Etiology : Part 1

Appendicitis
by John Henry Tilden

(Page 2 of 14)

To understand the cause of appendicitis we must go back to the beginning, and when we do we find that it starts just where all diseases start, namely, where health leaves off! When the laws of health are broken for the first time, it can be said that the individual has started on the road of ill health. How fast he will travel and just what will be the character of the disease he meets with will depend upon his constitution, inheritance, environment and education. I do not mean by education, school or book education; I mean intuition - that knowledge which evolves from home life and habits. I mean, has he any self-discipline?

Does he know anything about self-denial? Has he any conception of a control higher than impulse? Has he been brought up to know that there is a limit to the gratifying of wants and desires beyond which, if he goes, he must make good with laws that are as exacting as they are invariable? Does he know that nature shows no favoritism? Does he know that there are laws regulating his intercourse with men - with everything - that exact absolute justice from him? And that, if he takes advantage of weakness or ignorance because he can, or if he secures an advantage through credulity or trickery, he must settle for the crime before a judge who is absolutely just!

If he has this education, which is a constitutional ingrafting from the mother's blood, fructified by a like potential father, he will be almost immune from all diseases. This is an education that can not be secured unless the individual has the prenatal and environing influences to differentiate these static attributes of his nature, and, if he has, the result will be that all these qualities will come to him because "like attracts like." In an atmosphere where others attract evil this individual attracts good. The same is true on the physical plane. Those who have diseased bodies always have disease making habits, hence they attract from a given environment all the disease making impulses, while those of healthy bodies have health imparting habits, and attract from the same environment the health impulses for which they have an affinity.

The constitution, inheritance and education of all mankind will vary from the highest to the lowest types. As we go down the scale from those with ideal physical and mental health, we see man becoming more and more the victim of disease.

It is no uncommon thing to find people of seeming intelligence who appear surprised when told that they have brought upon themselves such a vulnerable state of health from wrong eating and care of their bodies that they are in line for appendicitis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, bowel obstruction, or blood poisoning. In such types blood poisoning would surely follow a complicated fracture of a bone - a fracture where the ends of the bone cut through the flesh causing an open wound.

Pregnant women belonging to this class go into confinement with their blood so heavily charged with the by-products of an imperfect metabolism that they are very liable to have septicemia.

People who think they must have "three square meals a day" must have catarrh, rheumatism, tonsilitis, quinsy, pneumonia, typhoid fever, and all sorts of bowel trouble including appendicitis. Why! Because three meals a day consisting of bread, potatoes, eggs, meat, fish, butter, milk, cheese, beans, etc., overwork the metabolic function and as a consequence organic functioning is impaired, cell proliferation falls below the ideal, bodily resistance falls lower and lower, the intestinal secretions lose their immunizing power more and more, until at last the body becomes the victim of every adverse influence. At first fermentation - indigestion - shows occasionally; the intervals between these attacks of acid stomach, or fermentation, grow shorter and shorter until they are of daily occurrence; accompanying this fermentation there is gas distention of the bowels, and this inflation in time interferes with their motility and weakens them so that sluggishness is succeeded by obstinate constipation.

Every step of this evolution shows an increasing toxic state of the fluids in the bowels. After constipation is established the efforts at securing evacuations are of such a nature as to irritate the cecum. Drugs to force movement cause painful distentions of this portion of the bowels. The drugs stimulate peristalsis of the small intestine; each wave from the small intestine breaks on the walls of the cecum, for the colon is loaded with fecal accumulations so that the onrushing contents of the small intestine can not be received by the colon; hence the force of the whole peristaltic impact is spent on the cecum, which must endanger the integrity of the mucosa as well as the musculature.

This point of the bowels, the cecum is more endangered from diarrhea than any other. The toxic ptomaines are especially liable to create a local infection if nothing more.

This state of the intestines - toxic state - is a constant menace to health; in fact the organism is heavily taxed to maintain its defense.

The overcrowding of metabolism, as explained above, the chronic constipation and toxic bowel secretions, I recognize as the chief factors - the necessary and leading factors - in the building and maintaining of that constitutional state which I am pleased to denominate Constitutional Catarrh. When this state is established, it can be said that the individual is ready to develop any phase of disease that circumstance, accident, or caprice of fortune or environment may offer.

The constant presence of gas in the bowels becomes more and more menacing to the cecum as the constipation increases. The filled-up condition of the bowels - the colon and rectum - prevents the easy passage of gas from the bowels, hence it accumulates in the ileo-cecal region and keeps the cecum distended.