n from the said tables of a system of diet suitable to the
various stages of disease. Any recommendations therein contained which
may appear to be contradictory or conflicting must be ascribed to their
complication on a progressive dietary system consistent with the
prospective advancement of the case towards recovery.
INFANTILE PARALYSIS.
Amongst the forms of Degeneration of the Muscular Tissue the reader will
have noticed that of Infantile Paralysis or Poliomyelitis.
The startling prominence that this complaint quite recently acquired was
due to its world-wide ravages in epidemic form and the absolute and
confessed inability of the combined sagacity of the whole faculty of the
orthodox medical profession to cope with it or to cure it--to fathom its
cause and origin or to curtail its increasing rate of mortality. I am
therefore constrained, so far as space permits, to give the matter
special and particular consideration.
The scientific name, "Poliomyelitis," is derived from the Greek words:
polios, grey and myleos, marrow; for its chief feature is a softening of
the grey spinal marrow.
First noticed by the medical world no later than the year 1840,
statistics show that in the last decade it has appeared in various parts
of the world in epidemic form, notably in Sweden and Norway. In America,
epidemics occurred in 1907 and 1908 and again in 1916. It was promptly
and energetically dealt with by the Rockefeller Institute of New York
where the proof was established of the possibility of transmission by a
living virus taken from the spinal marrow of a victim; but whether this
disseminator may be correctly termed a bacillus, or fungus or a germ,
medical-science has been unable lo determine; neither has it succeeded
with the most powerful microscope in discovering the individuality of
this "carrier," whilst all experiments with re-agents have been bare of
results. Thus the researches of science have merely brought us back to
the starting point; namely, that there is a "something" which exerts a
degenerating influence upon the cellular tissue of the spinal marrow and
causes the morbid enlargement of its cells.
The New York Board of Health, cites eight different forms in which the
disease may appear and acknowledges a startling failure to determine
either any uniform period of incubation (i.e. the time between contagion
and the appearance of the symptoms,) or the period of infection (i.e.
how long a sick person ma
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