Earthing/Grounding for health - Shoes as insulators, Electro-nervous action (1891)

miquelangeles

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SHOES AS INSULATORS

George Quarrie maintains, in the N. Y. Medical Journal, that civilized man is seriously damaged in health by leather shoes, which more or less insulate his body from the earth. He cites many illustrations of the physical superiority of barefooted classes; including the children of the poor, all the brute creation, and the leather-shod horses that are employed in mowing extensive lawns in Scotland. The latter have to be relieved every other day, to prevent serious injury to their condition, especially to their eyes, from the use of the leather muffles on their feet. He says:

"Let a man be placed on an electrically insulating glass stand in a dry atmosphere, and let him begin exercising with a pair of dumb-bells; let the soles of his feet be electrically connected with earth by a copper wire having fixed on it a galvanometer; it will be found that as he exercises, the galvanometer will be strongly deflected, showing that a current of electricity is passing from the man's feet soles to the earth."

Dr. Waller, of the London Hospital, says:

"One of the most fundamental and certain facts in physiology is, that the active state of a living tissue is marked by a fall of electrical level; in other words, an electrical depression is the best, most certain, and most delicate physical sign of physiological action. ' The latest advances of science on every side concede the fact that the nervous system is, to all intents and purposes, the electrical system. I therefore contend that our feet soles, with that marvelous cluster of cutaneous nerve endings brought right out into the papillae of the skin, so that if free to do so, they would have actual contact with the earth as we walk on it, were designed to act as an electrical highway between our bodies and mother earth, and that the maintaining that highway in a free and unimpeded state is a matter of vital importance, not only to man himself, but to all other animals on earth. To this end I provide our ordinary shoes with an in-sole of good conducting material, with very fine wires invisibly fixed, so as to afford perfect electrical communication be tween this in-sole and the earth; so that a man in his ordinary footwear is caused, in an electrical sense, to literally walk barefooted on the ground, as he ought to do."

We should like to ask whether this theory is favored or not, by the actual condition of the nerve-endings of the sole in those who travel much on bare feet. Are these nerves in no way obtunded, or masked by thickened epidermis, so as to impair materially their electrical communication with the earth?


ELECTRO-NERVOUS ACTION

Few philosophical students of Nature have any doubt of an intimate relation between the currents of vital action, or motion in nerve tissues, and the magneto-electric currents of the Earth and the solar system. To put ourselves, individually, in the proper conditions, positions, or whatever, for the best relations to those forces of Nature from which we draw more than our breath or nourishment, will be perhaps the most fruitful of future studies in both hygiene and therapeutics . The suggestion of Mr. Quarrie, above quoted, may be a contribution, directly or indirectly, to progress on this line.

The quotation from Dr. Waller reminds us to relate an interesting phenomenon witnessed by the writer, some years ago, in the office of Dr. Bernhardt Fincke, of Brooklyn, famed for high homoeopathic attenuations. Dr. Fincke has what may be called a personal galvanometer, of the most delicate susceptibility, by which the fluctuations of nervous energy, in a person holding one of its poles in each hand, are registered to their faintest degrees. Invited to test the effect of an infinitesimal, through this instrument, the writer, being tired from exercise, chose arnica as the drug. The present action of his nervous force having been registered through the galvanometer; a dozen almost microscopic pelletles of infinitesimalized arnica were administered to him, still holding the conductors. Almost immediately the register began falling, until the index passed through a half circle, retrograde. Soon, however, it began to return ; until, mirabile dictu ! it gradually crept back to the original station, passed beyond it, and eventually rose a good part of a circle higher.

These are facts: Explain them who best can. We do not undertake to decide which ways the reverse currents of energy went and came; or what they indicated, further than some electro-nervous effects of the drug, first apparently depressing, and then recuperative, to the nervous action of the subject.


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