| OCR Text |
Show Why We Behave Like Human Beings By GEORGE DOHSEY. Ph. D LL. D. DEATH AS AN "ADVANTAGEOUS "ADVAN-TAGEOUS ADAPTATION" X7 EISM ANN held that death Is an "advantageous adaptation." For what? To whom? Looks like nonsense. Osier said that man Is as old as his arteries. There was enough truth In this to make it take. It means even less to say that man Is as old as his endocrine glands. Arteries and glands are as old as the man. Metchlnlkoff held that because of "disharmonies" In the body, the phagocytes devoted too much time to eating pigment In hair and too little to the bacterial flora of our digestive tract Result: fermentation, fermenta-tion, poison, death. Puberty Is a period, but a kind of sex life begins at birth ; for many, real sexual maturity never comes. So It is with adults; some are more adult in body and mind at fifteen than others at thirty-five;, some hurry through to senility before be-fore body and mind have become fully adult. Normal old age Is physiological ; It Is no more a disease dis-ease than adolescence, and should be as agreeable. In pathologic old age, 3enillty Is premature and Is a disease. The seat of the disease may be anywhere or may be due to some bacterial Infection. In natural death, we die by Inches. But while there is only one path by which we may enter the world, as Pearl points out In his remarkable book on death, there are many that lead to the River Styx. Death does not strike at random, ran-dom, but In an orderly way and there are many ways of dying. We die when an essential part of our body breaks down. - From an analysis of the mortality mortal-ity tables of England and Wales, the United States, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, Pearl found that over half the deaths In all three countries are due to faulty wind and food canals. While both canals are inside in-side the body, they come In contact con-tact with air, food and water from the outside. The skin also Is exposed ex-posed to the world, but It Is armor-plate against foreign invasion. inva-sion. Wind and food canals have no such protecting layer of pavement pave-ment cells as has the skin. Outer skin and lining of wind and food canals constitute the body's first line of defense against invasion of bacteria. The next chief cause of death is the circulatory system ; the blood Is the body's second line of defense. When tie first fails to check the enemy, the way to the blood is open. Hence the great part played by the circulatory system as the second great cause of death. As Pearl says, we should live much longer If our lungs were as good as our heart. The death rates show certain Important Im-portant age and sex fluctuations. Early In Infancy deaths are heavy. There Is then a sharp drop until the ten-fifteen:year period, when the rate begins to rise to the twenty-twenty-five-year period. Thereafter the rate rises slowly until the fifty-fifty-five-year period, when It begins be-gins to rise again rapidly. Nearly 60 per cent of the deaths were from organs derived from the endoderm or inner germ-layer the layer that originally was outside the body. In the developing embryo em-bryo that layer comes to be folded within the body and Ilne3 the food canal and accessory organs of digestion. di-gestion. It is an old-fashioned, out-of-date relic of antediluvian ectoderm. ecto-derm. As a lining for the food canal It is our weakest spot. Our strongest spots are the skin cover of our body and our nervous system. Both are derived from the ectoderm or outer germ-layer. Deaths from structures derived from this layer make up only about 10 per cent of the total. Almost no germs get through a healthy skin. The cells of the skin and nerves have differentiated most from their primitive structure. The remaining SO per cent of deaths are from the mesoderm or middle germ-layer, circulatory and urogenital systems and muscles. The breakdown of the female reproductive re-productive organism Is also a heavy factor In infant mortality. While mortality due to breakdown break-down in ectoderm organs Is about the same for the two sexes, female fe-male mortality from mesoderm Is |
