary Baker Eddy tussled with malignant animal magnetism.

 

It is the law of life that the body resists and expels whatever it

cannot use. Disease is vital resistance to non-usable, therefore,

injurious substances. The living body grows and reproduces itself. It

develops its parts and extends itself by selecting from its

environment such materials as it has the capacity to incorporate into

its own structures, and rejects and refuses all others, as both

unnecessary and injurious. The power of refusal and rejection is a

necessary condition of its vital integrity. Refusal and rejection are

constant actions in both the plant and animal world. The organism

equally serves its own interest by either act.

 

A plate of strawberries and cream, when taken into the stomach,

occasions the vital actions called digestion. Following digestion,

the food is absorbed, circulated and assimilated. When used so that

its elements are no longer useful, the waste is carried to the

eliminating organs and eliminated. This is physiological or healthy

action.

 

A dose of lobelia, when swallowed, occasions the vital actions called

vomiting. This is the means by which the body expels it. A dose of

salts occasions the vital action called diarrhea. This is the means!

by which the body expels the salts. By diuresis, the body expels

other substances. Now the acts of digestion and of vomiting are

equally vital and they differ only as the objects to which they

relate differ. One is conservative, the other remedial. One is

physiology, the other pathology. One has as its object the expulsion

of noxious substances.

 

All the actions performed by the vital organs are vital actions.

Vital actions are either normal or abnormal. The difference between

health and disease is simply this: Health is the regular or normal

performance of the functions of the body, it is normal action-

physiology. Disease is irregular and abnormal action of the body in

expelling injurious substances and repairing damages-pathology.

Health expresses the aggregate of vital actions and processes that

nourish and develop the body and all its organs and structures and

provide for reproduction; in other words, health is the action of the

vital powers in building up and replenishing the organic structures;

or in still plainer words, the conversion of the elements of food

into the elements of the body's tissues, and the elimination of

waste. Disease is the aggregate of vital actions and processes by

which poisons are expelled and damages repaired; it is the action of

the same powers that are active in health, in defending the organism

against injurious or abnormal agencies and conditions.

 

The nature of disease is explained in the same way that the modus

operandi of drugs is explained. The immediate effect of the

introduction of a poison into the body is morbid vital action. This

is disease. The action of the organism against any repugnant or

poisonous substance is defensive-it is an effort to dispose of the

offending material. Purging occasioned by a drug is a perfect

illustration of diarrhea and dysentery. Vomiting from an emetic is

carried on in the same way, and for the same purpose, that vomiting

from any other cause is carried on. The excitement occasioned by

alcohol is precisely similar to the excitement occasioned by danger,

by the cry of fire at midnight, or the discovery of a burglar in the

house.

 

Symptoms are evidences of vitality-dead bodies do not produce

symptoms. Deprive the living organism of its ability to manifest its

repugnance to incompatible things, its power to reject and resist

these, in the defensive manner that we call disease, and you deprive

it of life itself. If the organism does not act abnormally under

sufficiently powerful abnormal conditions, this will be proof

positive that it has lost its vitality and is dead, or nearly so.

Disease is a product of life. Vitality is as necessary an element of

disease as water is of steam. Existing only where life exists, it

does so subject to the great laws of life. It is not " disordered

physiology " but re-directed vital activity. Its essential nature is

not altered one bit by the fact that it often fails of its object. If

a man fails in his object to acquire a million dollars, this does not

alter the nature of his acquisitiveness.

 

The word disease is a generic term and covers a multitude of

phenomena, some of these being of opposite character to others. It is

quite obvious that blindness, deafness, paralysis, emphysema, cancer

and other degenerative diseases are not remedial activities. This

does not invalidate our theory of the essential nature of disease but

it does emphasize the need for a new terminology, one that more

precisely classifies the different phenomena that are now confusingly

jumbled together under the rubric disease. I have suggested the term,

which I coined, biogony, for those elements of disease as now

understood that are remedial in character. Biogony is a combination

of two Greek roots-bios meaning life and agony meaning struggle.

Although I coined this word and gave it to the world nearly forty

years ago, it has not been accepted, perhaps because our theory of

the essential nature of disease has not been accepted.

 

Herbert M. Shelton ]

 

all the best,

 

Bob