To explain the facts to the lay reader it is necessary to depart a little from the subject of infectious diseases itself, and to state that osteopathic success in these diseases is due altogether to a great fact in Nature - the great natural fact demonstrated by science - that the living body is truly and completely in its entire structure and function a matter of chemical composition and chemical reaction.

To say that the body is nothing but a great chemical fact may sound strange to those who are unfamiliar with physiology. But such is the truth. Physiological chemists are special chemists who study and experiment with the tissues of the body; who analyze the body; who discover the various substances of which the body is built up. And physiologists are men who try to discover how these various substances act in the living body. The difference between a living body and a dead body is believed by physiologists and by chemists to consist in the different conduct of these substances in the two cases. This is not absolutely proved as yet, but scientists believe it is so. The dead body no longer takes into itself substances from the outside which it builds up into its own substance (food) nor does it throw off the products of its living energy, such as come from it in the form of carbonic acid from the lungs, water from the sweat glands, and numerous chemical substances found in the excretion from the kidneys.

Now all this is very intimately associated with the frightful disturbance the body passes through when, owing to some defect or fault in the body itself, it is invaded by germs-by disease-making bacteria. And we will ask the reader to follow us a little way into this chemistry of the body before considering its intimate relation with osteopathic treatment and success. Osteopathy is first and foremost founded on scientific fact. Some of these facts we will now point out.

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE LIVING BODY

A little - a very little - study of chemistry will teach us that all things in existence - all the things we can see, and all the things we cannot see, from the globe of the earth with its vast envelopes of water and air, from the sun and the stars, down to the microscopic particle of less than 4-10,000 of an inch in diameter, are merely chemical compounds, or chemical elements of which chemical compounds consist. The great meteor that falls out of the sky is pure iron. Iron is a chemical element. Pure iron never occurs on the earth, but has to be separated from some other element with which it is found united. Hematite ore, for example, is iron chemically combined with oxygen. Now oxygen is another element, but oxygen is a gas. When the two elements are in chemical union they form the beautiful many-colored hematite ore, mined in enormous quantities in the Great Lakes mining region. The ore is taken to the reduction plant, the oxygen is driven off, and we thus have the pure iron of industry.

Now the air around us consists of one-fifth oxygen and four-fifths nitrogen-another gaseous element. Iron and oxygen combine together in chemical union, forming iron oxide in nature, and iron combined in other natural ways is found in the bodies of all animals and plants. The liver carries a great store, or stock of iron ; iron enters into the chemical composition of the red blood corpuscles - the little bodies that give the blood its red color; and iron is a constituent of every one of those microscopic little units of the body which we call cells. Oxygen also enters very largely into the chemical compounds of which the body consists. Without the oxygen we draw into our blood through the lungs we could not live an hour. Without oxygen the body could not use at all the food it takes into itself. Without oxygen we should die of asphyxiation. Even when the lungs of an animal are collapsed by opening the air-tight cavity in which they naturally expand and contract by the movements of the muscles of respiration, the animal while perfectly unconscious, will make the most distressing and convulsive efforts to breathe, so that an observer would be convinced it were consciously trying to "get its breath" - so necessary to life are the chemical compounds in which oxygen enters. All the elements that enter into the compounds of which the body consists are familiar to us in the material of which the earth is made. Sodium and chlorine which, when combined, make sodium chloride - common table salt - are found in almost all the fluids of the body. Calcium and phosphorus are found in the bones as calcium phosphate; carbon and oxygen unite in the body as carbonic acid, and these two elements, together with hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur, unite together to form the wonderful chemical "compound" of which living matter essentially consists. This compound is called protoplasm (and dead protoplasm is called protein) and is distinguished from the other compounds of the body by the peculiar manner in which its nitrogen is united with the other elements of carbon, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. About 70 per cent of the body's weight consists of water, and water is a compound of the two gases, hydrogen and oxygen. A biological architect who knew the necessary chemistry - we might easily imagine - could take some twelve or fewer elements, including those above mentioned, and build with them a living animal. This, of course, is from the viewpoint of the cold-blooded chemist.

Now these wonderfully complex compounds of which the body consists are distributed in the body in the form of what are called "tissues". The different tissues are chemically different from one another. The secreting organs, like the stomach, the liver, the kidneys, the intestines, the pancreas, the salivary glands, the thyroid gland, and others, each produces its own chemical product. The gastric juice is the chemical product of that chemical factory, the stomach. The liver manufactures we do not know how many different chemical products. The liver manufactures urea and throws it into the blood to be taken out in the urine by the kidneys. The liver destroys uric acid. The liver manufactures a mysterious chemical substance which converts glucose-sugar, the form in which sugar appears in the body, into a substance very like starch; and stores this substance in the liver tissue; and the liver makes another mysterious chemical compound which again reconverts this animal starch into glucose-sugar and throws it back again into the blood. Were the liver to lose its control over sugar (sugar as a chemical compound consisting of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen) there would be an end of life.

But these are only a few examples. All that goes on in the body is chemical, and the most complex, delicately equilibrated kind of chemism: so that you can easily understand why nothing that will interfere with these numerous delicate reactions should be allowed to enter the body.

In chemistry we have what are called active and inert substances. An active substance is one which causes a chemical change in the substance to which it is added. An inert substance is one which causes no such change. Were you to chew up and swallow a fist full of white paper, or swallow a handful of pebbles or a cupful of bran, these substances would cause no chemical change in your body, but would pass out of it unaltered. They are inert substances in the body. They are neither food nor poison. Food and poison are both active substances. They cause chemical change in the body, and are chemically changed themselves.

Now physiologists assert that all active substances which are not foods are poisons. And the word of the physiologist may be accepted as true. It is a knowledge of this great fact of physiology that is causing the widespread and popular reaction against the use of the old-style drastic and poisonous drugs which the intelligent physician now hesitates to prescribe - preferring rather to let "Nature take its course" - and which the intelligent patient hesitates to swallow. These facts account for the increasing success of the osteopathic physician and for the growing use of osteopathy among the most intelligent and enlightened classes of patients. Osteopathic physicians have long since learned to take their success calmly and as a matter of course, knowing full well that their success is due altogether to the fact that osteopathy is founded on the well-known and scientifically proved facts of the body's life.

The osteopathic physician not only agrees with the physiologist in the physiologist's chemical view of the body and administers no active drugs, but he goes farther. He uses the chemistry that is natural to the body to restore to the body the very chemical equilibrium which the body, through whatever fault or defect, has lost. Under his fingers he has the wonderful keyboard of the nervous system, with its nerve fibers communicating directly or indirectly with every minute part and cell of the body, and under the normalizing impulse thus given, the organs and parts of the body that are out of chemical equilibrium leap in response. No active drug is needed to hasten or retard the marvelous work going on in these chemical factories. The nerve is the "master tissue" and the other tissues are its slaves. The osteopath controls the nerves. That is the secret.

NATURAL CONTROL OF THE BODY'S CIIE'MISTRY

When you see a nerve cell under the microscope, it looks like some vast gray-colored water animal with numerous exquisitely sensitive tentacles reaching out in many directions, one of which is prolonged enormously. This long tentacle is the nerve fibre, and many thousands, or tens of thousands, or millions of these fibres make up the nerve, or nerve trunk. All the muscles, all the glands, all the other organs and parts of the body are the mere slaves of these microscopic, monster-like organisms, the nerve cells. The osteopath sends his message to the disordered organ or part through these masters of the body, and the message brings blood to the part or bids the blood flow from the part precisely as the case requires, either to stimulate or normalize the organ to its own peculiar activity.

Every organ, every part of the body, has its own corresponding place on the marvelous keyboard of the flexuous spinal column, and instantaneously the osteopath reaches the disordered part by manipulating the nerve fibres that control its chemism. It is like the operation of a telephone exchange in perfect order. That is the reason why osteopaths have had such splendid success in the treatment of the fifty or more alleged diseases of the stomach and heart.

Many patients have suffered death a thousand times over from "heart diseases" diagnosed as "stomach troubles". It was really the heart - not the stomach. And the osteopath has cured such diseases by his intelligent, scientific understanding of the nerve centers by which the heart is controlled. The heart and the stomach are tied up together by the same nerve - the great vagus or pneumogastric nerve. Hold a glass of water to your mouth with your left hand, and put your finger to the pulse of your left hand then swallow - not too fast - the water in the glass, and note how your pulse changes the rhythm of its beats.
Do that, and you will have the key to the fact why the osteopath - understanding the connection between the chemistry of the body and its nerves - administers the only treatment that science can endorse, and cures his patient in Nature's own way.

Osteopaths have been highly pleased by the success they have had in treating diseases due to bacteria or germs. Each day we learn a little more about germ diseases and germs. Bacteria harmful to men get into the body through a lowering of its resistance, and by their multiplication in the body produce certain chemical substances poisonous to the tissues. These poisons, or "toxins", as we call them, are chemical compounds which destroy the tissues, or which disturb the great chemical factories of the body in the normal manufacture of their products. When these disease-making germs find an entrance into a body susceptible to them they grow with unthinkable rapidity and the body puts forth both its white blood cells and its entire chemical force fighting them. We assert with positive truth that there is no medical treatment given to fight the germs which will not hurt a patient suffering from one of these diseases.

The osteopath, like the doctors of the old school, studies the science of bacteriology, and in these studies he, as well as the modernly-educated doctor of the old school, has been taught that there is no "medicine" which can fight the germs. The only substance which can be taken by the sufferer from a germ disease that will help him in Nature's battle against the invaders is nourishing food. Possibly some harmless substance (in reality a food, such as castor oil), or soap-enemas administered to quicken, when expedient, the emptying of the intestines, may be a helpful thing as medical treatment; but you should realize that osteopathy by its own independent treatment secures the unloading of the bowels without the use of any purgative whatsoever. (Osteopaths, of course, use enemas freely.)

THE BODY MAKES ITS OWN MEDICINES

Germ diseases such as typhoid fever, certain other forms of intestinal disorders such as "running from the bowels", bloody dysentery, various disorders of the stomach, "common colds", bronchitis, spinal fever, scarlet fever, tonsillitis, grip or influenza, diphtheria and other infections which will be mentioned hereafter, can be and are relieved and often completely stopped by osteopathic treatment, because of the fact that the only cure possible in these cases is the chemical resistance of the body to the germs and their poisons. The body is already fighting with all its power to overcome the destructive effects of the germs. With every beat of the heart the blood is sent through all the tissues bearing countless billions of its devouring white-blood cells (phagocytes) and its newly made chemical soldiers (antitoxins) to neutralize the poisons of the germs and to destroy the germs themselves. This is Nature's own work, and if the body is not naturally strong enough to win the fight - if it is destined to lose the battle - it quits the struggle only in the last ditch.

Now the question is this: Can the body be helped in this struggle with the bacteria? It matters little whether the germ disease be an actual pneumonia or other rapidly destructive invasion of germs, or whether it be a "simple cold" (which is often easily conquered by the blood, but which too often, when neglected, finishes in pneumonia or tuberculosis). The only difference between the way the body fights pneumonia, diphtheria, influenza, chronic catarrh, or any other germ disease - even scarlet fever or smallpox, or the plague or yellow fever - and the way it fights a "simple cold" is this: that in the "simple cold" the body quickly produces, first, a great army of white blood cells, and, second, a great chemical army of Nature's own anti-toxins which by their numbers overwhelm both the invading germs and the toxins made by them. In the other diseases, and in cases where the "simple cold" paves the way for the development of pneumonia or tubercular bronchitis, the "reaction" of the body to the germ poisons is slower and of less extent. The body cannot produce its army of phagocytes and natural anti-toxins or germ fighters quickly enough, or in sufficient number, to destroy the germs and their poisons. "Medicine" in these cases is no longer prescribed. But right here is where the osteopathic physician steps in and helps Nature when Nature can be helped in no other way. How does he do it?

OSTEOPATHIC ADJUSTMENT SAVES THE DAY

The osteopathic physician claims and proves that scientific and intelligent adjustment, stimulation or normalization (as the case requires) of spinal tissues (not massage or the ignorant manipulations of untrained and unscientific hands, but genuine osteopathic adjustment) will increase the activity of the organs the cells of which manufacture the chemical soldiers that overcome the poisons of the invading germs. In a word the body manufactures natural anti-toxins. This has been proved so often in pneumonia, in typhoid, in grip, in tonsillitis, in diphtheria, in cerebro-spinal meningitis, and in other virulent germ diseases that it is now a commonplace fact of osteopathic practice which, as I have said before, is taken by the osteopath and his patients as a matter of course. The osteopath knows this fact well, and he knows, furthermore, that if the body can make a reasonably strong effort in raising its army, he, with his ready and prompt assistance, can reinforce it by using the great master tissue, the nerves, on the body cells and the blood to spur on - to help forward - the process of resistance. And this fact is attested today by thousands of families in which the osteopath has been called early and late in these diseases.

HOW OSTEOPATHS GIVE POWER TO THE HEART

The osteopath, too, is a powerful factor in sustaining the heart by natural stimulation when, in the destructive germ disease, it has been weakened and battered by the toxins of the germs. This kind of heart support is a thousand times more rational than the use of powerful drugs which the intelligent medical man of today hates - yea, trembles to use, but which, unfortunately, he often feels compelled to use, knowing no other way, rather than see the patient die under his hands. And the most alarming consideration is the terrific after-effects of these drugs on the heart - weeks, months or years later - which account for most of the sudden deaths from so-called modern "heart failure" among patients that have been so treated. From the natural (and powerful) osteopathic stimulation of the heart there is no quick and dangerous reaction - there is no reaction at all, nor later disaster, as is the case with the pharmacological stimulants and regulators, for, by giving the organ a more adequate blood supply, it is furnished with greater stores of the fuel which it uses up in doing its normal work, and hence the heart is permanently strengthened, not weakened, by osteopathic treatment.

Then, too, the osteopath controls the heart with much of the assurance with which one can work the handle of a pump - fast or slow, weak or strong, as the case demands.
 
So that in germ diseases the intelligent layman, with these facts in mind, will easily comprehend the reason why osteopathic treatment is the rational treatment indicated by Nature itself.

OSTEOPATHY FIGHTS ON THE SIDE OF NATURE

Again in chronic bronchitis when not caused by germs, but by heart lesions, or by displacement of joints in the spine or ribs (a common occurrence), the disease can be vastly relieved by imparting muscle "tone" to the heart and to the rest of the body, or in the second category of cases it can be removed altogether by correcting the bony displacement according to osteopathic technique.

The osteopath claims and proves that normalization and stimulation of the spinal tissues can and does assist the patient's body in overcoming the effects of the bacterial invasion. He stimulates the heart, as just explained, by Nature's own stimulant - the nerve. While he observes all the required precautions in the way of adequate and suitable nourishment, careful nursing, sanitary measures, and the other aspects of regimen which common sense and experience indicate as useful, he does bring in the help which the bacteriologist with sorrow deplores as non-existent. The bacteriologist is speaking honestly, and with the highest and best motives, when he says that "in the battle between the germ and the body, all we can do is to watch with intense interest the ultimate outcome". Yet the bacteriologist in good time will learn that osteopathy has found a way of taking an active part in the battle, and reinforcing the body with its own chemical troops which, if they do not always decide the day, at least decide it many, many times.

SCIENTIFIC MEN NEVER TAKE DRUGS THEMSELVES

The harmful effect of drugs on the living body has been long known and realized by the really scientific man, such as the bacteriologist, the physiologist, the chemist and the pharmacologist. Men like these who, knowing that drugs were worse than useless, began a few years ago to investigate germ diseases with the hope of finding, in the germs themselves, some hidden cure for the diseases which the germs produced. This was the beginning of what is now known as "serum therapy". It consists in the injection into the human body of the liquid part of the blood - that is, the part of the blood that remains after the clot has been removed - of an animal that has been treated with the germs which produce the special disease that it is desired to cure.

Now in justice to the men who have been experimenting in the laboratories with serum therapy, it is only fair to say that they have made no great claims whatever for this method of treatment! Rash and over-zealous doctors have hailed the mere hopes of the experimenters as actual discoveries, and sensational newspapers have grossly exaggerated the optimistic claims of the rash doctors; but conservative doctors are always very cautious in the use of new and dangerous agents which may work more harm than good.

Commercial drug houses have put on the market all sorts of useless and even harmful preparations, and have tried hard to induce doctors to use them by shamelessly exaggerated claims of their virtues, but few intelligent physicians are caught in the trap. The most conservative men in the world, however, with regard to the power of serum therapy are the original discoverers themselves. They know the limitations and the extreme dangers of the method, and have long since come to the conclusion that science must look in other directions for a rational and safe method of fighting germs in the bodies of men.

THE GREAT EHRLICH ABANDONED SERUM "CURES"

The greatest genius of experimental therapy in the world - so acclaimed at the recent International Medical Congress at London - I mean Professor Ehrlich, of Frankfort-am-Main – before his death abandoned serum work, regarding the field as already worked out, and in his last work devoted himself exclusively to the study of the effects of certain chemical compounds on the germ of syphilis. Such things are highly significant.

But, out of all this study and investigation of the chemistry of serums have come many great truths, the greatest of which is this: the only germ destroyer which can be depended upon, and the only germ destroyer that will not injure the body of the patient, is the blood and tissues of the patient himself!

This fact - now announced from the scientific laboratories of the world as the highest generalization of modern pathology - was taught as a fundamental truth of osteopathy by Still twenty-five years before the science of experimental pathology was born! This announcement of Still's - which is today regarded as an almost self-evident axiom of experimental pathology - could not have been understood by the best pathologists of his day, and it could not be understood simply because the knowledge and experimental proof of the luminous facts of this young science were still locked up in the treasury of the future.

OSTEOPATHS AS RESEARCHERS OF THE LIVING BODY

So that the osteopathic practitioner is justified in feeling that for all these years, while the laboratory researchers toiled to vindicate and verify the supreme intuition of the founder of osteopathy, he himself has been traveling the safe and solid highway which the experimental pathologists were yet in the process of building or even of shaping the stones that were laid down. Accepting Still's theory as true, the osteopathic physician, by the quick and positive results flowing from the subtle touches of his finger tips on the living body, has been and is a living and daily verifier and demonstrator of a therapeutic theory which is still twenty years in advance of ordinary medical thinking.

This, then, is the great and beautiful discovery that has been made and established as an absolute fact by the wonderful experiments of the research men in Europe. Their work has proved, once and forever, that the only cure for disease is the cure which Nature has already installed in the body. And many of the foremost leaders in this work besides Professor Ehrlich have abandoned serum therapy as a futile hope for man, while a great many others never had any faith in it at all. They are still studying the blood and its conduct in abnormal conditions. This new science is called "Experimental Pathology" and those who are working in it are in reality working along osteopathic lines.

THE LITTLE LEFT TO SERUM THERAPY

Serum therapy - that is serums offered as "cures" - is regarded by osteopathic physicians with open minds. They await more complete evidence. As among other schools of practice, there is wide divergence of opinion as to how much or how little ground there is for the tremendous claims made for it by those who advocate its use. Certain it is that only a small fraction of truth, as weighed by the evidence, is to be found in the wild and sensational claims made by the daily press for the several serums still being experimented with; and unfortunately the desire to make good newspaper "copy" seems entirely to outweigh the desire of the press to get at the real scientific facts. Such doctors as are uneducated greatly encourage these fanciful claims but, as I have stated, the experimenters themselves as a class are very skeptical regarding serum "cures" while well-educated physicians almost all share this conservatism of view very fully.

But the osteopath positively asserts - even granting for the sake of argument that the use of the serum therapy may arrest the destruction produced by bacteria in two or three certain diseases only - that osteopathic treatment without serums scores a higher percentage of real cures, not the sort of "recoveries" which show a later train of serious or fatal retributions due to mistaken ideas of therapy. Following the use of serums in countless patients that have been left in a deplorable condition as a result of administering these much-praised but oft-failing "cures", osteopathy works many actual and complete cures. For example: it has cured the paralysis of many children resulting from and following the antitoxin treatment of diphtheria.

The entire claims of results of all the work that has been done in serum are now limited strictly to (1) diphtheria serum: (2) the supposed reduction of mortality in spinal fever by the Flexner serum: (3) the beneficial results in a small number of cases of boils and acne (pimples) by Wright's vaccines: (4) the new "immunity treatment" for typhoid now under experiment by the U. S. Army; (5) the ancient and much disputed questionable use of vaccination in smallpox: (6) a preventive (not curative) serum for tetanus: and (7) the hydrophobia treatment. This summary includes the sum total of the fruit of all the incalculable mass of research work done in the hope of curing disease by these methods. The possibilities of serum and vaccine therapy have been considered for some time past by the foremost workers and critics of the European laboratories as having been completely exhausted. Serum therapy will probably rest on the laurels it has already won, such as they are.

The great science of pathological physiology, or experimental pathology, has now largely dropped "serum cures" as being perfectly impossible in virtually all but the few diseases named and is now turning its attention in other directions. Therefore, the popular notion, derived from Sunday newspapers, that serum therapy has a "great future" before it, has really never been believed by the best experts who have delved in this field. They look upon serum therapy as a worked out mine.

INFANTILE PARALYSIS

Spinal meningitis, or spinal fever, or infantile paralysis - that dread disease of the young-is a disease which osteopathy can reach through the blood when it can be reached at all. If Nature has left in the body the slightest tendency to fight this disease - as is usually the case osteopathy can help the fight along by pouring the blood in more generous quantities to the tissue where the battle is being fought. Osteopaths have had success in this dread disease where the medical practitioner has thrown up his hands. Given a fighting chance, the body of the patient tends to conquer the germs itself. And with this fighting chance on his side, the osteopath has a tremendous advantage over the ordinary practitioner because the latter is a mere spectator of the battle while the osteopath directly and indirectly assists Nature in the resisting process already begun.

RHEUMATISM

Another germ disease which osteopathy can influence is the more common one of rheumatism. Rheumatism is supposed to be due to a germ as yet little known, nor has this germ been positively identified. But it is a fact that in rheumatic patients the body is always putting up a splendid chemical fight, which should not be interfered with by the administration of useless and harmful drugs.

Of course, if a rheumatic patient will further insist on using alcohol and tobacco - two of the most active drug-poisons known to men - osteopathy cannot miraculously overcome the effect of these poisons in rheumatism. If the rheumatic patient who puts himself under the care of an osteopath wisely refrains from these two pronounced aggravators of the disease, osteopathy can help him. This treatment for rheumatism is the only treatment that has accomplished practical results. Old rheumatic patients are always agreeably surprised by the results of osteopathic treatment, nor should the newly attacked neglect this sole chance that is offered them of assisting their blood and their tissues in the eternal battle against the germs.

In other diseases due to germs, osteopathy has more than demonstrated its usefulness. Germs hurtful to man get into the intestines, or the blood of the man fails in its chemical constituents in such a way that harmful germs already in the intestines are permitted to multiply. The large intestine is infested with bacteria which ordinarily are not harmful. More than fifty different kinds of germs have their abiding place in the gut. When human stools - that is, the daily output of the intestines - are dried and examined, it is found that one-third of their weight consist of bacteria. This is a tremendous proportion.

Now under certain conditions some of these germs - either normal or not to the intestine  multiply and cause many sorts of trouble. Inflammation of the large intestine (colitis), putrefaction of lean meat, temporary or chronic diarrhoea, and appendicitis (or some of the numerous forms of mischief called appendicitis, in which the appendix is involved), typhlitis or inflammation of the blind end of the large intestine from which the appendix comes off as a blind sac, and other bacterial intestinal disturbances, are germ diseases which osteopathy can help, or cure, providing that reasonable measures be taken in the dietary habits of the patient so that the patient will not be continually counteracting the treatment.

In intestinal putrefaction, so-called "auto-intoxication", the patient should not eat much meat, as that error overcomes the effects of the increased circulation which osteopathic treatment sends to the intestine: it is deliberately a case of feeding the bacteria with the food that produces the poison. In this case the undigested meat acts like a drug and is a poison. But when this occurs the patient will do well to follow the counsel and advice of the osteopathic physician who knows quite well what his patient needs in the way of food, and, when necessary, restricts the diet to vegetables.

In other cases of intestinal bacterial disease the contrary is necessary. The patient needs solid meat for his diet and should have it: for lean meat (except in a few cases) supplies to the blood and the tissues the chemical substances which help the body to fight the invading germs. Many an osteopath has made well men out of patients who, with slight nervous disorders of the stomach, have failed to find relief, either in the regulation of diet or in the stomach tonics of the old therapeutics. It is said that fifty per cent of all the patients who seek treatment are suffering from disorders that originally rise in the great digestive tract. This is probably true, and there would be fewer sick men in the world if the sufferer, when he first feels the discomforts of disorder in the stomach and intestines, would have them corrected by forestalling the bacteria through prompt osteopathic measures.

In men - especially older men - the bladder and the prostate gland are the seat of much discomfort which may or may not be caused by germs. The old way of treating these male disorders is to hand the poor man a prescription which, by disturbing the chemistry of his stomach, makes his original discomfort worse. Osteopathic treatment is required here if anywhere. I have in mind a special case within my own knowledge in which the man under the drug treatment was contemplating a business failure (he is a large manufacturer) by reason of his inability to look after his interests. Three months' treatment by an osteopath restored him to his work and although that was four years ago he has never been near a doctor since - not even an osteopathic doctor.

MALARIAL FEVER

Another type of germ diseases that are specially amenable to osteopathic treatment are the fevers that are called "autumnal" (malarial fever). Malarial fever is due to the multiplication in the blood of an animal parasite which destroys the red blood corpuscles. The body strives to overcome the parasites - to kill them - by the development of anti-poisons, while at the same time it replaces the destroyed corpuscles by over-activity in the red bone marrow where the red corpuscles are made. Osteopathic treatment here is of special value not only in helping the body in its natural fight, but in helping it to throw off future attacks by quickly destroying the new host of invaders.