By enervation it is intended to express a lack of pep or force in the nerve function, fatigue of nerve force.

There is the same controversy among those who believe in the self-created cause of disease and its natural cure over whether toxaemia precedes enervation or whether enervation is the cause of toxaemia, and the writer is one who takes the ground that either may precede the other as motivating cause.

In those cases who are not subject to great nerve stress and strain, who have no markedly devitalising habits, who are not dissipators, who take all the sleep required to recharge the batteries every night, yet who still come down to the state of enervation or toxaemia, it is fair to suppose that the cause first operative is the toxaemia resulting from gradually increasing acids stored in the body, the end-products of digestion and metabolism. Yet we do see enervation and toxic states develop in those of not markedly bad dietary habit who have gone to the limit in efforts to destroy or dissipate the stock of vitality with which Nature at first endowed them, and it is fair to suppose that the other causes have operated to create a devitalized state that permitted of this accumulation through inability of the enfeebled eliminative organs to sewer the body properly.

However, the writer believes the food causes so greatly preponderate over the causes that we may class as dissipation, that for the purposes of this book he feels justified in assuming that toxaemia causes enervation in a great majority of the cases met with in daily practice.

In correcting what he believes to be the usual causes of this state he finds it much easier to correct the dietary habit first, at any rate, and generally when this is well accomplished there is little or no trouble with the other causes of enervation as we recognize them.

Surely it is true that the gradual accumulation of acids in the system does militate against nerve force, as no one will deny; surely also these food causes are so universal that they may almost be assumed to belong to every one.

So in attacking the subject of Digestive Enervation we are doing so rather from the standpoint of toxaemia as a primary cause of this state.

Nerve exhaustion and digestive incompetency are so intimately bound up together that there seems to be no way to dissociate them. Usually they are better treated together as differing phases of one thing: progressive acid-autotoxicosis, or toxaemia.

These toxins may be of exogenous or endogenous origin, and there are those, as Dr. Tilden, who, knowing that the digestive tube is merely an inversion of the body's exterior, are prone to regard toxins developed within this canal as of exogenous origin, that is, generated without the body, but for purposes of making the subject more clear it seems that we should disregard these technicalities and consider toxins manufactured in the digestive tract and colon as endogenous, as surely they are absorbed into the body and have to be accounted for by the body.

There is here the familiar vicious cycle, the toxic state creating enervation through body poisoning, and the enervated state further adding to the toxic condition by interfering with elimination of debris.

So what does it matter whether we ascribe to one or the other the place of first cause, since they are so intimately related that we cannot in practice separate them?

Toxic accumulations are like addition, a little bit added to what you have makes a little bit more.

So we accumulate handicaps in the form of self-created and retained toxins or poisons, and we suffer from toxaemia, whether primarily from a breakdown of nerve force or from this accumulation which causes such breakdown.

We do not know how we came so, but we're here.

By enervation we mean lack of nerve force, weakness, inertia, inability to carry on function normally.

Every function of the body depends for its activity or its capability for function, on the character of nerve force with which it is supplied continually, and right here is where acidosis comes in, for the increasing acidity of the body, or, more properly speaking, its lowered alkalinity, is the cause of this lowered nerve force.

We do not mean to say that this is the only cause, for anything that depletes our vitality lowers nerve force.

Loss of sleep, dissipation in its varied forms, too great mental and physical stress, all these tend to lower nerve force, but back of these is so universally the increasing acid state from wrong habits of eating that we are not able to separate these causes definitely.

Enervation in any degree lessens function of every sort, of course, for we are all of one piece, and if one organ suffers so do all, their nerve force being one source only, the very center of us ourselves.

No one part suffers a paucity of nerve force, leaving out the question of external violence that may interfere with the nerve supply to some one part, but we suffer in toto from this state, and the weakest organ or function is the one that shows this plainest.

We inherit from our parents no better organs than the ones with which they were supplied, and if organic weakness had developed in either parent, or perhaps in both, the offspring would be weak in this particular. When the state of enervation begins to show, this organic weakness will develop recognizably, and we say this man has developed this or that disease.

The only disease that has developed is acidosis, or toxaemia, the weakness being only the evident break, the leak to which he was predisposed by heritage.

If this man with the inherited weakness so lives as to prevent the accumulation of the hindering acids, this weak organ will never be in evidence, for it was good enough to carry him this far, and in the absence of further handicaps would carry him through to the end, without question.

So on our parents we may blame only our predispositions to disease of this or that organ, the actual disease being always a thing of our own creation.