Powers of the Hand. – and how very good and useful or its endowments! How wondrously adapted to the uses to which it is daily applied! It’s elegance of outline, delicacy of mold and beauty of color has ever made it the attractive study of the artist; whilst its elasticity, flexibility and strength, combined with its delicate and exquisite mobility, and perfect adaptation as an organ of pretension, have led many philosophers to attribute man’s high and graceful spear he worked he even more to the hand them to the mine. Glowing thoughts are penned up on the pages of history by means of the hand; it wheels the artist pencil and brush, and makes the bare canvas and attractive and valuable work of art; how it strikes the keyboard of the piano with so delicate a touch that low, sweet, plaintive strains of music are brought forth; now the force of the blow is much greater and firmer, and louder and louder and more thrilling musical strains.

Skill of the Hand. – the farmers toil, a housewife status, the dressmakers deafness, the mechanics skill, are all accomplished by the human hand. How constantly does the lives from an aids us in expressing our feelings. It is the orator’s chief aide and giving expression to his lofty strains of eloquence, or emphasizing his pathetic appeals.

At this point, for this session I am going to sign off.  The platitudes have finally gotten to me but don't fear.  We'll be back again and you can continue to read my droll commentary like subtitling on a bad Sundance Film Festival Marathon in Italian.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• The Ovaries
  
  

  The Ovaries.– The organs are situated contiguously to the womb. They signify eggs from their shape, and they are the parts which the male semen acts upon to produce the phenomenon of pregnancy. They are in large eye inflammation in their passage down the fallopian tubes, once a month during the middle. A female life, produces the condition familiarly known as menstruation. The plate also affords another view of the vagina.

  And that is a pretty short paragraph to describe the process of reproduction. I believe it would be difficult to describe this process any more succinctly or with any less detail especially a medical textbook. It’s with short descriptions like this, that I wonder how on the world the author ever manage to squeeze 1700 pages out of a medical textbook.

  Sometimes I wonder if the short nondescriptive descriptions might have been more prevalent a hundred years ago and possibly super prevalent even further back. Maybe there was something lingering in the human psyche from the days when monks transcribed books by hand that led authors to avoiding words. If it wasn’t for this author’s ability to spot on with a lot of gibberish whenever he feels like it, I might suspect such a thing. The fact that the author did not use a lot of language here leads me to believe that the author was avoiding the topic.

  If ancient authors and written descriptions about to sail from Europe to India across the ocean in a similar style, it is no wonder that Columbus ended up only making it half way there suffering through a number of endless caribbean cruises before making landfall.

  My point is that as you go back in time and read writing that was written years and years and years ago different things seem important. Different subjective requirements come in to play in the writing and in the reading. The lack of objectivity leaves future readers at a loss for the detail that they need to make heads or tails out of text and information. It’s an important example of why the objectivity is important in writing scientific information. The subject of writing is also important in the two can be balanced what they need to be labeled such that future readers will understand those items that were understood to be fact as opposed to those items that were still under speculation.

• Beauty and Strength of the Foot
  
  

  Beauty and Strength of the Foot. — not only does the foot, too, frequently sustain heavy weights, but it must carry them as well. It likewise affords a firm support. Were it not for this beautiful mechanism, the constant jarring a concussion which would be experienced in the act of walking would inevitably destroy these delicate organs, the brain and spinal cord, and death would immediately follow. How few persons and civilized nations have perfectly natural feat! The beauty and utility of the human foot is marred; its movements are impeded by encasement and unnatural boots and shoes; these, instead of conforming to the form and shape of the foot, make the foot of death itself to them. The consequences corns, bunions, cross toes, in-growing toenails, large joints, and a number of other evils from which so many suffer the present day.

  And that sections ends another section of non-sense.  I am looking forward to the further sections of the book that actually conveys some knowledge.  You couldn’t find useful information in this section of the book with a GPS device.

• Duty of the Throat
  
  

  Duty of the Throat.- the muscular bands of the throat now grasp it and pass it down the gullet into the stomach, beyond our control.  Here it comes into contact with the gastric juice, undergoes the churning motion of the stomach, discarded over by the pylorus, thoroughly saturated in mixed before entering into the intestinal tract, where it is subjected to the action of the file, the pancreatic juice and the intestinal fluid each with its special duty to perform.

   

  Again nothing terribly exciting here in this section but the next one will take us into “Nature’s Treasures Opened to Man”.