The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 7, 1901, Page 3

THE SUNDAY CALL. OXME obscure quackery,” Y said S when I started out to find Os- teopath: Then, when the number was given me— “In the smart Sutter-street dis- trict,” I reflected, “where it is good form to take one’s ailments. For the sake of engraving that address on its card, Osteopathy hangs out a shingle in 2 back room. The shingle an- nounces ‘2 to 4 p. m.” because that gives a importance, and Os- teopathy s on coffee and doughnuts and wishes it dare receive patients the other 22 hours.” I was looking to see a room split ip two by a screen. I was looking for & piece of furn: e, outwardly any- thing from wardrobe to parlor organ and inwardly folding bed. Not a bit of it. Osteopathy occupies the whole building represented by its Sutter- street number. I awaited Diplomat in a reception room where I saw mir- rored full-lengths of myself framed in gold on every side and where I could not hear my own feet fall for the velvety depths of the carpet. The cheirs were sleek and portly and bro- caded “You look prosperous here,” I said to the Diplomat. He rubbed his silky hands to- gether & prosperous way and smiled a prosperous smile. “We are,” he replied, and opened his deinty Russia leather appoint- ment’ book. It was overflowing. That ust the trouble. Osteo- pathy, like every other form of cure, is far too prosperous. Osteopathy is no doubt all right; after ell the Di- plomat’s beautiful explanations of the bodily mechanism and the way its wheels and levers should be put in or , I can’t but believe that it is all right. There could” be nothing more plausible; the mechanism of your body is cut of order just as that of your bicycle might be; Osteopathy keeps 2 repair shop where you can drop in with your body and have it repaired while you wait. But it is still another encourager of silments. This town and every other town of America is full of them. There are the orthodox prac- tioners, r upon tier of them, in the downtown office buildings. There are the # A frect= ~nd isms, seat. S PATSING I Coravicie w FELIEVING 5 L #EaRT ( ‘7ZROVBLE. .flfl\ % NV A A X %, tered here, there and everywnere. There are too many of them doirg thriving businesses. There can’t te enough real zilments in this town of 350,000 people to pay the rent ot all these suites of offices and to kezp up =21l those swagger, professional rigs. The trouble i largely supported by unres We have so many of them they are such pampered pets. lavish on them sll we can afford and nsually a good deal more. The doc- tors are not in the leact to blame— they don’t rob us, but our pets do. The doctors are a very scasible lot to take advantage of our folly. We tooiz our ailments th= rounds of allopathy £nd homeopathy and then we tried Christian Science and various mental healings and now we are treating them to Osteopathy. I used to have a throat that was the darling of my heart. I did it up in a cozy mink skin in the winter and in a fluffy ostrich boa in the summer. Minks and ostriches charge high, toc. for their coverings. I took my throat tv Chicago and gave it a five-dollar-a- peep specialist. When it was tired of him, I hired others and bought out drugstores. I treated it like a spoiled child. It ran up immense bills for me, and for a while I worried abou~ them, but in the end I learned phi!- osophy. The last bill was so big that I knew it must be meant as a joke, so I threw it in the waste basket and decided to take the joke all in good part and always to speak pleasantly to the joker when I met him. By that time I was tired of bror- chitis and tonmsilitis. I had gone the round of cures and it occurred to me that I had done enough. So I gave up my throat, cut its acquaintance, foergot that it existed, and the result ie that I have never heard from it since. It is a sorry fact to own that we women have more of these cherished 2ilments than men have. A man doesn’t often develop them unless his wife is the kind that runs after him armed with a bottle of liniment in one hand and a mustard plaster in the other; then he feels that he must pro- vide targets for her weapons. It is left for some of our sex to assemble and compare notes over the teacups on headaches. Most men con- sider ailments the wunimportant things of life because they are the disagreeable ones. A man said to me the other day: > N T AR R 280N NN\ N = SRR OI L SN N 7N 2> ’QI N DRAKIK QWE OF “T often feel like a brute wnen my sister tells me about her achss and pains, because I can’t sympathize with her. Sometimes I get so tirad of hearing about them that I walk away. I suppose I should be thrashed.” “No, you shouldn’t,” I said, for I knew that the girl did not know what real suffering was. “Your walk- ing away is the best tonic she could have. Men always will walk away from troubles and there’s no way that they can help us more. It makes us feel very much ashamed and we de- cide to be more game the next time. We give cach other too much mushy sympathy; if you men can help us to forget our small ailments by ignoring them, you are doing missionary work.” Goodness only knows there are enough broken bones and brain con- gestions and pneumonias in the world —quite enough to help us find out cur friends. As for the unreal ones, they are a bore to others and ought to be to ourselves. I have the kind- est regard for all the doctors I know, osteopathic and otherwise, but I think we should be better off if more of them had to give up their rigs and ride in five-cent street cars. At present, some of us are doing 80 in order to pay their bills. SARAH COMSTOCK. SN SR WIS INUN TN ISININET R NHRRRIKIORY SFINAI TREATMENT .3 YA THE STEOPATHY—AIll stwuff ana now- sense, says one. A mere bone-pul! ing proposition. A leg-pulling on as well. Osteopathy—A Gangerous thina because a break from the beaten path say the more serious-minded opposers. Osteopathy—The only possible system of healing, say the devotees. At any rate, all acknowledge that it is worth fighting about, and that proves that it is no unimportant system of Kill- ing or curing, whichever it may be. Well-known people all over the United States are taking it up and introduecing it to their families. Among them are Mrs. Carrie/Nation and Mark Twain. The for- mer has an ax out for anybody that dares disapprove of it while she is around. The latter told 4000 people In the Albany Assembly chamber that osteo- pathy ought to have the right to practice if it wanted to. The State of New York was divided against itself in the matter. What Mark said was this: “The State stands like a Gibraltar for spiritual liberty, and it should stand for bodily liberty. You have a right to doctor your soul in any way you please, evea to its everlasting death. Why should the State step in with this matter of smalier consequence? Don't let us whittle our liberties down. “Drive the osteopaths out of the State and it will be the old story of the Garden of Eden. Adam didn’t need the apple, but when it was prohibited he sinned to get it. As sure as you prohibit osteopaths, CAL.COLLEGE \OSTEORP TiHY we will be bound to have them. I didn’t care a fig about them till I heard of this bill. T may want more than one osteopath, because had the Ciemens tribe been in the Garden of Eden they would have tak- en the whole crop of apples.” Other States besides New York have squabbled over the same thing, and in ten of them the new practice of healihg as come out ahead. California is at last on the list of those legalizing the practice, and, in consequence, osteopathy is flour- ishing hereabouts like the green bay tree. San Francisco has a sanitarium and a college, where, after a two years’ course, students may be graduated to the degree of D. O., which means Diplomat or Dac- tor ‘of Osteopathy, as you like. REDUCING K ANTERIOFR CUFRVAITURE WALLS oF CHES All over the country It is being heard of, and is gaining converts every day. Besides those already named, such famous people as the Forakers, Governors Tan- ner, Stevens, Grout, Lee and Shaw, ex- Governor Pingree, Daniel Frohman—these are all on the list. In our own city Charles Paxton and Charles. Fish are among those who have been won over. It's time to know what osteopathy means. As a matter of fact it is thirty years old, but only lately has anybody paid at- tention to it. Old Dr. Still of Kirksville, Mo., was the man who made it and named it, and he started other men to working out what he was pretty vague about. He named the system osteopathy, from. “‘osteon,” which means bone. and “pathos,” which means disease, but the idea of bome disease is so narrow a one that the modern osteopaths would like to charge the name if 1t hadn't already be- come a fixture. Dr. Still had some sort of an idea that all disease was In the bone and could be treated accordingly but his followers don’t hold to that. Th say that he had an inkling of the real thing and that they are elaborating it. He nointed out the way and they are grading it. The chances are that they are reaping the rewards, too. In the vear 1871 Dr. Still lost three chil- dren within twenty-four hours. They all dled of spinal meningitis. Something was wrong with medicine, he told himself. The children might have been saved. So he began to experiment and in time he worked out a system by which he claimed and believed that disease could he cured. His reasoning was this: By the displacement of a bene the blood or nerve supply of the body is interfered with and disease results. Remove the ob- struction by plgcing the hony parts of the bedy in perfect order and health returns. All this was well enough in its way, but there was not enough of ft. Evidently the bomes could not be made responsible for every ill that flesh is heir to. So the followers of Dr. Still enlarged upon his theory. They sald The principles ap- plied to the osseous system are equally applicable to every system of the body. Then if 2all the systéms of the body are uneokstrreted in their work they will per- form their functions perfectly, health will be certain, and man will need no remedial agency whatever. If a policeman finds a street obstructed by a disorderly crowd, he sayvs “Move on.” The physician who finds the system of the body obstructed says “Move on” to the obstruction. The way that the osteopath does this is by manipulation. He has the trick of kneading down very much finer than any masseur that pretends to do the same. If you compare his treatment to massage he will look at you in a way not friendly. and you will feel a chill in the atmosphers until you have covered up your blunders. “The difference,” he will explain ielly, “is that massage is a general system of manipulation without any specific end in view, and is usually practiced by per- sons who wouldn’t understand the science of the body If it were explained to them.” Then he will explain to you how he presses upon a nerve, usually in the spine, and how this pressure. by means of the sympathetic nerves, reaches in its effects the part of the body where the obstruc- tion has occurred. The proper manipula- tion or pressure causes a stimulation that results in the “moving on’ of the obstruc- tion. These sympathetic nerves are the means of reaching those organs that cannot be directly wrought upon by manfpulation. The solar plexus is the center of them. How are you going to regulate matters without medicine? There are nerve cen- ters In the spine; these connect by & per- fect telegraph system with the vital or- gans. Then throw away your medicine bottles, say the osteopaths, let us lay you on an operating table and we will inhibit the nerves along your spine, or frrita‘e them. as the need may be. Maybe you don’t believe it, but we can reach your digestive organs that way and settle in short order with that lobster salad that you stowed away after midnight. The body, says Dr. Potter, is like a clock. If all the wheels and springs are in good running order it will take care of itself. They can be put In order by keep- ing up th2 circulation and the activity of the nerve forces. Every druggist in the country is apply- inz his Httle hammer to the osteopaths, for they are smashing his bottles for him as if they were all Mrs. Nations apd his goods were all gin. They don’t do it with a hatchet; they merely tell you that he is selling vou poison, and they can cure you by other and far pleasanter means. There is no doubt that it Is far nicer to lie down comfortably and be rubbed and kneaded and stroked until you feel like a sleepy kitten than to pour down brown doses and gulp pills, ome after each meal and at bedtime. “The blood is the life” they quote, and it can’t be set in order by the use of drugs. As for heart diseases, they sav, the current practice is to treat the pa- dent with some of the cardiac poisons or heart paralyzers, seeking to control the heart’s action, when the heart is doing the best it can under the abnormal condi- {ions existing elsewhere. Probably by far the most commenly used of these poisons is digitalis, yet Dunglison in his medical dictionary says of this polson that “it is cumulative in its action, and that in over- doses it causes vomiting, purging, dimness of sight, vertigo, delirfuia, kiccough. con- vulsiens and death—all the symptoms, in short, which characterize the acronar- cotlc class of polsons.” Dr. J. M. Smith, they add, ofithe New York College of Physicians and Surgeons says of digitalis: “It has hurried thou- sands to the grave. All medicines which enter the circulation poison the blood In the same manner as do the poisons that produce disease.” Then the diplcmat repeats: No drugs ex- cept toxic antidotes and anesthetics. The druggists hate him, and no wonder. Wa use mechanical therapeutics. And he epells it with an upper-case M and T. He makes a tig point of the claim that there are no sorry effects from their treatmer: There are no stimulaats to react from, no poisorous drugs for the system to recover from. Old Dr. Still invented the thing in Mis- souri, but it is being talked about from coast to ccast, and one of its representa- tives, Dr. Littlejohn, has read a paper about it before a society in London. So if it keeps on at this rate it looks as If the druggists would have to throw out all thelr stock except stamps. telephones and the directory. &edding Rings- Wedding rings are not always plain gold circlets. During the last few years a large number of couples have adopted a ring- made in two parts. When worn, it looks like an ordifary gold ring, with an almost imperceptible joint. The idea, which originated in Germany, was that, in the event of the wife becoming a widow, cnme part of the ring would be taken off and the remaining narrow band of gold would be a constant reminder of her loss. The Germans used to make the manner in which the ring was worn of signif- cance. Thus, if a young man wished to marry, he wore a ring on the first finger of his left hand; if engaged, he put it on the second finger; if married, on the third; it he preferred to remain single he wore it on his little finger. The woman sn- nounced her Intention In the same man- ner on her right hand.