Cause for Bright's Disease. -- it has long seemed probable that the increasing prevalence of that terribly fatal malady, "Bright's disease," especially in cities and large towns, maybe due to the poisonous effects of exceeding minute quantities of lead, dissolved from the lead pipes so generally employed as service conduits, notwithstanding the protective coating, which usually forms so promptly upon them.

In the year 2008, this paragraph would seem like something rather obvious. But it is remarkable to look back in time and see how people consider the potential for this problem to exist, before science had proven it out. We sometimes forget that our knowledge is built on many many different precursors and actions that were taken before we came to be. Humanity learns its lessons from the people that come before it and the actions that they take. Sometimes they learn those lessons quickly, and sometimes they learned those lessons very slowly, whether they are trying to understand lead poisoning or come up with better egg nog recipes. This is one of the reasons why history is so important for us to study, not only do we get to learn some of the items from the past to avoid making the same mistakes, we get to learn how people in the past recognize the problem and dealt with it so that we can recognize and deal with new problems today.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Wonders of Sight, Hearing, Touch and Locomotion
  
  

  Next we will start to explore Chart III.  This is a relatively short section and it will conclude book 1 on the Human body. 

  Just to give you a little hint of what is to come, each section here seems to kick off with the description of “something” and Its Wonders.

  Example

  The Eye and Its Wonders

  The Ear and Its Wonders

  The Hand its Mechanisms and its Wonderful Endowments

  I’m not making that up.  You’ll see . . .

• Giving up of Oxygen
  
  

  Before I begin this next section, I wanted to point out the title it has a most curious title. I can’t wait to figure learn what it might mean. It sounds as if someone might give up an addiction, however I believe that addiction was not understood 90 years ago as it is today. Although people did work to give up ‘vices’ that today are known to be addictive such as alcohol, tobacco, opiates and other items.
  

  Giving up of Oxygen. –the atmospheric air laden with its life-sustaining property, oxygen, having passed in to the lungs, gives up that vital element and receives in its place the carbonic acid gas, water, and other refuse materials which the blood is picked up in its journey through the body, and which are no longer fitted to circulate in the blood and preserve the vitality of the body. No tonic invigorates so well as a few, deep, full inspirations of pure, cold air.

  ________________

  well I didn’t expect what I received in that section. The last sentence though definitely sounds a little bit hokey. Older maybe invigorating, but that doesn’t certainly make it healthy. It just makes a cold.

  Oddly there are a few unscientific studies that have been circulated over the last decade or two that offer a contrarian exception that heat therapy might actually be good for a person that is sick. I suspect that the correct answer is that the body needs or prefers a stable temperature that is neither too hot nor too cold in order to remain healthy or regain health.

• Quantity and Variety of Foods
  
  

  Quantity and Variety of Foods.  — as we have already seen, the human body consists of numerous mechanics or artisans, who are constantly at work repairing and upbuilding the unceasing destruction that is continually going on.  If fresh food be not daily supplied, this work would soon cease, and the lamp of life flicker out.  To replace this constant waste we required nearly 3 pounds of solid food, and fully 3 pounds of liquid food for our daily allowance.  But to convert the pent-up energies of bread, meat and vegetables into the tissues of our own mechanism require a number of differently constructed organs, and these we now desire to draw your attention to this beautiful chart.  The organs consist of the stomach, liver, pancreas and intestines, which comprise the principal organs concerned in the process of digestion.

  – — – — – —

  In 2007 I can hardly imagine what eating 3 pounds of food a day might be like, and I tend to eat a lot having a very high metabolism.  For example I had two waffles for breakfast, two products on hot dog buns for supper and to bananas today.  I think the total of all that food combined may have been a pound for pound and a half if you don’t count the banana peels.  To put it differently, I can’t quite imagine eating six half pound cheeseburgers every day.  Not to mention the half pound cheeseburgers that you get a fast food place like Wendy’s, are weighed before they’re cooked and not after.  So a half pound cheeseburgers going to weigh less when you eat it because they took out some of the crease and fat, but probably not enough.

  Drinking 3 pounds of liquid definitely caught my attention.  There have been many references over the years to the US nutritional food pyramid.  By many accounts the pyramid has been traced to some Washington, DC bureaucrat that came up with a concept that a person needs to drink eight glasses of water every day.  To my knowledge, no one has come up with any scientific basis for why that Washington bureaucrat would chose an eight glasses as opposed to five or 10, or even just stating that a person should drink as often as they are thirsty.  Now I’m curious to learn if 3 pounds of water equates to approximately 8 glasses of water.  This book was published in 1916 and the food pyramid was was written up in the 1930s approximately 14 years later.

  Is it possible that I found an early reference in this medical textbook that may have been the basis for that quackery prescribing eight glasses of water every day?

  It definitely could be possible as this to tomb of a book was definitely reference material that I could envision a bureaucrat pulling off a shelf of the Library of Congress, what better book than the Library of Health to be found in the Library of Congress.  I don’t expect ultimately be accredited with finding the source for that quackery anymore than you or I expect to find a publisher’s clearing House letter in our Mailboxes containing an actual check for $1 million.