Good Living. A Philosophy of Health

227 Pages·1953·2.54 MB·English

by  A. T. Todd (Auth.)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR :—
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G O OD L I V I NG
A P H I L O S O P HY OF H E A L TH
BY
A. T. TODD, O.B.E., M.B., M.R.C.P.
Consultant Physician, Bristol Royal Infirmary
BRISTOL: JOHN WRIGHT & SONS LTD.
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P R E F A CE
THIS book is written for every man or woman who really
desires health. I have described how un-health is to be
avoided as plainly as I can, within certain limits ; I have not
used the most simple language and I have had to use certain
concepts which are a little difficult to understand, and this,
because there is no other way. Those who will not take the
pains to understand what is written, would not have the sense
to do what is shown to be necessary by abundant proofs—so
this book is not for them.
Perhaps the reader will soon begin to say : " Why, this
seems to be true ; but what a wonderful fellow the author
must be if he practises what he preaches ". Well, the author
is not at all a wonderful fellow—if he had known what has
taken a lifetime to discover at his beginning, and if he had
been given a thoroughly sound self to start with, he might
have become wonderful. But he has had enough from it to
be able to say that the practice is very well worth while.
A. T. T.
February 26, 1953.
G O OD LIVING
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY LIFE AND LIVING ?
GOOD living may mean either of two things : living a good life
according to the ethics of one's race, for ethics vary from race
to race ; or living happily or healthily. It is the latter which
will be treated here.
The term ' living well ' will not be considered at all, for
that means having as much of the better liked foods and drinks
as possible. Living healthily or happily means to live a life
which fully satisfies each self—it is this which is to be treated
here, and though it seems to be so obvious a thesis and a
rationale to be desired by all, I am convinced that it has not
been treated before in a manner in any way similar to what is
proffered here. The self means that combination which we
call * body and soulor * body and mind ' ; Spinoza considered
the two to be simply different aspects of the same thing ; the
body concept being the extended or space-occupying aspect
and the mind the non-space-occupying aspect; and as his
philosophy is most in agreement with that of this treatise, we
shall have to consider his beliefs in some detail as we pass along
our way.
But if we are to live well we ought to have proper concepts
of what we mean by the words * living ' and * wellor rather
as proper concepts as we can have, for in reality we do not
know what life means at all, a statement which will certainly
startle many readers. For life is one of the elemental things,
and again that will not do, for the elemental ' things ' are not
things at all, but rather activities ; for example energy and
i
2 GOOD LIVING
electricity are elementals, so is that which we call matter or
substance. I can hear Mrs. Jones exclaim, even before this is
written—" But I know all about electricity, it is what makes
the light come on, heats my iron, and works the telephone
Then I say : " But these are not what electricity is, Mrs.
Jones, these are some of the things it can do ; now try to tell
me what electricity is ? " This of course she can no more do
than the very distinguished physicist Professor Soddy, who,
when he was asked if he would answer questions, said he would
do so, except the question—What is electricity ? Mr. Jones
then chimes in—" I know what energy is, it's the force which
drives my car, it's a 12-h.p. thingummebob ". But I ask,
" And what is this force which drives your car ? " I am
answered : " It is the power which the petrol gives Then
I ask, " What is this power ? " After a little thought, we
come back to energy again, and no matter how we consider
it, we can get no further; we do not know what energy is,
we only know some of the things it does, for it is a form of
activity and not a thing.
The nature of matter, or substance, has long been a puzzle
to philosophy. The old Greeks were content to leave it as
" stuff, wood" (v\r]) or as " what is" (rd 6Va). Later
Locke said that we could not say what it is except that it is
that which carries certain properties, such as weight, hardness,
colour, etc. ; he showed that if these were taken away, we
should not recognize what might be left. Kant also gave up
the problem of trying to determine what matter might be, he
said it was " that thing which is what it is " (der Ding an sich)>
something which we could never know. Schopenhauer, who
pretended to extend and clarify Kant, reverted almost to the
Greeks and used one of their names for it—idea (iSc'a), the
thing which is seen.
We can go a little way beyond that now, but then again
come to a full and complete stop, which looks to be a permanent
one—matter or substance is simply energy and nothing more.
The atom is a core of energy which has attracted around it few
or many satellites of electrons and many others of the tribe,
which also are cores of energy of a different kind. We do not
know what energy is, but it is very clear that it falls into two
INTRODUCTION 3
forms—the static and the kinetic, but these two can be trans-
formed from one to the other. Coal and wood are static
energy until another energy, say heat, acts upon them and
transforms the static into the kinetic energy which will drive
the machine, etc. The moon is static energy now, although
once it had both kinds ; but if a large enough comet hits it,
some kinetic energy will appear again. A recent good example
of conversion of static into kinetic energy is the atom bomb.
Of the energies which especially affect us as living units, i.e.,
units driven by the kinetic energy we call ' life ', food is the
most important; it is static energy, and any form of static
energy which has agreeable smells and tastes, and for which
we contain ferments to convert the static into the kinetic, we
call food. We thus degrade foods and utilize the kinetic
energy thus released by digestion ; this energy is promptly
changed into another form of energy, life. But if we put this
static energy, food, into ourselves and the body, having no
need and therefore no ferments ready for it, then the energy
is released by the microbes of putrefaction in the colon, always
present, but abounding in the colons of those who constantly
give them plenty of work to do. Thus the energy is freed
anyhow—but what can it do ? It can do nothing good, but
yet it must do something, therefore there is only one thing
left for it to do, it must do harm, and, being converted into
another form of energy, it makes disease or gradual death.
The evidence of this disease and death is the smell which
comes when the * normal' colon overflows its foulness.
Thus kinetic energy is that unknowable which does things
—heat, electricity, light, radiation. Food is that static form
of energy which digestion can get and transform into
warmth, work, love, thought, and life ; but without digestion
is converted into disease, hate, death. The whole world,
excepting the living things upon it, is static energy, which
can be converted into kinetic activity again if sufficient energy
is applied to it, for example, as heat from the collision with
a large meteor or comet, or by the sun turning into a red
giant from loss of its energy by radiation, then its gravitational
pull will engulf the world and give the sun a small new lease
of life. This has been ' proved ' by the astronomers quite
4 GOOD LIVING
conclusively by juggling with man-made numbers and by
treating time and space as things, not relationships ; thus
with entities which have existence only for man, they prove
what nature will do, to their own great satisfaction.
Mr. Jones comes in again. " I think I can do better as
regards substance than I did with energy, I did chemistry at
school; we know what wood is, it is mainly a substance or
matter called cellulose ; that is a complex combination chiefly
of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen/' I ask him " What is
carbon ? " He tells me that it is an element with the number
12. Then I ask him to tell me what an element is ; this is a
certain arrangement of electrons, protons, etc., he says, new
constituents are being discovered almost every month. I ask
what an electron is and after some delay I am told it is an
electromagnetic sort of vortex in the ether. But I had an
idea that the concept ether was no longer considered as a
scientific reality, but was merely an hypothesis which permits
the readier understanding of certain phenomena. But I let
that pass, and ask " What is an electromagnetic vortex ? "
Here Mr. Jones is obviously much embarrassed, for he has
immediately had to conclude that we are back again at the
concept of energy. But Mrs. Jones says that this is modern
hair-splitting ; that she knows what a stone is, and like Dr.
Samuel Johnson when in a similar predicament, goes and
kicks one, saying—" This is what a stone is ; it's hard and
heavy and grey in colour; a stone is a stone ". Again I tell
her that these things are what a stone or matter does. But she
cannot get so far and takes Mr. Jones away to see her favourite
film actress in the latest film.
There is good reason why we do not know what these
elementals * are '—we have not the senses (I do not mean the
sense) to tell us that; we have only the senses which let us
know what they can do.
So back we come to the concept of life ; we know some of
the things it can or cannot do, and it is no use trying to go
further than that. The first question may well be—" How
did life come to be upon the earth, for it was far too hot at
first ? " And to that we have to admit that we know no more
than we know how magnetism came. One popular theory is
INTRODUCTION 5
that life came here on a meteorite, a sort of passenger from
another world in which life already existed. This is a very
foolish idea ; the meteorites we see coming to this world are
the shooting stars ; they become so hot with the friction of
the atmosphere that mostly they burn themselves out before
they reach the soil, and fortunately too ; for it is said that
the craters on the moon are due to large meteorites hitting it,
not being stopped or mitigated by atmosphere, for the moon
has none. Anyhow any living creature on a meteorite which
had survived the temperature of absolute zero which is present
in space, would be quickly incinerated in our atmosphere.
The various religious systems of the world have various
theories as to the coming of life ; there is little to choose
between them.
Life probably originated when the earth was cool enough
by a fortunate combination of chemical and physical processes,
especially solar radiation, and since there was then no food
upon the earth, or in the water as the more likely of the two,
the first being would have to be able to make food, that is to
utilize the light of the sun to synthetize from water, carbon
dioxide, and oxygen a simple sugar ; thus the first life must
have been a simple, probably green, vegetable. This uni-
cellular organism became more and more able to produce
food and learned to specialize—that is, certain parts become
differentiated to perform one operation, another another, and
so on. At a certain stage a very much more ' clever ' one
appeared ; he seemed to say to himself—" That fellow over
there is working quite hard ; I will wait till he has got a good
helping and then I will jump on him and take what he has
made This was the first animal, and ever since they have
been parasites directly or indirectly upon the plants. The
story of Cain and Abel symbolizes this.
But these are stories hardly worth the telling, and though
much could be said, it has already mostly been said.
We do not know what life is, but a partial definition can be
given—in man, life is largely the ability to obtain and utilize
energy from things called foodstuffs ; that is the energy which
is life is maintained by increments of energy obtained from
foods, and these all come from the vegetable kingdom directly
6 GOOD LIVING
or via other animals Thus we can get the energy which is
needed for us to go on living if we can digest our foods ; if
we digest well in every way, we live well; if we fail to digest
through becoming worn out, we die. Therefore, we need to
study digestion with extreme care if we are to know how to
live well, and this is not an easy study or one that should be
rushed or scamped ; also it will require that the reader shall
take pains, even if he has had a medical education.
This knowledge of digestion is thus seen to be absolutely
critical, yet nobody really thinks or bothers at all about it;
none of the books except one or two of my own give anything
of real value about it—this may appear rather boastful, but
the reader who goes through this book will find that it is not
boasting. Digestion is popularly considered to be automatic
—you eat, and there you are ; and for this reason bad living
from bad digestion is universal and is considered the normal
state of man ; as a result the philosophers of all time have
debated and still do, whether life is worth living. Since the
philosophers are considered to be the people to guide us
through life, let us make a short review of a small selection.
Socrates, or Plato, for we do not know how much Plato put
into the dialogues attributed to Socrates as he left no writings,
said that if death was, as it might well be, a dreamless sleep
it was by much to be preferred to life. On consideration it
is not too bright an opinion from the man called the wisest of
all by the Delphic oracle ; for the appreciation of the pleasure
of a good night's sleep only comes when we have wakened ;
if we do not wake we can feel no pleasure.
Kant, who completed what Epicurus started, the philosophy
of the five senses, says : " One must indeed make an ill reckon-
ing of the worth of a journey (i.e., through life) if we can still
wish that it would last longer than it actually does, for that
would be a prolongation of a perpetual contest with sheer
hardship " (Works, vii, 381). Kant can be taken as final
except as regards morals and ethics, for it was not until later that
Darwin came and showed how the instincts were active in man,
just as in the 'animals', and that morals and ethics depend upon
the instinct of gregarity, and this Kant did not know. In his
time these sciences were considered to have their basis in