The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-05-06

[ ldlt Dul Ol ldlt q uluilAluhE OA RAO OOAo to the contrary have been collected. To-day it is almost commonplace of surgery to sew up up breaks in the heart wall.
 A blow on the chest sometimes rup- lures the heart, and yet the victims of such injuries not seldom recover. Wounds in the heart made by knives and bullets are now treated with some approach to certainty, and although the death rate in such cases is of course high, it is being lowered year after year, and it would be rash sur geon to-day who would call any small injury to the heart inevitably fatal. It is impossible, indeed, to say that an injury to any organ, no matter 1 what its extent, is sure to result in death. The human machine was de- signed to stand all sorts of shocks, and even when science is possibly unable to repair the machinery it often re- pairs itself.
 l Cancer for instance, is sometimes beyond the reach of surgery, but it is not rare, by any means, to hear of such cases ending in recovery. The body is always at work fighting Its enemies, and so soon as the latter cause any damage the work of repair is begun.
 Exposure to an injury, indeed, al- ways increases the bodys ability to withstand that injury. This ability, in one form, becomes what is known as Iimmunity-which is utilized to great advantage in modern medicine. The man who Is forced to live in strong draughts soon becomes accustomed to them, and after little while he takes cold no longer.
 This explains in part the good health lof sailors, woodmen and others who work and sleep in the open. Again, the man who makes habit of consum- ling small quantities of poisonous drugs, or of exposing himself to great heat or cold or of fasting for long Iperiods gets used to these things, as the popular phrase is, and is injured by them far less than the average man.
 It is well known, for instance, that people who have become slaves to opium are able to swallow with im- punity enough of the drug to kill 8 dozen ordinary persons. Thomas De Quncey, the celebrated author of "The Confessions of an Opium Eater" tells us that he drank 5000 drops of laudanum (the equivalent of 920 grains of opium) day.
 In the Baltimore city jail few years ago there was man whose daily dose was 480 grains of morphine, or one ounce. One-fortieth of that amount would kill the average man. Other drug victims have taken even more, and the medical books contain accounts of men who have consumed as much as four ounces day.
 Again there are individuals who, without any course of slow immuniza- ton, seem to set aside all the laws of nature. There are, for example, many recorded cases of persons seemingly impervious to the effects of the deadly drug commonly called prussie acid.
 Ordinarily ten drops of prusslc acid placed upon the tongue of a grown man will cause collapse and death within ten minutes. Yet there is a well authenticated case of man who swallowed nearly forty drops with no effect beyond momentary insenslbility.
 Strong muriatic acid Is another yio- lent poison that occasionally fails to kill.
 Would be suicides have swallowed as much as an ounce without permanent i'll effect There are even cases on record of persons who have survived large doses of sulphuric acid-the most damaging and corrosive of all common chemicals.
 Just as 1t is capable, at times of surviving terrible injuries by mechani- cal and chemical agencies, the body is able in other cases, to face enormous extremes of temperature. The crew cf the fruit steamers plying between Gen. tral America and the North Atlantic ports see the mercury go up or go down, every week, at least 30 degrees, and on the voyage northward 1t Is not unusual to witness drop of 45 de- grees in as many minutes,
 In the stoke holds of these ships, | along the Central American coast, the mercury often registers 140 degrees. And yet the flremen and sailors are a pretty healthy lot, and it Is rare to hear of one of them dying as a result of the sudden changes and extreme lrange of temperature.
 Sir Joseph Banks, an English physi- elan, made elaborate experiments to determine how much heat the human body could stand with safety. He found that he himself was not per- ceptibly injured by a temperature of 211 degrees.
 Other men have survived far greater heat, and some of the medical books contain references to a woman who faced BOA degrees for several minutes without damage. This temperature, it will be- observed, is 152 degrees above that of boiling water.
 On the other hand, the body seems to be able to withstand any conceiv- able degree of cold. In some parts of Russia during the winter the mercury drops to 50 degrees below zero, and Iyet thousands of persons face this ex- treme cold without injury. They wear heavy furs, to be sure, but their noses and ears are commonly exposed, and beyond rubbing those parts now and then to promote circulation they take no precautions against freezing. A temperature of 70 degrees below zero is not unknown in the Yukon, and yet the country Is regarded as habit