The heart and lungs are carefully protected by being enclosed in a bony cage made up of ribs, spinal column and sternum. Nature fortifies and places all the vital organs in the least exposed and most inaccessable parts of the body.

When short of nutritive material nature nourishes the most vital organs first. In fasting, or in starvation, the fat is consumed first and then the other tissues in the inverse order of their usefulness and importance. In death from starvation the loss to the nervous system is almost immeasurably small. Given rest and sleep and the nerves seem able to maintain their substance without injury through the most prolonged fast.

In fevers, when nutrition is at a low ebb, the hair often falls out and the nails lose much of their substance. The nutrition that normally goes to these is being utilized by the other organs.

During pregnancy, if the diet is deficient, nature first sacrifices the most dispensible portions of the mother's body--the teeth, hair, nails, etc.,--to supply nutritive material to the developing embryo. The more vital organs do not suffer until the less vital ones have first been sacrificed.

Thus we might continue giving example after example of the wonderful engineering feats of the body and show with what marvelous powers and works it meets emergencies and protects its own vital interests. When we consider the wonderful mechanism of the human body, the certainty with which all organs perform their allotted work, the marvelous ingenuity with which the body meets emergencies, its almost limitless powers of repair and recuperation, we develop a large respect and admiration for the curative power of the body and learn to view with contempt and disgust the means that man employs in his unintelligent efforts to cure.

The compensatory powers inherent in the human body are almost beyond comprehension. It is not merely that there is a body mechanism that acts as a thermostat and prevents the body's temperature from varying more than a fraction of a degree in all kinds of weather; that another mechanism maintains the proper water content of the tissues; while another keeps the chemical balance of the system close to neutral; but there are remarkable examples of people living and maintaining average health after whole organs have been destroyed or removed. One kidney and part of the other may be gone, sections of the intestines may be removed, even the stomach may be cut out, the gall bladder and other small parts of the body, the spleen, etc., may be removed and the individual go on living and enjoying life. Such adaptations reveal the reserve of power and the wealth of resources of the living organism.

Well did Jennings affirm: "But at every step of her (nature's) downward progress (in the face of pathoferic causes she cannot overcome), her tendency and effort have been to ascend and remount the pinnacle of her greatness; and even now, in the depth of her degradation, the tendency of all that remains of her, of principle or law, power and action, is still upwards." Although orthopathic phenomena always tend toward a definite end, they are not always successful. They have their limitations and are capable of successfully resisting only a given amount of poisoning or of repairing or compensating only a limited amount of injury. Whether success or failure crowns the effort, the healing processes are carried out in the same orderly manner and by the same processes and functions, modified, of course, to meet different exigencies, with which the body is built and maintained.

Cure or healing is the restoration to normal function and the repair of damaged structure. These are accomplished by the same powers, processes and agents that maintain health. The same power that determines the development of the embryo from the germ or ovum, is identical with that which is the source of the constant preservation, and renovation, purification and reparation, development and growth of the organism after birth. The generation of new structures to supplant the dead and dying ones is due to cell multiplication and involves the same creative forces that operate in the body of the growing, developing babe. By these processes normal health is maintained and if health is impaired, restored. As Dr. Walter was so fond of saying; the power of cure is the power of repair and the power of repair is the power of reproduction.

When the cells of the lungs are injured or sick they repair and cure themselves, assisted of course, by the general system. Sick and damaged kidney cells cure and repair themselves. Sick and damaged stomach cells or brain cells or liver cells or muscle cells cure and repair themselves. All of this is accomplished, not with drugs and treatments, but by virtue of the cell's own inherent powers of self-cure and self-repair and is accomplished by the use of the same light and air and water and food--cell substances-- that are used in building new cells. Dr. Moras says: "But, as air is air, and as such is not a cure; and as water is water, and as such is not a cure, therefore, 'cure' is not a thing that exists outside of, or distinct from the particular tissue-cells in whose 'bosom' it (the cure) originally was (performed and pre-ordained by nature) and is again re-formed with the elements derived from air, water, light, and foods."--Autology.

Cure begins and ends in the cells, organs, tissues and fluids of the body and is accomplished by the self-same functions and processes and by the use of the self-same materials, agents and forces with which nature builds and maintains the body in health. In other words, cure is simply healthy function working under a handicap. "And that cure," says Dr. Moras (Autology), "is Nature-made and Nature-pre-ordained, and resides in the cell-matter unknown as life, but recognized as function, in the heart-granules of the tissue-cells.

"It is that thing which we call 'function or nutrition', which enables a kidney-cell to manufacture kidney-tissue and urine with the same air and water and food stuffs with which brain cells manufacture brain-tissue and thoughts", or, with which liver-cells manufacture liver-tissue and bile, and gonads manufacture gonad-tissue and spermatozoa and ova.

These are the fundamental processes of life. Their constant and successful performance depends upon the ordinary conditions and requirements of life, and not upon some therapeutic measure. It may answer the purposes of the surgeon to have it supposed that he is possessed of healing salves, etc., but he is well aware that the great art in these cases, is to keep the part entirely at rest, the edges in due apposition, where such is necessary, and extraneous bodies from having access to it-- his trust being altogether placed in the sanative influence of the instinctive power situated in the injured part, and in every part of the frame.

There is not the slightest evidence that the living organism can make any use whatever of any influences or agents in the cure of disease or repair of injury that it does not and cannot use in maintaining health. There is, however, a world of evidence that the living organism can get along without all these therapeutic agents and influences and equally as much evidence that it does often get along in spite of them. There is, also, a world of evidence, that many, if not all, methods and systems of therapeutics are harmful and, as a consequence, retard healing and cure.