Philosophy of Osteopathy - Andrew Taylor Still (best authors to read TXT) 📗
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The Osteopath finds here the field in which he can dwell forever. His duties as a philosopher admonish him, that life and matter can be united, and that union cannot continue with any hindrance to the free and absolute motion. Therefore his duty is to keep away from the track all that will hinder the complete passage of the forces of the nervous system, that by that power the blood may be delivered and adjusted, to keep the system in normal condition. Here is your duty; do it well, if you wish to succeed.
FORMATION OF SACRUM.We believe only when we do not know. Belief and doubt are equal terms. If we believe the sacrum is formed by a local system, then we can or will have cause to believe that the rectum and colon appear after the outer skin is in process of forming. For want of the truths we are left in speculative doubt. I believe the lower bowels are formed by local machinery that receives and appropriates to the purpose of construction of such parts or organs as nature designs to be used there. If we dissect a chicken as soon as hatched we will find the colon beginning at rectum and complete in form, but not connected to the small intestines.
THE PELVIS.To get more directly at the point I want to make I will say I have some reasons to believe that the lower bowels are builded from rectum to the vermiform appendix, by acts of pelvis. It may be well to state that I have seen formation of rectum and colon in the chicken, before the small intestines were visible at all. Then in same chicken I saw, liver, lung, crop and gizzard, and only one artery in the region of the small intestines. From this I was led to believe that the pelvis did much of the forming of the viscera. If so, then we could look for much relief through the system of the pelvis.
APPEARANCE OF ŒDEMA.Œdema is the one word that appears to be at the first showing of life and death in animal forms. Previous to death by general swelling of system, a watery swelling of fascia and lymphatics, even to those of nerve fibers. If a disease should destroy life by withholding all fluids, we can trace such cause in the beginning to a time when there was watery swelling of the centers of nerves of nutrition, to such amount as to cut off nerve supply until sensation ceased to renovate and keep off accumulating fluids so long that fermentation did the work of heating till all fluids had dried up, and the channels of supply closed by adhesive inflammation, and death follows by the law of general atrophy.
DO ALL DISEASES HAVE BEGINNING IN ŒDEMA?To assert that all diseases have their beginning in œdema may be wide in range, but we often find one principle to rule over much territory. "Instance:" Mind is the supreme ruler of all beings, from the mites of life to the monsters of the land and sea. Thus we see a ruling principle is without limit. The same of numbers. By heat all metals melt to fluidity; acids must have oxygen to begin as solvents in most metals. We only speak imperfectly of some common laws to prepare the student to think on the line of probabilities as I hold them out for consideration. Suppose we begin at the atoms of fluids such as enter to construct animal or vegetable forms, and pen up till decomposition begins. By such delay does not nature call a halt and refuse to obey the laws of construction and let all other supplies pile up even to death? Is not all this the result of œdema? Œdema surely begins with the first tardy atom of matter.
Pneumonia begins by its œdematous accumulations of dead atoms, even to the death of the whole body, all having found a start in atoms only.
QUESTIONS FOR THE OSTEOPATH.We will close this chapter by propounding a few questions which the Osteopath should keep in mind.
Are the human and animal forms complete as working machines?
Has nature furnished man with powers to make his bones; give them the needed shapes of durable material, strong in kind?
Does a section in nature's law provide fastenings to hold these to one another?
Then another question arises: How will this body move, and where and how is the force applied?
Where and how is this force obtained?
How is it generated and supplied to these parts of motion?
What makes these muscles, ligaments, nerves, veins, arteries?
Are they self-forming, or has nature prepared machinery to make them?
Does animal life contain knowledge and force to construct all of the parts of man?
Can it run the machine after it has finished it?
By what power does it move?
Is there a blood vessel running to all parts of this body to supply all these demands?
If it has a battery of force, where is it?
What does it use for force?
Is it electricity? If so how does it collect and use this substance?
How does it convey its powers to any or all places?
How does the man keep warm without fire?
How does he build and lose flesh all the time?
Where and how is the supply made and delivered to proper places?
How is it applied and what holds it to its place when adjusted?
What makes it build the house of life?
Do demand and supply govern the work? If not, what does?
Are the laws of animal life sufficient to do all this work of building and repairing wastes and keep it in running condition?
If it does, what can man do or suggest to help it?
Is this machine capable of being run fast or slow if need be?
Does man have in him some kind of chemical laboratory that can turn out such products as he needs to fill all his physical demands?
If by heat, exercise, or any other cause he gets warm, can that chemistry cool him to normal?
If too cold can it warm him? Can it adjust him to heat and cold?
If so, how is it done? Is the law of life and longevity fully vindicated in man's make up?
CHAPTER XIV. Has Man Degenerated?The Advent of Man—Care of the Stock Raiser—Mental Degeneration Makes It Unpleasant for an Original Thinker—Original Thinkers of the Ancients—Methods of Healing—Failure of Allopathy—Primitive Man—Evidences of Prehistoric Man—Mental Dwarfage.
THE ADVENT OF MAN.The exact time when man's foot appeared on the earth, no record shows. A knowledge of his advent might be profitable. The unwritten history of the human races with the genius or lack of genius, might to us be an open book of knowledge. As it is not supposable that the mind of man has just become observingly active in the last few centuries, absolute evidence of purer and deeper reason than we have been able to present, stand recorded on the faces of many valuable "lost arts" which we have never been able to equal. Is it not very reasonable to suppose that the powers of mind have wonderfully degenerated from some cause?
CARE OF THE STOCK RAISER.The stock raiser carefully preserves the best and most healthy of the males and females of his flocks and herds for breeding purposes, that their offspring might be healthy and well developed, for the purposes for which he raises them. As a result he raises stock from the poultry house up, with marked improvement in form, strength and usefulness. Should he be foolish enough to kill off all the healthy and well developed males as they appear in his herds of cattle and other stock, for one or two centuries, would any one with average intelligence suppose that the standard of animals would or could be kept up, by breeding from the unfortunate stock, that had been pierced through the lungs while fighting with more powerful animals. If for breeding purposes he would save calves, colts, lambs, pigs, goats or any other young males to breed from, that had had a leg frozen off, one or both eyes plucked out, necks and ears torn by panthers, what would you think of the man's sanity?
On this line we would ask what has been the procedure of all nations? Has it not been to select the strong and healthy males, drive them out to the field of battle, destroy a million or more of the strongest men, as our war of the sixties shows. Since that war closed the fathers of our children are mainly the crippled, worn out, and degenerated physical wrecks, with the assistance of the refused, who for lack of physical ability were barred from entering the United States' service. Such physical and mental wrecks are the fathers of the children born during the last thirty years. Every healthy young lady who married and became a mother after the early sixties, had to select a husband from a war or hereditary wreck. From that degenerated stock of human beings our asylums are filled, and the beams of the gallows pulled down by the weight of the bodies of those mental dwarfs. Run this train of reason back for a few hundred or thousand of years,—this degenerating force, bearing upon the offspring, and is it a wonder that we have physical and mental wrecks all over the country?
MENTAL DEGENERATION MAKES IT UNPLEASANT FOR THE ORIGINAL THINKER.Now if we have been mentally degenerating, killing our best men back for a few thousand years time, and still have a few left who are fairly good reasoners, what was their mental powers then, compared with now? They could think from native ability; we only through acquired ability by our methods of education. Should an original thinker occasionally appear from the crippled and maimed, he will have much that is unpleasant to contend with, unless he is generous enough to credit the cause to an effect produced by the lack of mental and physical forces in the sires just described. A man or woman who is able to reason, cannot afford to wear out his or her physical and mental forces by spending time in tiresome discussions with such blank masses, who are very fortunate to have intelligence enough to make a living under the methods that require the least mental action.
It would not be manly nor lady like to allow a feeling of combattiveness to arise and spend your forces on such persons. Pre-natal causes have dropped them where they are, and a philosopher knows he must submit to the conditions, and he is sorrowful in place of vengeful and vindicative, and all that is left for him to do is to trim his lamps and let the lights defend themselves.
ORIGINAL THINKERS OF THE ANCIENTS.On this line we have much to think of. Anciently they did think: Great minds existed then, as is evidenced by the architecture displayed in constructing temples and pyramids. As in philosophy, chemistry, and mathematics, they stand to-day as living facts of their intelligence. In some ways we are equal and even surpass the ancients. Before the establishment of religious and political governments, national and tribal creeds, to sustain which the powerful minds and bodies of thousands and millions have been slain and their wise councils prohibited by death. Reason says under the circumstances we must kindly make and do the best we can in our day and time. No doubt their religion was better than ours, before they began to fight about their gods and governments.
METHODS OF HEALING.Some evidence crops out now and then that their methods of healing were natural and wisely applied, and crowned with good results. As far as history speaks of
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