bowels for use. The abdomen is
much longer than wide. In short, it is a house or shop builded for
manufacturing purposes. In it we find the machinery that produces rough
blood or chyle, and sends it to heart and lungs to be finished to
perfect living blood, to supply and sustain all the organs of this
division. This diaphragm or wall has several openings through which
blood and nutriment pass to and from abdomen to heart, lungs and brain.
I want to draw your special attention to the fact that this diaphragm
must be truly normal. It must be anchored and held in its true position
without any variation, and in order that you shall fully understand what
I mean, I will ask you to go with me mentally to all the ribs, beginning
with the sternum, see attachments, follow across with a downward course
to the attachments of this great muscular septum to the lower lumbar
region, where the right crus receives a branch or strong muscle from the
left side, and the left crus receives a muscle from the right which
becomes one common muscle known as the left crus, the same of the right
crus receiving a muscle or tendon from the left, which you will easily
comprehend from examining descriptive cuts in Gray, Morris, Gerrish, or
any well illustrated work of anatomy. You see at once a chance for
constriction of the aorta by the muscles under which it passes, causing
without doubt much of the disease known as palpitation of the heart,
which is only a bouncing back of the blood that has been stopped at the
crura. Farther away from the spine near the center of the diaphragm we
find the return opening through this wall, provided to accommodate the
vena cava. To the left a few inches below the vena cava we find another
opening provided for the oesophagus and its nerves; like the aorta, it
has two muscles of the diaphragm crossing directly between oesophagus
and the aorta, in such shape as to be able to produce powerful
prohibitory constriction to normal swallowing.

A LIST OF UNEXPLAINED DISEASES.

At this point I will draw your attention to what I consider is the cause
of a whole list of hitherto unexplained diseases, which I think are only
effects, caused by the blood and other fluids being prohibited from
doing normal service by constrictions at the various openings of the
diaphragm. Thus prohibition of free action of the thoracic duct would
produce congestion of receptaculum chyli, because of not being able to
discharge its contents as fa