Preventable Diseases | Page 8

no matter how stereotyped, or toil-worn, or
even degraded, the individual cells of any tissue may have become,
they still retain most of the rights and privileges which they originally
possessed in their free and untrammeled am[oe]boid stage, just as in the
industrial community of the world about us. And, although their
industry in behalf of and devotion to the welfare of the entire organism
is ever to be relied upon, and almost pathetic in its intensity, yet it has
its limits, and when these have been transgressed they are as ready to
"fight for their own hand," regardless of previous conventional
allegiance, as ever were any of their ancestors on seashore or
rivulet-marge. And such rebellions are our most terrible
disease-processes, cancer and sarcoma. More than this: while, perhaps,
in the majority of cases the cell does yeoman service for the benefit of
the body, in consideration of the rations and fuel issued to it by the
latter, yet in many cases we have the curious, and at first sight almost
humiliating, position of the cell absorbing and digesting whatever is
brought to it, and only turning over the surplus or waste to the body. It
would almost seem as if our lordly Ego was living upon the
waste-products, or leavings, of the cells lining its food-tube.
Let us take a brief glance at the various specializations and trade
developments, which have taken place in the different groups of cells,
and see to what extent the profound modifications which many of them
have undergone are consistent with their individuality and
independence, and also whether such specialization can be paralleled
by actually separate and independent organisms existing in animal
communities outside of the body. First of all, because furthest from the
type and degraded to the lowest level, we find the great masses of
tissue welded together by lime-salts, which form the foundation masses,

leverage-bars, and protection plates for the higher tissues of the body.
Here the cells, in consideration of food, warmth, and protection
guaranteed to themselves and their heirs for ever by the body-state,
have, as it were, deliberately surrendered their rights of volition, of
movement, and higher liberties generally, and transformed themselves
into masses of inorganic material by soaking every thread of their
tissues in lime-salts and burying themselves in a marble tomb. Like
Esau, they have sold their birthright for a mess of "potash," or rather
lime; and if such a class or caste could be invented in the external
industrial community, the labor problem and the ever-occurring puzzle
of the unemployed would be much simplified. And yet, petrified and
mummified as they have become, they are still emphatically alive, and
upon the preservation of a fair degree of vigor in them depends entirely
the strength and resisting power of the mass in which they are
embedded, and of which they form scarcely a third. Destroy the vitality
of its cells, and the rock-like bone will waste away before the attack of
the body-fluids like soft sandstone under the elements. Shatter it, or
twist it out of place, and it will promptly repair itself, and to a
remarkable degree resume its original directions and proportions.
So little is this form of change inconsistent with the preservation of
individualism, that we actually find outside of the body an exactly
similar process, occurring in individual and independent animals, in the
familiar drama of coral-building. The coral polyp saturates itself with
the lime-salts of the sea-water, much as the bone-corpuscles with those
of the blood and lymph, and thus protects itself in life and becomes the
flying buttress of a continent in death.
In the familiar connective-tissue, or "binding-stuff," we find a process
similar in kind but differing in the degree, so to speak, of its
degradation.
The quivering responsiveness of the protoplasm of the am[oe]boid
ancestral cell has transformed itself into tough, stringy bands and webs
for the purpose of binding together the more delicate tissues of the
body. It has retained more of its rights and privileges, and consequently
possesses a greater amount of both biological and pathological

initiative. In many respects purely mechanical in its function, fastening
the muscles to the bones, the bones to each other, giving toughness to
the great skin-sheet, and swinging in hammock-like mesh the precious
brain-cell or potent liver-lobule, it still possesses and exercises for the
benefit of the body considerable powers of discretion and aggressive
vital action. Through its activity chiefly is carried out that miracle of
human physiology, the process of repair. By the transformation of its
protoplasm the surplus food-materials of the times of plenty are stored
away within its cell-wall against the time of stress.
Whatever emergency may arise, nature, whatever other forces she may
be unable to send to the rescue, can always depend upon the
connective-tissues to