The Wisdom of the Human Body

"When the relationship of bacteria to infectious disease was first brought to the attention of the scientific world, for a long time the specific germ was the chief object of study. Experience soon taught us, however, that in combating infectious diseases, it is even more important that we familiarize ourselves with those conditions of the body by which nature combats disease."

It would appear from the work of many scientists that nature is not limited to one way of protecting the body against infectious dis­ease. There are indeed many different ways by which this is accomplished. In Doctor Cabot's speech, already referred to, he further remarked:

"We have been seeing this afternoon some of the disturbances of our heat balance brought about for therapeutic purposes by heat treatment. But nature knew all along that to produce fever was one of the ways of curing disease. Nature has always used thermotherapy. A few years ago physicians tried to reduce fever temperatures. Now we produce them."'

This treatment by artificially produced fever is now being effectively used to treat syphilis of the brain, gonorrhea, undulant fever, chorea, and other infectious diseases in which previous methods have failed. But fever, or heat treat­ment, is not the only method nature uses to combat infectious diseases. Graziani, an Ital­ian physician, injected rabbits with filtrates of typhoid cultures and kept them at different tem­peratures (plus 38, 32.2, and minus 40 C.). Those kept at low temperatures developed more agglutinin than those kept at higher tempera­tures. He also experimented with rabbits kept at 32° C., bathing half of them morning and evening in water at 20° C. for thirty minutes. The animals treated by cold bathing produced more agglutinin than the others. In typhoid infections the reaction to cold water and cold air is one of nature's methods of protection.

Ecker and O'Neal found that typhoid agglu­tinin titers in rabbits were decreased fully fifty per cent by hyperthermia treatment. Hadjo­poulos and Bierman found that complement fixation antibodies in rabbits immunized against pyogenic cocci were similarly depressed. This means that artificial fever and the reaction to cold bathing have differing effects in different infections.

Agglutinin is called an antibody. In different infectious diseases many different antibodies are produced, but only a few of these seem to have definite and lasting protective powers. Elie Metchnikoff pointed out this fact early in this century, and it has become more and more evi­dent that many antibodies are mere by-products and have no real protective value such as is found in the agglutinin of typhoid infections.

Nevertheless, some anti­bodies are protective. It was by this study of nature's storehouse of protective means that tetanus antitoxin and diphtheria antitoxin, as well as the Pasteur method of immunization against the virus of rabies (hydrophobia), were discovered. Vaccinations against cholera have also been perfected.

In 1937 Arthur Locke, of the Western Penn­sylvania Institute of Pathology, published his researches on the heat mechanism as related to protection against the pneumococcus and the virus of the common cold. His experiments consisted in classifying animals according to their ability to recover from chilling, which has been popularly believed to be closely related to the pneumonias. Those animals that could re­cover from a three-degree chilling in twenty minutes were given intravenous injections of as high as 83 pneumococcus germs per cubic centi­meter of blood. Ninety-two per cent of these animals lived and showed no fever or other man­ifestations of infection. On the other hand, those that took two hours to recover a normal temperature after a three-degree chilling, all died if injected with as few as six pneumococci per cubic centimeter of blood.

Arthur Locke found a similar relationship in man between oxidation and resistance to the common cold. The margin between the coef­ficient of poor oxidation and the coefficient of protective oxidation to respiratory diseases was an exceedingly narrow one. The poor oxidation gave a coefficient of 049, and the efficient pro­tective oxidation a coefficient of 0.61.

Spiesman and Arnold, of the University of Illinois and the Chicago Health Department, found that changes in diet and the use of hydro­therapy produced increased resistance to the common cold. It may be that these agents pro­duce their effects at least in part by increased oxidation. The stimulation of oxidation is one of the principal effects of both heat and cold. According to the form of hydrotherapy used, oxidation has been shown to be increased by as much as 17 to no per cent. The protective foods, by their content of the oxidation-reduc­tion vitamins (C and the B complex), might produce their effects in the same way. Vitamin C destroys every known virus with which it has been experimented, and even neutralizes bac­terial toxins, such as those of diphtheria and tetanus.

All viruses are known to be very vulnerable to oxidation ; while protoplasmic poisons, such as carbolic acid, formaldehyde, and the sulfa drugs, have no lethal effects upon them what­ever. W. B. Rose ¹⁰ of Yale found he could pro­duce in dogs a blood-stream infection by with­holding vitamin B„ and then promptly cure it by giving the same vitamin. This was bacillus aerogenes capsulatus, a gas-producing or­ganism. These are some of nature's methods of combating infectious disease.

In his further comments upon these powers of defense, Doctor Cabot asks some very rele­vant questions:

"We say this is done by the healing power of nature. But what is nature? What are the char­acteristics of this power? The first is that it has a superhuman wisdom. We all admit the wisdom of the healing powers at work in the body, powers which our therapeutics are a very long distance behind. Where does this force come from? Where do we get the healing substances in our tissues? Out of our food and water and the air we breathe—that is, out of the bounty of the universe."

Dr. Cabot then cuts directly across our hesi­tation, the unmentioned reluctance of most phy­sicians and many other men of science to admit frankly that there is an intelligence superior to ourselves, an omniscient and omnipotent Cre­ator. He says:

"Now, if we see in our medical work a power superhuman in wisdom and in goodness, one that works all the time and that comes out of the cosmos, I do not see why we should be afraid of that name. It is perfectly obvious that it is God. Why should physicians be afraid to use those letters, G-O-D ? That is only the proper word that represents those facts; 'nature' is a very foolish word to use for them, for no one knows what that word means. So instead of vis medicatrix naturae we should say vis mediea­trix Dei. It is the power of God on which each one depends today for the fact that he is here instead of being underneath the earth."

"There is no reason, then, so far as I can see, why doctors should be afraid of the simple, old-fashioned word, God. The medical profession has learned in studying disease more about the meaning of this word than the vast majority of the so-called religious people. Why not tell this truth, because it is true?"

But this hesitancy, this reluc­tancy, or fear, to say that God is the author of all these marvelous superhuman provisions for our protection from infections and from all other disease, should surely not embarrass Seventh-day Adventist doctors or any other Christian physicians. And certainly we can readily admit with Doctor Cabot that these healing powers at work in the body are indeed from God and that ''our therapeutics are a very long distance behind" them. Surely there is profound wisdom in making an intensive and prolonged, yes, a lifetime study of nature's laws and means of protection, because they are God's laws.

Study them in the recorded researches of scientists. Study them with the definite convic­tion that when discovered, God's ways are al­ways best, always superior to any mere human ways of combating disease of any kind. The determining importance of this superior pro­tective intelligence—vis inedicatrix Dei—is well stated by the biographer of "The Doctors Mayo :" "An ample experience on the post-mor­tem service is likely to teach a young surgeon, in the words of the section head, 'How important is the protection of the Lord in any operation, even a supposedly harmless one.' "

It is refreshing and strengthening to one's courage, in acknowledging this dependence and in praying for wisdom to co-operate with the Lord in both medical and surgical practice, to come across such frankness on the part of a well-known physician. Nor is it at all difficult to see that the physician must co-operate with God and work in accordance with His laws, the laws of physiology, if he expects success in his work. He should certainly not try to treat disease "without nature's aid." To do so is only to invite disaster, delay, or failure, pro­ducing damage or derangement of the delicate mechanism of the body and sacrificing many lives. It is surely an egotistical, self-sufficient man, with little scientific knowledge and still poorer discernment, who would employ means that work counter to nature's laws and finely wrought balances.

The importance of such careful, painstaking study was pointed out by Mrs. E. G. White in 1887. She wrote :

"If self-sufficient, he (the physician] will read articles written in regard to diseases and how to treat them without nature's aid ; he will grasp state­ments and weave them into his practice, and without deep research, without earnest study, without sifting every statement, he will merely become a mechanical worker. Because he knows so little, he will be ready to experiment upon human lives,, and sacrifice not a few. . . . He did not do this work with evil design, he had no malicious purposes ; but life was sacri­ficed on account of his ignorance, because he was a superficial student, because he had not had that prac­tice that would make him a safe man to be entrusted with human lives."

Even new, modern, or generally used reme­dies must be brought to this test—do they aid nature or work counter to it? If these guiding principles mean anything at all, they certainly mean that treatment of the sick should be physi­ologic, that is, in accord with nature's laws, the physiologic laws of the body, the laws God has established for our benefit, our health, our pro­tection against disease, and our recovery from disease. They also mean that those methods are harmful which are not in accord with physio­logic laws ; and even though they may not pro­duce death, they result in derangement of the intricate and delicate chemical mechanisms of the body, preventing or delaying recovery from sickness, and adding just so much more against which the recuperative powers of nature have to contend.

It may be very reasonably asked, "How is a physician to know all of nature's laws of normal or physiologic function ?" A lifetime is not long enough to learn them. Many men of science have spent their entire lives studying and experimenting in order to ascertain the body mechanisms and biochemical activities. Though much, indeed very much, has been learned, the field of the unknown is still vastly greater than the known. We are indeed as children standing on the shore of a world-en­circling ocean of science, casting pebbles a few yards from us onto its surface, and observing but surface effects of our experiments.

There is a book of over sixteen hundred pages written by Best and Taylor of the University of Toronto, entitled "The Physiological Basis of Medical Practice." With this good beginning regarding physiologic laws, how are we to know what means of treatment are in accord with these physiologic laws, and what means are not, but run counter to them? The first is an almost unlimited task, and the second is not far behind it. Must we try everything that is advanced before we can know? Must we find out by the method of "trial and error," watching the results on human subjects before we can determine what is physiologic and what is not? I wonder whether this method is not rightly named "trial and error." Is there not some method that could be called "trial and success" ? Are there not means which, when rightly used, even with our human limitations of knowledge, can be safe, sound, and successful? May we not at least start out in the direction of success, wasting no time with that which God tells us is harmful ? Do we not have a pattern—a blue­print—for our medical work? Is this guide still good today, or is it out of date? Have its principles been outmoded and superseded by man's devisings, by something better than God has given us ?

The events delineated in "The Great Con­troversy" are now occurring before our eyes.

Is this book reliable? Does it give evidence of a superior intelligence back of it? What do you say about it, Seventh-day Adventist physicians? "Medical Ministry" is written by the same human instrumentality. Is it reliable or unreliable ? It deals with scientific facts, later corroborated by research. The large majority of medical principles which have come through this same instrumentality were not only unknown to medical science when they were written, but were entirely contrary to the accepted ideas of the majority of medical men of that day. 

I have personally sought out scientific research bearing on many of these principles given from 1865 on down to the latest written, and have found every one of them corroborated by research done thirty to seventy years later on. I know of only one that yet remains to be fully demonstrated and accepted by medical research. Look up a few medical books written from 1865 to 1890. Of how much scientific value are they today? Could you say of them what has proved true of the Testimonies?

Do you think we have been misled by cun­ningly devised fables or an old woman's dreams?

Are these principles worth studying and using, or not? Are these writings out of date, unscien­tific, and unreliable? Are they superseded by present-day knowledge?

It is just as easy for the Creator, who made the human body and devised all its mechanisms, to tell us what methods are, and what are not, in harmony with physiologic laws, and hence what restores and what deranges and damages these biochemical relations, as it is for God to tell us events that are in the future. I do not see how we can accept "The Great Controversy" and reject or ignore "Medical Ministry" and its companion volumes. To ignore or reject God's methods of restoration by practicing medicine without nature's aid, when we have been given such all-important guidance, is to sacrifice many lives and the health of many more.

The literature of science (human knowledge) cannot tell us what is true or false in the Bible or the Testimonies. The principles of true science given in the Bible and the Testimonies are to be our guide in choosing from scientific research and literature, that which God approves and that which works in co-operation with nature's divinely instituted laws. There is other "science falsely so called," such as evo­lution, which says essentially, "It is not God who made us, but we ourselves ;" but in the medical field false science is that which man devises and attempts without nature's (the Cre­ator's) aid.

We cannot counterwork God's methods or ignore them and expect success in its greatest fullness, for health and lives will then be sacri­ficed.

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