Dr Jaeger's essays on health-culture / Gustav Jaeger ; translated and edited by Lewis R.S. Tomalin.

  • Gustav Jäger
Date:
1887
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr Jaeger's essays on health-culture / Gustav Jaeger ; translated and edited by Lewis R.S. Tomalin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the mechanism; the skin of the patient feels either too hot or too cold, and the flesh is flabby. Che}?iically, the observer smells that the exhalation of the patient has become more intense and mal-odorous ; and, if he take the trouble to test the patient’s skin with his tongue, he will find that, corresponding with the bad taste in the mouth of which the patient complains, the objective impression on the taste is bad. If we now compare the healthy man, we find his movements to be quick, regular and certain, the expression of the face is regular, the hair is glossy, the voice powerful and clear, the temperature of the skin is normal, the flesh firm, and his exhalation is free from offence to the senses of smell and taste. When we consider the above- named essential characteristics, the views of the prevailing School of Medicine are found to be deficient, as summed up by Virchow’s statement, that “Diseaseis a dynamic phenomenon.” For the differences between Disease and Health are not simply of a dynamic, i.e. a physical kind— these conditions can be distinguished not only by means of the eye, the ear, and the touch—but they are equally of a chemical nature, and are patent to our chemical senses. And inasmuch as the prevailing School of Medicine makes no use of the chemical senses in the examination of diseases, but only hears, sees, and feels, it permits the element of matter, whence proceeds the physical disturbance of movement—i.e. that which is physical—to escape it and the School fails to recog- nise the substance of the disease, the materia peccans. I shall each other, or, ia technical phrase, re-act on each other. So soon as the voIuntaiV movements undergo through disease a laming influence, the breathing and circulation endeavour by accelerated activity to assist the voluntary apparatus: hence the contrast. But in spite of this divergence, the voluntary and the involuntary move- ments correspond in one particular: in health they are regular, in sickness irregular.
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