Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/552

548 muscular exertion such as lifting. Nor should activities be sudden and severe, otherwise the danger of a false step and a fall may result in a shock or fracture or both. Nor is it important nor desirable that the muscles should be kept at their full strength, even if it were possible. The quality of musculature is mainly desirable for the purpose of oxygenation and to maintain full skin activity, freedom from stiffness and the consequent compression upon the blood vessels and nerves. In short, the component parts of the machine in healthy old age are slowly and equally weakened. They fail to respond to calls, the centers giving out less early than the outer parts, but these same centers should be maintained at their best for so long as it is possible. Finally the wheels of the machine stop. This slow decline is really a beautiful spectacle and requires the sheltering influences of civilization and sympathetic care. In the state of primitive society man died even as the animals and birds die, the one by the hand of the stronger. When assailed by sickness or age, death came swiftly from one or another agency of nature, either from animal or man. In civilization much vigor can be conserved indefinitely, or at least to well toward the century mark, provided the aged persons exercise judgment in the manner of life lived; and if cut off before a reasonable time the fault lies within themselves or their circumstances. In this slower decline it is more possible for disease and decay to become manifest, but even here prevention is a large possibility. If the heart, or the digestive organs, shall be kept disproportionately vigorous they will overload and press the other organs, and one of these, the weaker one, gives way.

The use of inorganic drugs has little place in relieving the grave disorders of the old. When these are found in the form of the natural mineral waters they have, since time immemorial, been held in high esteem for definite and indisputable good effects, the nature of which has never been satisfactorily explained. Modern studies on the physiology of the blood, especially of the serum, helps to account for this. Recently Trunecek, of Prague, has announced a method of treating the phenomena of arteriosclerosis which has been not only most successful, but suggestive, and seems to me to throw light on the value of mineral waters which will prove a rich field for research. His thesis is that certain salts can be introduced into the blood current which shall aid in dissolving the calcium phosphate found in the structure of the sclerosed vessels. Hence he adopted the plan of throwing into the circulation direct, by hypodermoclysis or intravenously, a strong solution of sodium phosphate and magnesium phosphate which are found normally in blood serum but only in minute quantities. His followers have obtained gratifying results, and many modifications are made of his original solution. Leopold Levi used this by the bowel and the mouth and it was found that the latter gave just as good effects.

Under this treatment the usual discomforts and evidences of