Valere Aude: Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration. Louis Dechmann
healing attention must be given, not to the various organs, but to the various tissues.
These tissues are dependent directly upon the condition and contents of the blood, whose office it is to nourish them and which exhibits the wonderful property of conveying to each tissue its selective regenerative materials, provided of course, that these elements are present at the time in the blood.
Sixteen definite elements have been established—and a seventeenth will probably soon be added thereto—which, in their various combinations and aggregations, form the different tissues of which the organs in the human body are composed.
The prevalence of one or several of these elements in a certain tissue forms the main or governing feature of that tissue. Thus, the prevalence of potassium phosphate characterizes muscle tissue, the prevalence of ammonium phosphate (lecithin) nerve tissue. Each one of the various tissues consists of certain of these elements, and each tissue at every point where it occurs is affected by the lack of any of its elements.
One of the greatest physiological chemists, Justus von Liebig, maintains that, if one of the necessary elements in a chemical composition is missing, the rest cannot fulfill their duties and the respective cells must become diseased and degenerate.
This discovery, known as "the law of the minimum," has thrown additional light upon the tasks before the new school of medicine.
Upon the basis of a careful diagnosis, the necessary nutritive salts or cell-foods, carefully compounded in accordance with the law of chemotaxis must be administered. This law discovered by Engelmann, requires that these cell-foods must be administered in digestible and assimilable forms so that the cells will be attracted by the chemical reaction, which may be of a positive or a negative character.
This being so, we can easily build up the tissues, by studying their chemical composition and supplying to the system that which is necessary, in the form of food. The cell will take care of the rest. Each tissue has its specific cell-system, and each cell will be attracted only by those ingredients which are needed for the mother tissue.
To bring to a tissue through the blood the lacking constituent element or elements is the only means of regenerating and healing diseased cells.
In this connection we are considering only constitutional diseases.
It has been shown that the lack of certain chemical elements from the blood signifies disease and that the variety of the disease depends on which of the elements are either lacking entirely or are present in incorrect proportion.
After this lack has been determined, the course to pursue in curing the disease is to supply the lacking chemical elements in the form of concentrated cell-food in addition to the regular food.
This method displaces entirely the old system of filling the body with poisonous drugs in order to counteract the effects of the disease. Such a system may suppress the symptoms by benumbing the nerves and preventing pain, it may counteract the natural process of healing of which inflammation, fever and pain, are the outward manifestations;—but it can never cure.
The discovery of dysaemia, or impaired blood supply, as the governing cause of disease, has destroyed another idol of modern fetish worship in medicine.
Since the discovery of various species of bacilli, which accompany nearly every form of disease in some form or other, these have been commonly declared to be the causes of diseases, and the tendency is to find some poison that will kill the bacilli in order to cure the disease.
The bacillus, on the contrary, is only the consequence, or symptom, of a disease. The diseased and decomposing parts furnish fertile soil suitable to the propagating of bacilli because of the lack of the normal chemical elements in the blood and tissue. But to kill them, while the underlying conditions for their reproduction remain unchanged, can, obviously, never effect a cure. So the great hopes that have attached to sero-therapy are doomed to disappointment, and the application of anti-toxins prepared from the serum of animals, are fated shortly to vanish in the wake of others of those strange temporary crazes which periodically obsess mankind for a while and pass away.
The discovery that a dysaemic condition of the blood leads to certain destructive processes termed diseases, was soon followed by the apprehension that one of the principal factors in bringing about such disturbance is predisposition—in many cases heredity.
The term "Hereditary disease" signifies that the improper chemical composition of the blood of one or both parents is transmitted to the offspring, and that it causes in them likewise a degeneration of certain tissues and of the organs composed of those tissues.
The hygienic-dietetic system of healing does not, however, regard heredity as an invincible enemy, especially since my discovery of the "Law of the Cross-Transmission of Characteristics."
It is in the solution of this problem of "hereditary disease" that my system will eventually come into its own and will ere long be recognized as the most rational and effectual therapy ever applied since the beginning of the art of healing. It may be years before it is accorded the proverbially tardy acknowledgment of the "orthodox" schools, but that it will, nay must be eventually adopted is virtually a foregone conclusion—that is, if it be indeed the function or policy of the physician of the future to adequately seek to succour the suffering and regenerate the races of mankind. Of the physician of the present it can at best be said in Goethe's incisive words:
"Er halt die Theile in seiner Hand,
Doch fehlt ihm leider das gelst' ge Band."
He holds the parts within his hand,
But lacks the mental grasp of all.
For full explanation of the significance of my law, I must refer you to the first lecture in my book entitled "Within the Bud,"—and the lesson therein on the theory of "Pangenesis," which space forbids my repeating here. This lesson will convey conclusively to any thinking mind what heredity really means. After a brief study of this interesting subject the importance of the "Law of the Cross-Transmission of Characteristics" will become amply apparent and the intelligent reader will undoubtedly wonder why it has not been applied and acknowledged long ago. For answer, I must refer you to the schools, whose policy it has ever been to, at any rate, abstain from assisting, if not absolutely to diplomatically hinder the development of fresh scientific discoveries. But the time is fast approaching when a sharp and decisive end to this iniquity will be demanded by the will of an enlightened people; only then will the existing orthodox power be compelled to loosen its obstructive grip which the interests of humanity have, so far, been powerless to unclasp. But, to quote the stirring words of one who looked with prophetic, faithful eye into the tangled problems of futurity:
"The people will come into their own at last— God is not mocked for ever."
My Law of the Cross-Transmission of Characteristics may be simply stated as follows:
Under all conditions, the matter of sex is determined in the egg-cell at the moment of fertilization.
Under all conditions, the sex is determined by a struggle for the mastery in the egg-cell, between the energy of that egg-cell and the energy of the male spermatozoon. In a crisis, when the life of one of the two seeds is trembling in the balance, one of them—through the exertion of its "Latent Reserve Energy," dominates, and engenders a child of the opposite sex. This reversal of the sex is in conformity with the Law of the Cross-Transmission of Sex; that is, the mother is represented in the male offspring and the father in the female—this being the normal expression of the Law of Cross-Transmission of Characteristics.
The "Latent Reserve Energy" is provided by nature for the "Preservation of Species," and through this provision an impulsive, vehement energy can, at the final moment of a crisis, be called upon for the salvation of its kind.
A seeming exception to this is due to the "Law of the Dominant" which overrides the action of "Latent Reserve Energy," and is a provision of nature for the preservation of the "Dominant," which is the most prominent quality in nature.
When the subject is