Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/198

 None of these functions must be overworked, as none of them must fall short of their proper duty. Healthy, regular, daily action is their law of life. If the brain and nervous system are overworked, vitality is lowered, the resisting power of the body is diminished, disease is easily produced. If the brain and nervous system are underworked, the generation of nervous power is low and deficient, the vitality of the tissues becomes low in proportion, and disease is easily excited. Overwork exhausts, ruins, kills the body, just as the continued generation of the galvanic current exhausts the acid and wears out the zinc plate. The weakest point of the body has to bear the result of this violation of Nature's laws. If the heart is that point, disease falls upon it, and death before the legitimate term of man's existence is the consequence.

To keep the body in perfect health it must be duly oxygenated. There must be free and ample interchange between the blood in the lungs and the air entering the pulmonary cells. The life-stream must be purified by its elimination of carbonic acid; it must be vivified by the absorption of oxygen. The fulfilment of these conditions demands a full, free, and constant admission of pure air into the lungs. This full, free, and constant admission of pure air cannot be obtained in badly-ventilated houses, crowded buildings, schools as at present constructed, theatres, manufactories, pits, underground railways, and the like.

When the body has reached that age at which natural decay or degeneration has begun, the absence of pure air hastens and increases the degenerative tendency. Where the heart is more prone than other organs to disease, the want of pure air falls with powerful effect upon the tissues of the right heart. Their nutrition is defective by reason of the impurity of the blood with which they are fed, their vital force is lowered, their muscular fibre loses its tonicity, degeneration and debility take the place of active nutrition and power. If in this condition any stress is thrown upon the heart by hurried walking, by lifting, climbing, violent declamation, passional expression, singing, laughing, or by any unusual exercise of the voice, the tricuspid valve gives way, it henceforth fails to close its aperture, and the results of a back-flooding of blood upon the venous system of the body begin to follow. If none of these exciting causes occur, the continued breathing of impure air is followed by constantly-progressing degeneration of the tissues of the valves and muscular structure of the right heart; they become soft and feeble, their atoms shrink; the segments of the tricuspid are at length unable to meet in their attempt to close their aperture; a small chink or slit is left between them; through this the blood finds its way into the auricle above at every contraction of the heart; and soon regurgitation is followed by the secondary consequences produced in the general system—congestion of the liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys, bowels—by hæmorrhoids, general dropsy, and occasionally by cerebral mischief.