Albert Freeman Africanus King

“ In external, visible parts, that are the seat of injury or disease, or that have been wounded by the surgeon's knife, and which are undergoing the process of tissue-repair, we see redness and congestion follow exposure to cold, and often enough hear the patient not only complain of pain, but date its commencement from known exposure, and express his belief—reached as if by instinct—that "cold had settled on the part." ”

“ IF we should say that diseases prolong life, that without them man would be more liable than he is to sudden death, the announcement would be received by most medical thinkers, and by all those who have never studied pathology at all, as a transcendental idea, quite insusceptible of logical proof. But it is otherwise: that certain processes of disease are really conservative, and contribute to the longevity of the individual, is an absolute fact, as we shall now endeavor to demonstrate. ”

“ When, however, we come to speak of the more permanent structural changes, which neither Nature nor art can remove, and which have seemed to produce premature death, scarcely any one will acknowledge that the processes which develop them are at all conservative. Yet they are. And the error of supposing they are not has arisen chiefly from a total misunderstanding as to the nature of disease. A very prevalent idea, if not indeed a universal one, seems to be, that disease is a separately-existing entity—a thing independent of the body and inimical to it. ”

“ This view—never very widely acknowledged—received its final death-blow by the publication of Virchow's "Cellular Pathology," in which it was shown that the entire organism, in all its parts, is really composed of an indefinite number of individual centres, in fact cells, each of which has a life of its own, performs its own functions, and dies its own death: it is the invisible motions of these millions of microscopic entities, which, in the aggregate, constitute the visible changes and actions which we say characterize life. ”

“ It was surely never designed that breathing the indigenous air of any natural environment should be, and without warning of danger, a means of death. Such a supposition is inconsistent with that general beneficence of Nature as exhibited in the signals of danger, instinctively recognized by all living things, when contemplating their natural enemies, and when in the presence of conditions that are destructive to life.
Man naturally loves beautiful things—woman and the flowers. ”

“ What product of man's art has not been anticipated by Nature? Hardly any.
In the absence of direct experiments with the mosquito as a fever producing agent, I have endeavored to ascertain if the geographical distribution of the insect had any relation with that of malarial disease. But the insect and the disease are both so wide-spread that it is difficult to find any locality entirely exempt from either. Tasmania, Singapore, New Zealand, Ceylon, and the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, as well as the bog-country of Ireland, are said by some medical writers to be entirely exempt from fevers. ”

“ Exposure to cold is fatal. The shivering of young animals—their great liability to become chilled on exposure-to a depressed temperature—has been observed by every one; and in the breeding of domestic animals, as in the cultivation of plants, there is probably no more potent source of mortality than insufficient warmth; and, further, this mortality is found to be more prevalent during unusually cold seasons. Now, the young of our own species form no exception to this rule; they, too, are liable to suffer a fatal arrest of physiological development on being exposed to cold. ”

“ Secondly, we notice that the natural course of physiological development is characterized by painlessness—unconsciousness on the part of the individual that any tissue-changes at all are taking place. As the height of perfection in function, as in digestion, for example, consists in ignorance or unconsciousness of the existence of the organs performing it, so is it an invariable quality of every perfectly natural organic change that it should take place without the knowledge of the individual—I mean without any knowledge derived from unpleasant sensations. ”

“ Of course, the direct transformation of inorganic matter into living animal matter is impossible. There must always occur the intermediate phenomenon of vegetable life. Vegetables can transform the inorganic chemical materials of the air and earth into their own structure, but the animal must either feed upon the products produced by the vegetable or upon other animals that have been so fed. No single definition of life, therefore, can include both animal and vegetable life, since the vegetable is an intermediate product between minerals and animals. ”

“ And, to begin, let us ask, "How shall we know when physiological development is following its natural course, and when it is not?" There are two striking characteristics which can always here be taken as guides, viz., slowness of organic change, and latency. The physiological growth of tissue is always gradual in its progress, both as regards change of shape, bulk, and variation in physical properties. These go on with an insidious progression that is, for the most part, quite imperceptible to ordinary methods of observation. Natura non facet saltem. ”

“ A living body, whether a simple cell or a fully developed mammal, consists of a temporary aggregation of a limited number of material particles, call them what we may—molecules, atoms, ions, electrons—whose actions and reactions between each other, and between themselves and their environing conditions (light, temperature, air, water, food, terrestrial magnetism, gravitation, etc.) ”

“ Buds that have withstood the severest cold of winter are often killed by the late but more moderate frosts of spring, because at this latter period they are in a state of more rapid tissue-change. The egg of the fowl will bear a considerable degree of cold without losing its vitality so long as its evolutionary processes are at a stand-still; but, when the rapid changes of structure incident to embryonic development have been set up, exposure even to the ordinary atmospheric temperature of spring and summer, if at all prolonged, is sufficient to destroy its life. ”

“ We now come to the question: What is a living animal? The one most marked characteristic of things that are truly alive is motion, especially locomotive auto-mobility, to which must be added growth and reproduction. ”

“ As we have seen that, in organisms undergoing physiological development, those organs are most liable to be attacked with inflammation after exposure, whose rate of growth happens to be at the time most rapid, so in after-life it is not all the organs in the body that are liable to inflame after exposure, but only those in which pathological evolution is taking place. ”

“ Thus we frequently observe modifications of structure induced by exceptional conditions that have been brought to act upon the body, of so trivial a character that they can hardly be called diseases, while at the same time they are in some measure anomalous deviations from the typical standard of the species; but in these, as in the higher grades of structural modification, it will be seen that the conservative purpose of adaptation is carried out. ”

“ Now, since the external stimuli which act upon the body in the manner we have described only produce their effect in living organisms (for in dead bodies and inorganic matter they do not elicit similar reactions) , it is evident that the tertiary products which we call organic disease are purely the result of vital processes, and for this reason alone must be conservative, as are all the phenomena of life. ”

“ We observe, however, that graduality—slowness of organic change—is common only to so-called chronic pathological changes; in acute organic diseases (those that we have seen destroy life) the change of tissue is rapid; hence an organ undergoing pathological modification that becomes the seat of an acute process (of an acute inflammation) can no longer be said to have followed its designed typical course, and we can no longer anticipate the same attaining of the pathological evolution to its designed conservative, typical completion. ”

“ Another erroneous hypothesis, not differing very widely from the idea of Stahl, and which may be named and dismissed before we proceed, is that which supposes the existence, in the nervous system, of some tangible, central point of nerve-matter, from which, as from a seat of government, mandates are issued to control the motions and changes that take place in every quarter of the organism; and which leads us to infer that processes of disease, since, as it would seem, they are allowed to take place by this governing "central point," would be rather protective than-suicidal to the individual. ”

“ In some tropical countries, despite heat of climate, fires are kept up all night in every apartment as a preventive against fevers; and experience has demonstrated that they are more effective when placed between the open window (or door) and the body of the person to be protected. In this way it is easy to comprehend how every mosquito will fly directly into the light and the fire before reaching the thus protected sleeper.
15. "The air of cities in some way renders the poison innocuous, for, though a malarial disease may be raging outside, it does not penetrate far into the interior." ”

“ Vain and useless indeed would be the energy generated in living bodies by the successive compositions and decompositions, the integrations and disintegrations, the electrolytic associations and disassociations of ions and electrons resulting from animal metabolism, if no arrangement had been provided by which the energy developed could be secured to the use of the individual producing it, instead of instantly flashing back to the earth whence it came, which it inevitably would do, in the absence of such insulation. ”

“ Very young animals, and indeed young plants, are peculiarly liable to die before reaching maturity. This is especially the case in animals, at least during the first few days of life, but the liability continues, though in a gradually-decreasing ratio, until physiological development is complete. Breeders of stock know very well the difficulty of rearing the young; and even in wild animals that live in a perfectly natural state, untrammeled by domestication, a good proportion of new-born individuals perish in early life. ”

“ In the retrogressive phenomena of death as in the evolution of living from dead matter, the old saying of nature not making leaps, again asserts itself, and the prevalent error that everything must be either dead or alive, with no intermediate gradations, becomes pronouncedly manifest. ”

“ We may now further follow out the analogy between physiological and pathological evolution, by observing that structures undergoing pathological development (conservative organic modification) , like those that are being developed physiologically, manifest an intrinsic tendency, when undisturbed in their progress, to pursue a fixed, typical course to their naturally-designed termination. When permitted to pursue such a typical course, the observed structural changes are exceedingly slow, and are attended with little or no physical suffering. ”

“ Carpenter is led to observe that "cold brings quickly to a fatal termination many maladies which it does not directly induce." Nay, the acute inflammatory attack, under such circumstances, is often enough the first intimation, to the patient, and perhaps to the physician, of the existence of organic change in the affected organ. A most common error, and, as far as I know, a universal one, is to date the real beginning of the disease from the acute inflammation, and ascribe any recognizable lingering symptoms to the acute attack having "lapsed into the chronic form;" ”

“ In a condition of health the various processes going on in the body, which we call vital phenomena, are nothing more than a series of internal reactions provoked and maintained in obedience to the impression of surrounding conditions that act upon the organism from without. The reactive powers possessed by the healthy organism are perfectly natural to it, and, so long as the external stimuli impressing the body from without are also perfectly natural, the resulting tertium quid will simply consist of a naturally-constructed, a physiologically-developed organism. ”

“ Malaria is most dangerous when the sun is down, and it seems almost inert during the day. Of this there is no doubt, and the various hypotheses on the marsh-vapor theory, that have been alleged in explanation of it, are almost as numerous as they are unsatisfactory. With regard to the mosquito, however, it is well known that it remains, for the most part, during the day, harbored in woods, weeds, or low underbrush, and comes out after sunset and at night to indulge its blood-sucking proclivities. ”

“ An extremely ignorant person might answer that all parts of a living body are alive except the bones. It required some education before we medical men learned to realize, without surprise, that crude metallic bodies—bullets, pins, needles, wire sutures buried in our internal organs, nails driven into our fractured bones by surgeons, finger rings, scissors, forceps, spectacles, etc., left in the peritoneal cavity by careless operators—could remain in a human body without any immediate danger to life. ”

“ No nutritive change, even in a single cell, can take place without a disturbance of electric equilibrium and the development of an electric current, be it ever so diminutive. Nerve force, electricity and "vital force" are identical in so far as they are all manifestations of electromagnetic energy. Every histological unit in an animal body is a diminutive battery in which such energy is evolved. ”

“ Furthermore, when it is remembered that disease-producing bacteric germs are so minute that a million may rest on the head of a pin, and that the smallest puncture of the finest needle-point (as in Pasteur's experiments with chicken-cholera) , when charged with an atom of infecting matter, may be sufficient to infect the body with the septic matter, it scarcely seems possible to ignore any longer the punctures of mosquitoes and other proboscidian insects as possible sources of both infection and contagion. ”

“ Nay, it may even turn out that, under certain circumstances, mosquito-bites shall even be protective against malarial disease, for as Pasteur and others are able to produce, artificially, "attenuated culture-fluids," the inoculation of which, while producing slight symptoms, protects from more serious phases of disease, so may there exist in nature naturally "attenuated" fever-poison fluids, the inoculation of which, by mosquital puncture, may produce trivial symptoms, and thus protect from more decided attacks of veritable fever. ”

“ It is the fatty dust into which these dead cells have crumbled that rises to the surface as cream and when amassed in the churn constitutes the butter of commerce. Milk is emphatically a dead material. ”

“ But the serpent also is beautiful—superficially smooth, tapering in form, elegantly elastic, absolute in symmetry, undulating in motion, every element of beauty in woman finds its counterpart in the snake; yet we love the one, loathe the other—loathe it because we have inherited the instinct that tells us it is one of our natural enemies, whose touch is destruction ”