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The words organic and inorganic have undergone considerable change of meaning within recent years and these changes have led to much confusion in thought and practice. Organic means pertaining to an organ; connected with or pertaining to the bodily or vital organs of plant or animal--organic structure, organic disease, organic chemistry, organic function; combined with function; having a definite, systematic structural arrangement; organized; an organic whole; a complete unity. Originally, organic chemistry was that dealing with the products of animal and vegetable organisms. At present, it is largely restricted to the study of carbon and hydrogen compounds.
Not long since, anatomy was defined as "the science of organization." The anatomist differentiated between the words organized and organic. The term organized was used to refer to things which have organs--parts which are differentiated from each other. Organic was applied to things which result from the vital (synthetic) activities of organized bodies. Substances which did not result from vital synthesis were referred to as inorganic.
Today this is all changed. The term organic is used to designate all carbon compounds, whether formed in the body or not. The term inorganic is now regularly applied to food substances that result from the synthetic activities of the living organism which were formerly called organic. The best examples of this are the food salts contained in all plant and animal foods. There is a tendency to make no distinction between the salts in foods and those in the chemist's laboratory. Indeed, it is commonly thought that the salts of the laboratory may be readily used by the body as substitutes for the salts that should exist in our foods.
All of this confusion has come about by defining organic to mean carbon and hydrogen compounds, whereas, it really means products of the synthetic activities of the organs of an organized being--an organism. Bear in mind that the basic meaning of organic is pertaining to an organ. Chemists should stick to their own terminology and cease trying to pervert the terms of biology.
The chemist observes that silt may eventually become flesh, but he overlooks the many refining metabolisms through which it must be carried by both plant and animal before it can be "made flesh." He can only feebly imitate, he cannot duplicate, Nature's creations.
The chemist manipulates the elements that filled the great void before the spirit of the Supreme Synthesizer acted upon it. He can produce a dummy egg, but he cannot make a viable one. A viable egg contains all the potentialities of a new animal. The chemist's egg seems to have everything--that is, everything except the power to evolve into a new animal. Man's creations turn out to be clay, slag, delusion. The chemist cannot make an egg that will hatch. His science is no match for the rooster. The compounds of evolution are vastly different from the synthetic compounds of the chemist. Only his egomania causes the chemist to think he can create a viable egg out of lifeless elements.
The natural order of nutrition is for the plant to "eat" the soil and the animal to eat the spare products of the plant. This order was established many long ages ago and has been in operation as long as plant and animal life have existed side by side on our globe. It has worked very successfully throughout all this time and our present efforts to skip the refining work of the plant and go directly to the soil for our sustenance makes us appear ridiculous. The common use of table salt (sodium chloride), the employment by physicians of calcium salts, iron salts, and other such preparations and the employment of so-called "tissue salts" by certain types of physicians amount to an effort to skip the plant and eat the soil. Sprinkling various salts of this nature on foods is a similar effort. These practices are direct outgrowths of our science mania.
The body does not employ nitrogen as such--it uses proteins, or, more specifically, amino acids. Acceptable amino acids are manufactured by the plant kingdom only. The animal cannot manufacture them out of the elements. The body does not use carbon as such--it uses carbohydrates, or, more specifically, simple sugar: monosaccharide. Acceptable sugars are prepared by the plant kingdom only. The animal can convert some of the protein compounds into sugar, but it cannot manufacture sugar out of the elements. The body does not use carbon in making fats. It uses chiefly fatty acids. It can manufacture fat out of sugar and protein, but it cannot manufacture it out of the elements. It is dependent upon plants to take the "dust of the earth" and make this into acceptable compounds--organic substances. The animal body cannot manufacture organic salts out of the elements of the soil. It must receive these ready prepared from the plant. The animal is incapable of manufacturing vitamins out of the elements. From the plant it must receive either the vitamin or the pro-vitamin. The synthetic activities of plants manufacture the food supplies of the whole animal world.
Can the chemist supplant the work of the plant? This has long been his dream. He has sought to duplicate the products of the plant world and make these serve as foods for man and animals. He claims a certain measure of success. But, since the body draws a sharp line of distinction between laboratory compounds of all kinds and those resulting from the synthetic activities of plant life, we prefer to apply the term organic to these latter and inorganic to the crude substances of the earth and to the products of the laboratory.
We have not learned to make, nor even to imitate living substances. We know that animals are dependent upon plants for their food and cannot go directly to the soil for it. We can neither synthesize these substances in the laboratory, nor can we tear them down in the kitchen or in the laboratory in "purifying" them (extracting their salts from them) without greatly impairing their food values. It is a mistake to assume, as these experimenters do, that chemical substances constitute nourishment irrespective of their form or condition.
Chlorophyll is the great organic laboratory. By its aid and the aid of sunlight plants take up the crude elements of the soil and carbon and nitrogen from the air and synthesize these into organic combinations. Plants alone can do this. Animals cannot do it. Man cannot do it in the laboratory.
Plants, at least working plants as distinguished from parasitic and saprophytic plants, manufacture proteins, carbohydrates, hydrocarbons, organic salts and vitamins. We say that soil is the food of plants; we could, with equal propriety say that plant substances are the soil of animals.
"All nutrient material is formed in the vegetable kingdom, in the growing process--the green state," says Trall. "No animal organization can create or form any food of any kind. All that the animal can do is to use or appropriate what nutrient material the vegetable kingdom has provided. The vegetable kingdom is intermediate between the mineral and animal kingdom."
Animals cannot use soil materials, nor can they synthesize carbohydrates out of carbon and water. For the same reason that they cannot utilize the minerals of the soil, but must receive them in the form of organic salts resulting from plant processes, they cannot utilize drug minerals or the inorganic salts produced in the chemical or pharmaceutical laboratory.
The animal cannot synthesize amino-acids, the constituent "building stones" of proteins; nor sugars, the constituent "building stones" of fats; nor vitamins. He must receive these from the plant kingdom. Synthetic vitamins, now so much advertised, are no more useful than the inorganic salts offered by the chemists. Animals are dependent upon plants for organic foods--for proteins, sugars, starches, fats, organic salts and vitamins. All foods come, either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom.
We have it contended by the proponents of the use of various inorganic salts, called by them, "tissue salts," "bio-chemical remedies," "vito-chemical remedies," etc., that there is no difference between crude minerals and organic salts except in the fineness of the particles. They contend that if these inorganic substances are ground finely enough, the body can make use of them. So, they grind these in a suitable medium and prescribe and administer them.
Physical chemistry reveals that a mineral may be divided into the smallest possible particle--individual ions--by simply dissolving it in water. Experience with these salts proves that they are not remedial. Dr. Tilden's testimony is to the point. He says he gave them a thorough trial at one time in his career and found them to be worthless.
No animal--there are a few lowly forms that are said to be exceptions to this, but these exceptions are very doubtful--can make constructive use of any mineral unless he gets it through the plant kingdom. The mineral salts must be synthesized into living tissue before the digestive and metabolic systems of man, or animal, can use them in body building, body cleansing or for any other constructive purposes.
The inability of the animal organism to take the elements of earth, air and water and synthesize amino-acids, carbon chains, organic salts, vitamins, etc., from these renders the animal absolutely dependent upon the plant kingdom for its food supply. As these food constituents cannot be synthesized by the animal body its needs for these substances can be satisfied in no other way than by their provision, ready made, in plant foods. The ultimate source of all food needs of the animal body, except water and oxygen, is, therefore, the vegetable kingdom. The main supply would appear to be derived from the green and growing parts of plants.
The animal body is capable of building up the most complex forms of protein providing the necessary carbon chains and amines are supplied in the diet. The cow, the sheep, the pig, the chicken, or other animal that you may eat, is compelled to secure the absolutely indispensable amino acids from external (that is, plant) sources. There is nothing in the animal body that was not derived from the plant kingdom--nothing, that is, except water and oxygen.
The proven fact that the organism of higher animals, is incompetent to synthesize carbon chains, or to effect ring closure and that only in rarest cases can they achieve animation and then only by making use of ready prepared and more complex amino acids, that it cannot synthesize vitamins and organic salts--this lack of ability to make the fundamental syntheses compels the animal to rely exclusively upon organic substances for its food supply. I repeat: the normal order of feeding is, plants feed upon soil and animals feed upon the spare products of plants. The dream of the chemist to be able to reverse this order is an expression of his egomania.
Organic salts are in the colloidal form. Colloidal iron or calcium or phosphorus are usable. Inorganic salts are crystaloids and are not usable. Crude minerals, after they have been organized by the plant kingdom into highly complex compounds, are assimilated and used by the body, but taken in their elementary state, are injurious, some of them even deadly poison, to the body. The plant takes the elements of the soil and synthesizes these into acceptable compounds. The animal is limited to these compounds.
Carque very appropriately says: "Even the embryonic plant must feed on the organic compounds of the seed until its roots and leaves are grown. The elevation and characteristic change of inorganic matter, which takes place principally in the green leaves of the plant, by means of the chlorophyll, is the starting point of all organic combinations. Chlorophyll is, therefore, a substance of great physiological importance."
Only along special lines have chemists been able to repeat or feebly imitate the productions of nature. The essentially living products not only cannot be produced in the laboratory, they are, as yet, but little known. So-called bio-chemistry is not what its name implies. Life can exist only in a complex mixture; the chemist studies merely isolated fragments. The physiological and biological chemists all seem to have missed the conception of the individuality of the living mass, as a complex of elements and compounds, each of which bears a special and vital relationship to each other. Each element is vitally essential to the welfare of the whole mass.
Biochemistry is largely guess work. The chemists do not know exactly what processes take place in the living organism. They write learned treatises on bio-chemistry, but it is 98% guess work.
Just as the animal body is unable to synthesize amino acids, but is confined for its supply of these, to the plant kingdom; so, it cannot synthesize "organic" salts from the crude or "inorganic" salts supplied by doctors and druggists. The plant kingdom is the great laboratory in which animal food is synthesized and our chemists have not learned to duplicate vegetable processes. Imitate some of them, yes, but there is a vast difference between the ability to produce urea and the ability to synthesize proteins.
We must secure our mineral salts from food. We cannot get them from any other source. The power to assimilate crude matter, as it exists in the soil, and convert it into structures of living bodies is a monopoly of the vegetable kingdom. It is the office of plant life or vegetation to take the primary elements in their crude form and convert them into the organic state. No synthetic process known to the laboratory can do this.
After the plant has raised the crude earth-elements to the plane of plant substance, the animal may then take them and raise them still higher, that is, convert them into animal matter. The animal is forced to secure food either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. He either eats the plant, or else he eats the animal that has eaten the plant. Air and water form the only exceptions to this rule.
We know that the same elements, with practically the same chemical compositions may be wholesome food in one case and virulent poison in another. The protein of nuts and nitric acid both owe their distinctive characteristics to the nitrogen they contain. Sugar and alcohol not only contain the same elements, but represent very nearly the same chemical combinations. One is a good food, the other a strong poison. They taste and smell unlike and when consumed do not produce the same effects.
The air is rich in nitrogen. Plants are able to absorb it and assimilate it--to make proteins out of it. But animals cannot. We must get our nitrogen from foods.
It was pointed out in a previous chapter that the body it unable to manufacture vitamins and the essential amino-acids. It is capable of manufacturing sugars out of more than one kind of organic substance, but cannot produce this from crude carbon. Only in organic combinations are minerals usable. Only plants--vegetables and fruits--with the aid of sunshine, are capable of taking the crude mineral elements of the soil and organizing them.
Salts built up by plants, we shall call organic salts and those built up by other processes we shall call inorganic. The chemist may continue to declare that he can find no difference in the two groups of materials, but the animal body continues to make a distinction and to draw a sharp line of demarcation between the salts the chemist turns out and those turned out by the plant.
Iron is an essential element of the body. It is especially found in the red blood cells. We get it from fruits and vegetables. As we there find it, it is usable. But we cannot supply our bodies with iron by eating saw fillings or pig-iron. Its frequent use in drug form upsets digestion, producing headache, gastric distress and constipation.
Elements are available only in certain forms. We must draw our minerals from foods. In like manner must we draw our vitamins from foods. Synthetic vitamins are as useless as earth salts before these have been organized by the plant.
McCann truly says: "We must not assume because the chemist has calculated the iron of the red blood corpuscles as 'iron oxide' that it would be a good thing, therefore, to go to a drug store and purchase a dose of iron oxide. The iron in the blood does not exist in such form. The chemist has to reduce it to such form before he can recover it from the organic compounds in which it is found in life.
"Herein lies the great error made by the patent medicine manufacturer (also by the ethical practitioner. Author), who tries to make the people believe that because certain salts are found in the human body therefore medicines containing them are good for the human body.
'To assume that because 'calcium oxide' appears in an analysis of the blood serum it must therefore appear in the blood serum itself as calcium oxide is a childish error.
"The calcium, iron and other mineral salts as they appear in the blood and internal secretions are present in such wonderfully complex forms that they cannot be reproduced in the drug store or laboratory."
Otto Carque says: "In natural foods iron is found solely in the form of complicated iron compounds which have been built up by the life processes of plants. From these compounds hemoglobin is produced in the animal organism, which is not able to construct the highly complex organic molecule from inorganic substances." He points out that foods are organic wholes, "in which the tissue salts are chemically associated with the organic substances, and only in this form are they able to sustain vital force."
Experiments on anemic rats with diets containing drug iron, food ash containing iron, flour to which copper was added, etc., showed that by no kind of trick or makeshift diet could the anemia be overcome. The rats had to have real foods from nature's own food laboratory--the plant kingdom--in order to recover.
Thousands of invalids, feeble children, chlorotic girls and anemic patients are taking iron daily, often by injections, in drug preparations, and upon the prescription of a doctor. This is supposed to supply any deficiency in this element and give them health and strength. The practice is a snare and a delusion. It sometimes induces a facetious simulation of health, and deceives both the physician and his patient. But it has long been known that such iron is not assimilated by the body, while, when given to chlorotic individuals of the tubercular diathesis, it hastens the development of tuberculosis.
Phosphorus is a necessary constituent of the bones and nerves. But we must supply it to the body as we find it in plants. Crude rock phosphorus as it comes from the earth, is a powerful poison. Laws now prohibit its use in the manufacture of matches, because of its poisonous character. It particularly affects the jaw bone producing a condition known as "Fossy jaw." Its continued use, as a medicine, even in small doses, produces anemia and emaciation. Although so vitally essential to bone and nerve, phosphorus, when not. "organized," as we find it in plants, is the most virulent poison of any of the normal elements of the human body. A man of average size contains, normally, about two pounds of phosphorus, but two grains of this "disorganized" (this may be done by calcination of a bone), given to a healthy man, produces great excitement, particularly of the brain. Delirium, inflammation and death may be the result in a single hour. Ten times this amount, taken as nature gives it to us in food, produces no such trouble.
Phosphorus poisoning is characterized by nervous and mental symptoms, jaundice, vomiting, general fatty degeneration, the presence of bile pigments, albumen and other abnormal constituents in the urine, followed by death.
Chronic phosphorus poisoning was quite common among workers in match-factories. Necrosis of the jaw bone was one of its frequent results. It ranks with mercury in its power to wreck the bones.
It is claimed that animals and children are able to utilize inorganic phosphorus in building up their bones. Hens seem able to use inorganic phosphorus in making egg shells. But when we come to the question: Is the animal organism capable of building up organic phosphorus compounds out of inorganic phosphorus?--we are face to face with a different and vital problem.
Berg says "here most physiologists make the mistake of failing to distinguish between salt-like or ester-like compounds (the so-called mixed-organic compounds) and compounds into which the phosphorus has entered as a constituent part of an organic complex. Yet the chemical distinction is vital." "So far as the more highly organized animals, at any rate, are concerned, we do not know a single instance of such genuine reduction of phosphorus and the incompetence of the animal organism to achieve this reduction is the probable explanation of the inability of the higher animals to synthesize carbon chains." "Innumerable investigators have studied the problem, and almost all of them have come to the conclusion that no such synthesis can be effected within the animal body."
Sulphur is poisonous. Yet sulphur is a necessary constituent of the body, and when supplied as nature prepares it in food, is wholesome. But as a medicine it is unwholesome.
Berg reviews all of the experiments made, which are claimed to show that the animal body can make use of inorganic salts, and shows that faulty experimental methods have been present in every case. Taking the case of sulphur he says, "We know this element in the organism only in the form of cystein or its 'anhydrite' cystin, although there can be no doubt that quite a number of sulphur compounds are represented in the 'neutral sulphur' of the urine. * * * Cystin is a vitally essential substance which cannot be synthesized within the animal body." Osborn and Mendel have repeatedly noted that growth, and even the mere maintenance of weight, are impossible unless ready-made cystin is supplied. Sulphur compounds are available for assimilation only in the forms in which they exist in organic matter.
Lime, or calcium, cannot be supplied to the body by feeding it crude rock lime or chalk. In such a form, lime is an irritant and a corrosive. In the "unslacked" form, it is highly destructive of the tissues of the body. Lime water, so often given to infants, is of no value to them and produces much injury. We must take this as it is supplied by plants.
Inappropriate food may actually "drive out" appropriate food. "Large doses of calcium chloride," says Berg, "induce severe losses of calcium, which may culminate in osteoporosis and osteomalacia in the experimental animals." The calcium chloride actually induces a hyperacidity within the body and so great an impoverishment of the alkali reserves of the body that those of the bones are called upon to neutralize the acids.
A "biological antagonism" between soluble alkalies and the alkaline earths is known to exist in animal physiology. "If the bicarbonates, or indeed, any salt of sodium or potassium, be administered to a human being in fair quantity for any brief but appreciable period, the following extraordinary phenomenon is manifest: large quantities of calcium and magnesium salts immediately make their appearance in the urine, thus showing that sodium or potassium when administered to an animal in excess at once exhibits so strong a contrast in the economy of that animal that immediately a large output of calcium and magnesium occurs."--Reinheimer.
Berg says, "With the exception of calcium carbonate and tricalcium phosphate all the inorganic calcium salts induce acidity in the organism. Rose has repeatedly noted the production of acidity in adult human beings by calcium chloride and calcium sulphate; and Fuhge, Erich Muller's assistant, noted the same thing in testing my statements by giving lime salts to children."
Berg has pointed out that the acid radical (carbon) in calcium carbonate can be freely discharged in the gaseous form through the lungs, so that no bases are requisite to assist in its excretion."
Copp and others, investigating the nutritional factors in arthritis, found that it is essential to restore the calcium balance before recovery can take place. They found that when inorganic calcium salts or other basic salts in the inorganic form are given these are rapidly eliminated and are not assimilated by the tissues. The bodies of animals can make use of salts only as these are prepared for them by the plant kingdom, a symbiotic dependence of great significance.
There is no doubt that the inorganic salts of the drug store may be absorbed into the body more or less and, perhaps, some of them may be employed to a limited extent in such purely chemical processes as the neutralization of acids. But they cannot become parts of the teeth, muscles, nerves, blood or glands of the body.
Experiments seem to show that where there is a deficiency of salts in the diet, the use of inorganic salts--wood ashes, for example--will enable the animal body to use all or nearly all of the available organic salts in building tissue. There is no evidence, however, that such additions to the diet can make the diet equal to one adequate in organic salts. In most cases, however, these things seem to merely induce fatty degeneration.
Iodine is supplied in a usable form in foods. Drug iodine is a rank poison. The prolonged use of iodine and its compounds produces a condition known as iodism; characterized by violent colds, headaches, increased salivary secretion (insalivation), a metallic taste, gastric irritation and an acne rash. It has accounted for many deaths, while its use in goitre has proven not only a failure but disastrous. Food iodine never does this.
The following quotation from American Medicine, May, 1926, gives a partial picture of the effects of inorganic iodine compounds:
"In view of the wide publicity that has been given to the value of iodine as an absolute preventive of goitre, and the commendation that has been given to the communal use of iodized salt, it is important that the hazards attendant upon such wholesale employment of iodine should be given equal publicity. Iodine is a drug, although the bodily need for it suggests that it may be employed as a food. Its use has to be safe-guarded because of its pharmacologic properties and, indeed, as a result of its peculiar effects when ingested in too large quantities by those having a susceptibility to its effect or by those who have physical conditions likely to become pathologically activated through its administration. There is ample evidence that iodine rashes are appearing more frequently than heretofore and that acne vulgaris is more difficult to cure among those making use of iodized salt. Further, the appearance or recurrence of hyperthyroidism amply demonstrates that the technique generally employed for administering iodine to adults is attended with serious disadvantages and dangers."
It is now claimed that a small amount of arsenic forms a normal part of the human body. I need not dwell on arsenical poisoning. The doctor's arsenic is not mistaken for food arsenic, or "organic" arsenic.
Common salt (sodium chloride) is not an exception to the rule that inorganic salts are not acceptable to the animal body, as will be fully shown in a succeeding chapter.
Berg has shown that when mixtures of "artificial nutritive salts" (drugs) are given they play the part of foreign bodies in the organism, "for they increase the osmotic pressure to an intolerable degree," and "hence they are eliminated as rapidly as possible."
"When an acid-rich diet is being taken," he says, "and we aim at neutralizing the excess of acid by administering inorganic bases in the form of salts, the use of litmus paper will show that the urine speedily acquires an alkaline reaction. During the night, however, the period when the great cleaning up of the organism after the day's exertions takes place, the amount of available bases is greatly reduced owing to the rapid excretion of the ionized salts, the result being that the morning urine (which contains the products of tissue change during the night) has again become acid, and is rich in uric acid although its power of holding uric acid in solution is small. In other words, when the requisite bases are supplied in the form of inorganic salts they are excreted so rapidly that the organism suffers from alkaline impoverishment at the time when its need for alkalies is greatest.
"Conditions are very different in the case of natural nutrients. Here the inorganic bases are, to some extent at least, present in masked forms, in stable organic combination, and their presence can in many instances not be detected until after the destruction of the organic combination. To some extent, compounds of this character are even able to resist the disintegrating effects of digestion, as I have myself proved in the case of milk. In this form, the bases do not irritate the animal organism in any way, and they can be retained by the body for a considerable period, until the bases are restored to an ionisable condition by the breakup of the organic combinations. If, therefore, the organism be provided with an abundance of bases by supplying it with a food naturally rich in bases, ere long morning urine will be found to have an alkaline reaction. In such cases the uric-acid content of the urine will tend towards a minimum characteristic of the particular diet; and at the same time the capacity for excreting uric acid, that is to say the competence of the urine to dissolve uric acid, will rise to a maximum. Thus whereas the effect in artificial mixtures of inorganic salts is restricted to an hour or two after their ingestion, the bases in the natural nutritive salts remain effective over long periods, and are always on hand when the organism needs them. I have found that the water in which potatoes, greens, etc., have been boiled, or protein-free milk (whey), is speedy and effective."
Berg says: "Calcium carbonate, therefore, acts in the animal body as a free base in this respect, that it is competent to neutralize acids, and thus reduce acidosis. Obviously, all inorganic bases in the free state can act in the same way, provided that they can be absorbed by the organism in a soluble form. The free bases, however, have, like the free acids, and even more than these, the disagreeable quality of being corrosive. They dissolve organic matter, and can therefore not be tolerated by the organism except in extreme dilution."
Indeed, the use of inorganic lime-salts, with the exception of calcium carbonate and tri-calcium phosphate, produces acidosis. Large doses of calcium chloride induce severe losses of calcium from the body and may even result in osteoporosis or osteomalacia. Chloride of lime, if given for a long time, results in severe losses of calcium and even in bone deformity. Calcium chloride induces hyperacidity within the body and the alkalies of the bones and other tissues are used up in neutralizing the acids. There is only one source from which to secure your calcium--namely, natural foods.
In plants the minerals are combined in some peculiar way in the living system of the cell which makes them acceptable to the animal body, which is unable to take chemically pure substances and synthesize these into animal tissues. Schussler's salts and Carey's salts, even though administered in the sixth decimal trituration of homeopathic therapeutics, as is the common way of giving them, are not used by the body. Homeopathic trituration is not identical with the synthetic processes of plant life and does not produce the peculiar plant substances that are alone acceptable to the animal. These same facts apply to the many "cell salts," "vegetable salts," "essential foods," etc., now exploited in this country.
Members of the Biochemic school of medicine, followers of Schuessler, homeopaths and others, who declare that these crude substances may be used in and by the body as "tissue salts," if only they are finely enough ground and sufficiently triturated are greatly in error.
Strictly speaking there is no science of biochemistry. All so-called biochemistry is the chemistry of the dead. Those who have cell-salts, tissue salts, biochemic salts, etc., to sell are merely exploiting popular ignorance. Their "remedies" are worthless.
The body possesses the power to manufacture the chemical substances it requires and this it is continuously doing, the exercise of this power depending upon the supply of acceptable raw materials. Thyroxin, for example, manufactured by the thyroid gland, is tri-iodo-trypophane. The production of this hormone is dependent, not alone upon the supply of the amino-acid, tryptophane, but upon the supply of acceptable iodin. Drug iodine, in whatever form, does not enable the body to synthesize thyroxin, and its use is a frequent cause of the very condition it is given to prevent or cure.
Physicians have long prescribed iron in various forms in anemia, chlorosis, and other conditions. Abderhalden, a German scientist, performed an extended series of experiments upon several species of animals, to determine to what extent they were able to absorb and utilize different forms of iron. He discovered that animals fed upon iron-poor diets, to which were added inorganic iron substances, were unable, in the long run, to produce as much hemoglobin as those given normal food. He came to the conclusion that inorganic iron salts act chiefly, if not wholly, as "stimulants," and that hemoglobin is derived essentially from the organic iron compounds of food. Hemoglobin is a protein compound into which the iron salts enter and the iron salts of the drug store do not enter into this compound.