Preventable Diseases | Page 9

meet it; and, of course, as everywhere the medal
of honor has its reverse side, their power for evil is as distinguished as
their power for good. From their ranks are recruited a whole army of
those secessions from and rebellions against the body at large--the
tumors, from the treacherous and deadly sarcoma, or "soft cancer," to
the harmless fatty tumor, as well as the tubercle, the gumma of syphilis,
the interstitial fibrosis of Bright's disease. They are the sturdy farmers
and ever ready "minute-men" of the cell-republic, and we find their
prototype and parallel in the external world, both in material structure
and degree of vitality, in the well-known sponge and its colonies.
Next in order, and, in fact, really forming a branch of the last, we find
the great group of storage-tissues, the granaries or bankers of the
body-politic, distinguished primarily, like the capitalist class elsewhere,
by an inordinate appetite, not to say greed. They sweep into their
interior all the food-materials which are not absolutely necessary for
the performance of the vital function of the other cells. These they form
first into protoplasm, and then by a simple degenerative process it is
transformed, "boiled down" as it were, into a yellow hydrocarbon
which is capable of storage for practically an indefinite period. Not a
very exalted function, and yet one of great importance to the welfare of
the entire body, for, like the Jews of the Middle Ages, the fat-cells,
possessing an extraordinary appetite for and faculty of acquiring
surplus wealth in times of plenty, can easily be robbed of it and literally
sucked dry in times of scarcity by any other body-cell which happens to

need it, especially by the belligerent military class of muscle-cells. In
fever or famine, fat is the first element of our body-mass to disappear;
so that Proudhon would seem to have some biological basis for his
demand for the per capita division of the fortunes of millionaires. And
yet, rid the fat-cell of the weight of his sordid gains, gaunt him down,
as it were, like a hound for the wolf-trail, and he becomes at once an
active and aggressive member of the binding-stuff group, ready for the
repair of a wound or the barring out of a tubercle-bacillus.
And this form of specialization has also its parallel outside of the body
in one of the classes in a community of Mexican ants, whose most
distinguishing feature is an enormously distended [oe]sophagus,
capable of containing nearly double the weight of the entire remainder
of the body. They are neither soldiers nor laborers, but accompany the
latter in their honey-gathering excursions, and as the spoils are
collected they are literally packed full of the sweets by the workers.
When distended to their utmost capacity they fall apparently into a
semi-comatose condition, are carried into the ant-hill, and hung up by
the hind legs in a specially prepared chamber, in which (we trust)
enjoyable position and state they are left until their contents are needed
for the purposes of the community, when they are waked up, compelled
to disgorge, and resume their ordinary life activities until the next
season's honey-gathering begins. It scarcely need be pointed out what
an unspeakable boon to the easily discouraged and unlucky the
introduction of such a class as this into the human industrial
community would be, especially if this method of storage could be
employed for certain liquids.
Another most important class in the cell-community is the great group
of the blood-corpuscles, which in some respects appear to maintain
their independence and freedom to a greater degree than almost any
other class which can be found in the body. While nearly all other cells
have become packed or felted together so as to form a fixed and solid
tissue, these still remain entirely free and unattached. They float at
large in the blood-current, much as their original ancestor, the am[oe]ba,
did in the water of the stagnant ditch. And, curiously enough, the less
numerous of the two great classes, the white, or leucocytes, are in

appearance, structure, pseudopodic movements, and even method of
engulfing food, almost exact replicas of their most primitive ancestor.
There is absolutely no fixed means of communication between the
blood-corpuscles and the rest of the body, not even by the tiniest
branch of the great nerve-telegraph system, and yet they are the most
loyal and devoted class among all the citizens of the cell-republic. They
are called hither and thither partly by messenger-substances thrown into
the blood, known as hormones, partly by the "smell of the battle afar
off," the toxins of inflammation and infection as they pour through the
blood.
The red ones lose their nuclei, their individuality, in order to become
sponges, capable of saturating themselves with oxygen and carrying it
to the