Philosophy of Osteopathy by Andrew Taylor Still (android e book reader .TXT) 📕

As an illustration we will ask the reader if it would be reasonable to expect to pass 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 pass 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 passing 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 passed 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 quantities 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.

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 fœtal 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.

The mothers of the human race give birth to children from puberty to sterility. She may give birth a dozen times, but nature finally calls a halt, and the whole system of life sustaining nerves of the womb which are in the fascia, with blood in great abundance to supply fœtal life, ceases to go farther with the processes of building beings. Vitality for that purpose stops, never to return. Nature has no longer a demand for her system to act as a constructing cause for other beings, of her kind, and she is free the remainder of her days.

A question arises. Are children all she can develop in her system and give birth to? No, she can go through other processes of breeding. In her fascia there is one seed, if vitalized will develop a being called measles. She never has but one confinement. That set of nerves that gave support and growth to measles died in the delivery of the child, and never can conceive and produce any more measles. Another seed lives in her fascia waiting to be vitalized by the male principle of smallpox, and when it is born it always kills the nerves that gave it life and form. And the person never can have but one such child or being during life.

Still another seed awaits the coming of the commissary to nourish while it consumes that vitality in the fascia of the glands to develop the portly child we call mumps. Both male and female conceive and give birth to such beings, then tear up the tracks and roads behind them, by killing the demand for such drink.

I want to draw the mind of the reader to the fact that no being can be formed without material. A place in which to be developed, and all forces necessary to do the needed work. And as all excressences and abnormal growths, diseases and conditions, must have the friendly assistance of the fascia before development; the fascia is the place to look for cause of disease and the place to consult and begin the action of remedies in all diseases, even though it be the birth of a child.

We can arrive at truth only by the powerful rules of reason, so the philosopher has shouted from the house tops of all ages. He adjusts his many supposable causes, adds to and subtracts until he arrives at a conclusion based upon the facts of his observations. Knowing the principles that exist in substances and seeds, by which when associated with proper conditions that powerful engine known as animal life gives the truth with fact and motion as its voucher. We reason, if corn be planted in moist and warm earth, that action and growth will present the form of a living stalk of corn, which has existed in embryo, and still continues its vital actions as long as the proper conditions prevail, i. e., until the growth and development is completed. If you take a seed in your fingers, push it in the ground and cover it up, incubation, growth and development is expected in obedience to the law under which it serves. Thus we see to succeed we must deposit and cover up the seed in order that the laws of gestation may have an opportunity by which they get the results desired. As nature always presents itself to our minds as seeds deposited in soil and season to suit, and it is loyal to its own laws only, we are constrained by this method of reasoning to conclude that disease must have a soil in which to plant its seeds before gestation and development. It must have seasonable conditions, the rains of nourishment, also the necessary time required for such processes. All these laws must be fulfilled to the letter, otherwise a failure is absolute. As the great laboratory of nature is always at work in the human body, the chilling winds and poisonous breaths, with extremes of heat and cold at different seasons of the year by day and night, and the lungs and skin are continually secreting and excreting every minute, hour and day of our lives, is it not reasonable to suppose that we inhale many elements that are floating in the common winds that contain the seeds of some destructive element, to the harmony of fluids that are necessary to sustain the healthy animal forms.

Suppose it should start the yeast, or kind of substance that lives greatly upon lime. If this yeast in its action and thirst for food to suit its life and appetite should call in from the earth, water and atmosphere for its daily food lime substances only, and by its power destroy all other principles taken as nourishment, is it not reasonable to suppose it would deposit such elements in over powering quantities in the fascia of the mucous membrane of the lungs in such quantities, as to overcome the renovating powers of the lungs and excretory system, by its paralyzing quantities of diseased fluids, all through the universal fascia of animal life. This deposit acts as an irritant to the sensory nerves to such an extent that the electricity of the motor nerves is forced to take charge of, and run the machinery of the human body, with such velocity as to raise the temperature of the body, by putting the electricity above the normal action of animal life, and thereby generate that temperature known as fever?

The two extremes, heat and cold, may be the causes of retention and detention. One is detained by the contraction of cold until the blood and other fluids die by asphyxia. The warm temperature produces relaxation of the nerves, blood, and all other vessels of the fascia, during which time the arteries are injecting too great quantities of fluids to be renovated by the excretory systems. Thus you have a cause for decomposition of the blood and other substances, to be conveyed to the lungs for purification and renewal. You have a logical foundation and a cause for all diseases, catarrhal, climatic, contagions, infections, and epidemics. The fascia proves itself to be the probable matrix of life and death. Beginning with the mucous membrane penetrating all parts to supply and renovate the fluids of life, and nourishing all the nerves of nutrition and assimilation. When harmonious in normal action, health is good; when perverted, disease is destructive unto death.

I have perused all the authority obtainable, advised with and counciled for information in reference to the cause of whooping cough until I am constrained to think, whether I say so or not, that I have had many additions of words during the conversation, and to use a homely phrase, less sense than I started out with. My tongue is tired, my brain exhausted, my hopes disappointed and my mind disgusted, that after so much effort to obtain some positive knowledge of the disease in question, which is whooping cough, that I have received nothing that would give me any light whatever pertaining to the subject. It winds up thus, that it may be a germ that irritates the pneumogastric nerve. I go off as blank and empty as the fish lakes on the moon. I supposed writers would say something in reference to the irritating influence of this disease on the nerves and muscles that would contract or convulsively shorten the muscles that attach at the one end to the os hyoid, and at the other end at various points along the neck, and force the hyoid back against the pneumogastric nerve, hypoglossal, cervical, or some other nerve that would be irritated by such pressure on nerves by the os hyoid, when pulled back and held against such nerves. The above picture will give the reader some idea why I became so thoroughly disgusted with the heaps of compiled trash. I say trash because there was not a single truth, great or small, to guide me in search of the desired knowledge. And at this point I will say on my first exploration I found all of the nerves and muscles that attach to the os hyoid at any point contracted, shortened and pulling the hyoid back to and pressing against the pneumogastric nerve, and all the nerves in that vicinity. Also each and every muscle was in a hard and contracted condition in the region of this portion of the trachea, and extended up and into the back part of the tongue. Then I satisfied myself that this irritable condition of the muscles was possibly the cause of the spasms of the trachea during the convulsive cough. I proceeded at once with my hand guided by my judgment to suspend or stop for awhile the action of the nerves of sensation that go with and control the muscles of the machinery which conducts air to and from the lungs. That my first effort while acting upon this philosophy was a complete relaxation of all muscles and fibers of that part of the neck, and when they relaxed their hold upon the respiratory machinery the breathing became normal. I have been asked what bone I would pull when treating whooping cough? My answer would be, the bones that held by attachment the muscles of the hyoid system in such irritable condition that begin with the atlas and terminate with the sacrum. To him who has been a willing student of the American School of Osteopathy the successful management of whooping cough should be absolute, reliable and successful in all cases, when taken for treatment in anything like, a reasonable time.