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from the Wheel of Health the Problem and the Cure
from the Wheel of Health
Transference, transference, transference--three transferences, that is the secret of health. These three transferences --soil to vegetable, vegetable to animal, animal and vegetable back to the soil--form the eternal wheel of health.
Date: 9/10/2011 12:34:17 PM ( 13 y ) ... viewed 864 times FROM THE WHEET OF HEALTH
G.T. WRENCH M.D
online
MESSAGE TO THE USDA
As in the case of McCarrison, so also in that of Howard, it was in northwestern India that Western observation and Eastern tradition met, and little by little, amongst other principles, emerged the Indore process of compost.
In these years of practical work there was a continuous improvement in the health of Howard's plants and crops. So bold, indeed, did he become in his assurance that by right soil-feeding he had overcome the danger of disease that he offered to import "a supply of the various cotton boll-worms and boll-weevils from America, and the letting of these loose among my cultures. I am pretty certain that they would have found my cotton cultures very indifferent nourishment . . . at Indore during the seven years I was there; I cannot recall a single case of insect or fungous attack."
And what is of the same vital importance as this health of plant life, the animals at Pusa, Quetta and Indore which were fed on the healthy plant-life seemed to take upon themselves the character of the plants. "For twenty-one years (1910-1931)," Howard writes, in "The Role of Insects and Fungi in Agriculture" (The Empire Cotton Growing Review, Vol. xiii), "I was able to study the reaction of well-fed animals to epidemic diseases, such as rinderpest, foot-and-mouth disease, septicemia, and so forth, which frequently devastated the countryside. None of my animals was segregated; norm was inoculated; they frequently came in contact with diseased stock. No case of infectious disease occurred. The reward of well-nourished protoplasm was a very high degree of disease resistance, which might even be described as immunity." It will be noted by experts that the resistance covered diseases caused by filter-passing viruses, as well as those due to microbes.
Howard's two principal conclusions in this paper are so important that I have presumed to interpolate some italics. The two conclusions are:
"(1) Insects and fungi are not the real cause of plant diseases, and only attack unsuitable varieties or crops improperly grown. Their true role in agriculture is that of censors for pointing out the crops which are imperfectly nourished. Disease resistance
seems to be the natural reward of healthy and well-nourished protoplasm. The frst step is to make the soil live by seeing that the supply of humus is maintained.
"(2 ) The policy of protecting crops from pests by means of sprays, powders and so forth is thoroughly unscientific and radically unsound; even when successful, this procedure merely preserves material hardly worth saving. The annihilation or avoidance of a pest involves the destruction of the real problem; such methods constitute no scientific solution of the trouble, but are mere evasions."
These words, especially those italicized, vividly express, not only the vegetable, but also the animal problem, and not only the animal, but the human.
The secondary conventional causes of disease are not the real causes of disease. Diseases only attack those whose outer circumstances, particularly food, are faulty. The genes of heredity are sound and eternally faithful to healthy life. It is not they who are the givers of disease and of susceptibility to disease, for "disease resistance seems to be the natural reward of well-nourished protoplasm." It is outer causes, not the inwardness of nature, that produce disease. Man is the author of his own destiny.
The prevention and banishment of disease are primarily matters of food; secondarily, of suitable conditions of environment. Antiseptics, medicaments, inoculations, and extirpating operations evade the real problem. Disease is the censor pointing out the humans, animals and plants who are imperfectly nourished. Its continuance and its increase are proofs that the methods used obscure, they do not attack, the radical problem.
Howard transferred the health of the soil to that of the vegetable, and that of the vegetable to that of the animal, and those of the vegetable and animal back again to the soil.
Transference, transference, transference--three transferences, that is the secret of health. These three transferences --soil to vegetable, vegetable to animal, animal and vegetable back to the soil--form the eternal wheel of health.
We leave this as a fragment of recoil of the utmost importance to our theme of health and physique.
Howard's two principal conclusions in this paper are so important that I have presumed to interpolate some italics. The two conclusions are:
"(1) Insects and fungi are not the real cause of plant diseases, and only attack unsuitable varieties or crops improperly grown. Their true role in agriculture is that of censors for pointing out the crops which are imperfectly nourished. Disease resistance
seems to be the natural reward of healthy and well-nourished protoplasm. The frst step is to make the soil live by seeing that the supply of humus is maintained.
"(2 ) The policy of protecting crops from pests by means of sprays, powders and so forth is thoroughly unscientific and radically unsound; even when successful, this procedure merely preserves material hardly worth saving. The annihilation or avoidance of a pest involves the destruction of the real problem; such methods constitute no scientific solution of the trouble, but are mere evasions."
These words, especially those italicized, vividly express, not only the vegetable, but also the animal problem, and not only the animal, but the human.
The secondary conventional causes of disease are not the real causes of disease. Diseases only attack those whose outer circumstances, particularly food, are faulty. The genes of heredity are sound and eternally faithful to healthy life. It is not they who are the givers of disease and of susceptibility to disease, for "disease resistance seems to be the natural reward of well-nourished protoplasm." It is outer causes, not the inwardness of nature, that produce disease. Man is the author of his own destiny.
The prevention and banishment of disease are primarily matters of food; secondarily, of suitable conditions of environment. Antiseptics, medicaments, inoculations, and extirpating operations evade the real problem. Disease is the censor pointing out the humans, animals and plants who are imperfectly nourished. Its continuance and its increase are proofs that the methods used obscure, they do not attack, the radical problem.
Howard transferred the health of the soil to that of the vegetable, and that of the vegetable to that of the animal, and those of the vegetable and animal back again to the soil.
Transference, transference, transference--three transferences, that is the secret of health. These three transferences --soil to vegetable, vegetable to animal, animal and vegetable back to the soil--form the eternal wheel of health.
PROGRESS BY RECOIL
Howard and Wad collected all the organic material of the farm except the night soil, which, however, has recently been brought into use from the urban neighbourhood; they put them into compost pits, turning and mixing them at regular intervals for aeration as decay proceeded. The Indore process was carried out on a larger scale and with a greater outlay of capital and appliances than the Chinese farmers are able to employ. It was also watched scientifically. But essentially it was the same, a thorough rotting and mixing of organic matter until it was a rich concentrated mixture ready for the new cycle of life.
It is interesting to read amongst the list of the dead waste things that once more become living, in addition to animal manure: cotton stalks, sann hemp (green or dried), pea stalks, sugar-cane stalks, ashes, weeds, and leaves in good quantity; in moderate quantity, dead grass, stumps of millet, sugar-cane and ground-nut, nut husks, wheat straw, and damaged silage; and lastly, these curiosities in small quantities: waste paper, packing material, shavings, sawdust, old gunny bags, old canvas, old uniforms, and old leather belting.
PROFOUND
We therefore have to recoil, not so much to the ways of our small-peopled country, which was never civilized agriculturally in the full sense, but to countries of longer experience and also of better health
EXPLAINS THE CONCEPT OF RECOIL
We can recover by knowledge, not by instinct. Our instinct is no more healthy than we are. But of knowledge we now possess the world in its present and pact in a way in which our ancestors never shared or dreamed. So to recover we must recoil; go back to traditions which have been the associates of the food of crowded man for many centuries. This recoil must at present necessarily be fragmental and largely individual. We cannot expect a great agricultural reform movement. Our food fails to figure in our national and political programme in any sufficient, radical and primary way for this to be more than a distant possibility. We have fallen into the way of fragmentation, and by fragmentation, by electicism we must recover. But that fragmentation shall be founded upon the agricultural facts of human people, and not upon those of the laboratory. The laboratory must be ancillary only.
I shall divide the recoil work in this final chapter into its two aspects, general and individual. The general aspect is that of a change or re-adaptation of agricultural methods; the individual aspect deals with what the individual can do for him or herself now to gain better health and physique on the lines indicated by the very healthy people we have studied.
SIR ALBERT HOWARD
Sir Albert Howard and his chief assistant, Mr. Yeshwant D. Wad, in The Waste Products of Agriculture (1931), begin their description of their work with the principle that the fertility of the soil is steadily lost by crop production, and must be restored. ...Farmers of Forty Centuries--which should be prescribed as a text-book in every agricultural college in the world."
Fragmentation, I take it, arises the invasion and domination of thought by specialists. A piece of required knowledge is isolated and is studied with great technical skill and intensity by a specialist. This simplification of knowledge by devotion to only a fragment of it is suitable to the intelligence of the average man, and, as there are great numbers of average men, it is easy for present-day civilization to cultivate a number of specialists or simplicists, men to whom thinking is simplified by cutting it down to one problem or set of problems, or one technique or even one particular part of a technical process. It is not only a division of labour, but a division of knowledge which leads to the separation of the intellect from the wider reality of life.
Simplicism, the binding of man to one job or one small department of knowledge, affects every branch of modern life and not only science. If one breaks away from one's special box to seek the wide world of knowledge, and thinks to find a way under the tutorage of experts, one soon finds oneself in a Sudanese dust-storm. So finely fragmented is the knowledge, one loses sight of the real world.
The ultimate objects of McCarrison's experiments on faultily fed animals were, of course, human. They were to find out what and to what degree diseases in Indian peoples were caused by faulty food. So the memory of the Hunza came back to McCarrison with
peculiar vividness. They had no such diseases. They came before McCarrison as a picture of the high attainment man can reach in health and physique.
"My own experience," he wrote in his book, "provides an example of a race unsurpassed in perfection of physique and in freedom from disease in general. I refer to the people of the State of Hunza, situated in the extreme northernmost point of India. . . . Amongst these people the span of life is extraordinarily long; and such service as I was able to render them during the seven years I spent in their midst was confined chiefly to the treatment of accidental lesions, the removal of senile cataract, plastic operations for granular lids, or the treatment of maladies wholly unconnected with food supply."
There were two diseases of the eyes, cataract in old people and irritation of the inner lining of the lids. If the winter ventilation of the living-rooms in Hunza had been better, even though not so foul as that of most houses in the Hindu-Kush, which, Durand wrote, choked the unfortunate inhabitants, these two diseases might also have been excluded.
In his Mellon Lecture, delivered at Pittsburg, in the U.S.A., in 1922, on "Faulty Food in Relation to GastroIntestinal Disorder," this people of the remote Himalayas, whose name he did not give to his American audience, but undoubtedly the Hunza and such allied people as the Punyalis, again presented themselves to him--almost as control human beings in the vast laboratory of nature, in which civilised people, and especially Americans, were very prone to gastro-intestinal disorders.
"During the period of my association with these people," he said, "I never saw a case of asthenic dyspepsia, of gastric or duodenal ulcer, of appendicitis, of mucous colitis, of cancer. . . . Among these people the 'abdomen over-sensitive' to nerve impressions, to fatigue, anxiety or cold was unknown. The consciousness of the existence of this part of their anatomy was, as a rule, related solely to the feeling of hunger. Indeed, their buoyant abdominal health has, since my return to the west, provided a remarkable contrast with the dyspeptic and colonic lamentations of our highly civilized communities."
So the picture of a healthy people in 1921-2 strongly coloured McCarrison's thought.
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