Congenital Alterable Transmissible Asymmetry: The Spiritual Meaning of Disease and Science

By Morris Hyman

Since the soul is immortal and consequently indifferent to the concept of death, the evidence that the mind, with its unceasing fears, is always transcended in such moments of creating moral beauty is revealed in the frequency with which individuals have been known to have ended their mortal existences in spontaneous and hopeless attempts to save the life of a complete stranger. It is interesting to note that there is in the language no word, such as inspiration or intuition, with which we may describe such noble activities of the soul.

Chapter 2, The Intuition, pg. 12

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480813748

Morris Hyman

Morris Hyman, born Moses Hyman on June 2, 1908, was fated to become a doctor after his oldest brother, 16 years old with a scholarship to Columbia University to study medicine, died overnight in the 1918 influenza pandemic. In 1942, at the age of 33, married only three years to Shirley, Morris was sent overseas as a doctor in World War II (photo depicts him before sailing to his first destination, Casablanca). For three and a half years Morris remained in the theatre of war, first in Casablanca, then in France, England and finally Germany when the war ended and he and two other American doctors were in charge of a German hospital. Returning home to New York City, he practiced medicine for three decades on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at the Belnord, making house calls and never raising his fees for the entirety of his practice. He and his family spent summers in his much beloved Vermont, where he painted, wrote poetry, took long walks with his wife and daughters, and had numerous animals. He became a vegetarian in the 1950s. He is survived by his wife Shirley, who recently turned 101 (see “Shirley and Moe,” a You Tube video created by Brandon Stanton, author of “Humans of New York”), and two daughters, Sally Laura and Judith Isabelle. This manuscript was written in 1970.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-1373-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1375-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1374-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900822

Archway Publishing rev. date: 2/3/2015

Contents

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Introduction

Chapter 1.   The Inquiry Begins

Chapter 2.   The Intuition

Chapter 3.   Health and Disease, Reality and Shadow

Chapter 4.   The Physiology of Man

Chapter 5.   The Etiology of Disease

Chapter 6.   Foetal Development and Congenital Imperfection

Chapter 7.   General Considerations of Health

Chapter 8.   General Considerations of Disease

Chapter 9.   The Restoration of Health

Chapter 10. Further Considerations of Therapy

Chapter 11. Miscellanea

Chapter 12. Coronary Pathology

Chapter 13. The Malignancies

Chapter 14. Recapitulation

Introduction

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We live in an era of paltry awarenesses, in which the most widely employed terms and concepts are unrelated to true reality. Ask the average individual to define, for example, a religious person, and he will almost invariably point to one who attends church regularly and is a faithful devotee of its dogmas and rituals. But if we question him further, and he is honest in his responses, the following dialogue may well eventuate:

But (we shall inquire) this religious person of whom we are speaking—shall we attribute to him the quality of selfishness of selflessness, if either be in the nature of true religiousness?

Selflessness, of course.

And the going to church, with its adherence to ritual and dogma—is it generally associated with concern for others or for self-seeking? In other words, what is generally the motivation for the church going?

Selfishness, I’m afraid; it is salvation for self that the individual is looking for.

And what shall we say of a person in one of the dedicated fields—nursing or medicine or social work or teaching—whose primary preoccupation may well be with the fate of patients or clients or students? Shall we consider such an individual to be selfish or selfless in his labor?

Selfless, to be sure.

And if such a selfless, dedicated person never attends church, shall we now believe him to be irreligious by contrast with that other, the faithful parishioner whose fundamental motivation we have already concluded to be that of self-seeking?

There is only one possible answer to the final question, and it is opposite to the prevailing one.

Similar fallacies may be detected in the concepts of our age with respect to such commonly described qualities as courage, power, wisdom, beauty, virtue, freedom, spiritual education, etc.—the list is long enough. But the inquiry of this writing is with another of the misunderstood appellations of contemporary society, with the word, science, as well as with its perceiver, the scientist.

Our era is replete with allusions to both terms; and thousands of students who graduate each year with degrees in the discipline make likely the conclusion that ours is a Mecca of wisdom to which every past epoch must bow in homage. While such statements as: we have developed more scientists in the past decade than were present to all of the previous ages of humanity, which the author came across recently in the pages of a popular magazine, only reflect the aura of knowledgeable sanctity which envelops us.

And yet there is a curious uneasiness which accompanies such concepts, and one wonders: if this be truly the age of scientific wisdom it professes to be, then why the attendant chaos and fears and suffering? For there is an equally persistent feeling, which nothing seems able to eradicate, that an age of science, of widespread knowledge of the sublime ultimates and absolutes of existence and of the universe, must somehow be accompanied by light (rather than by darkness), by courage and faith, joy and hope, beauty and virtue—all the lovely beatitudes in which our culture is so sadly lacking.

And being a physician, a disciple for more than thirty years of one of the presumed sciences, encouragement is added for the questioning of prevailing faiths. If disease (as we are being so constantly and eagerly informed) is being steadily eradicated, then why has longevity reached an apparent crest from which it appears even now to be receding? Successes have occurred in the treatment and prevention of such infectious conditions as diphtheria and tuberculosis and poliomyelitis, while experience too often reveals the frequency of therapeutic failure in the dread diseases of cancer and coronary thrombosis. And by some miracle of spiritual insight, the slumbering soul awakens one day from the encompassing darkness to realize that success, which is possible when microscopic predators exist to be suppressed and destroyed, may not be possible when the problem is one of congenital imperfection. And though chemicals are being ceaselessly synthesized and employed with seeming effectiveness, their toxic manifestations appear to be on the increase as well; and nowhere is there being asked the imperative philosophical query: how can drugs which are completely foreign to the entire evolutionary experience of a species be more beneficial than harmful?

Where also are the philosophical probings which begin by understanding and acknowledging that physical man is an offspring of certain attributes and laws of Nature, while wondering whether disease may not be an end product of indifference to such all-embracing reality? What, indeed, if we are to inquire further, is disease itself, and what is that blessed abstraction called health which, when lost, brings on the inevitable shadows of illness? Is there even a unity present to all healthy, functioning cells—and may it be nutritional adequacy? And what of the nutritional norms of the human species—are we truly omnivorous, as is so universally accepted? And are there indeed 10,000 different diseases, or whatever number has by now been calculated by the discipline of medicine—or is there in reality but one disease with 10,000 different faces? And new questions occur as answers redeeming the old bring fresh courage in their wake.

Step by step, through the mists of enshrouding faith, the soul struggles on: each effort yielding deepening illuminations which brighten the pursuant steps, each act of faith the progenitor of new faith. And one day, emerging from the stifling cavern of contemporary beliefs into the ecstasies of ineffable light, there arises the associated awareness that what has been left behind in the shrouded holocaust is not science but a seductive similitude.

The author is convinced that the scientist is the rarest of all beings, a mature soul somehow distracted, perhaps by rare environmental occurrences, from the exalted and sublime spiritual and philosophical contemplations which are his natural prerogative, to the study of the lesser beauties of embodied reality. Progressively informing the intellect, as God has informed Nature, his soul moves across the darknesses of prevailing opinion to become the unique perceiver of the hierarchy which lurks within and animates the living organisms and the physical world—the lonely and infrequent inheritor of the elevated spirit’s voluntary descent into those lesser realities which constitute the perceptions of the scientist. And his final and ultimate discovery, blindingly bright, self-assertive and without refutation, is that the physical has no reality of its own, but only participates in such to the momentary degree to which it has been yielded the reality of the spiritual.

Chapter 1.

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The Inquiry Begins

Let us begin by defining science, at least in terms of general understanding. It is, presumably, the total knowledge of any aspect of physical reality, whether it be of living organisms or of Nature.

But how difficult it is for the soul of man, locked as it is within a physical box of limited perceptions, and unaware even of its limitations, to arrive at such knowledge!

Let me cite an example.

A train is standing idly at a station and a man enters and sits down. He is distracted by many things, but now, gazing out of the window as the train begins to depart, he becomes suddenly aware of the illusion that almost all of us have experienced at one time or another: it is not the train but the landscape that is moving. Within seconds, however, he has reversed his perceptions and the true nature of reality becomes once more evident. However, his awareness that it is not the landscape but himself who has entered into movement is related to the fact that he has had the prior experience of non-movement: knowing one, he can comprehend the other. Imagine, however, that each of us was born on a moving train without knowing that we were in movement. Our most profound and perceptive scientists would then be measuring the speed of the passing landscape, the highest honors being bestowed on those whose accuracy approached most closely the velocity of its movements. And it is the purpose of this writing not merely to demonstrate the nature of true science, but to reveal that its contemporary and fraudulent similitude is carefully measuring the speed of a variety of non-moving landscapes.

Let me give other examples.

For many millennia, man was convinced that the earth was stationary and that the sun revolved about it. It was all too evident, to a physical organism born upon a moving planet and unaware that it, itself, was in movement upon that earth, that the solar eminence was the one in revolution. Not only did his religion assure him of such a truth, but it was authenticated as well by that most reliable of his senses, his sight, which assured him, through the diurnal rising and setting of the sun, that it was the latter which was in movement. To the locked confinement of a physical entity ignorant of the fact that it was traveling in space upon an endlessly orbiting planet, the perceptions of the sight and of its reflecting organ, the intellect, were woefully inadequate for the revelation of truth. For it is in the nature of such perceptive limitations to envision the universe not as it is, objectively, but through the imposition upon the goal of its scrutiny of its own finite qualities; and a movement unaware of its true state burdened the sun with the aspect of its own qualities.

Thus, when Aristarchus of Samos, some three hundred years before Christ, and Copernicus, almost two millennia later, were able to discern the true visage of heliocentric reality, it could only have occurred through the employment of a quality whose existence, prior to the physical earth and apart from its unceasing revolutions, made possible such unique perception; the eyes and the intellect, having from birth on been confined within the limitations of their own unending movements, were incapable of such discernment.

More than a century later, when Isaac Newton discovers an eternal, spiritual reality which controls and guides the ceaseless ebb and flow of the physical worlds, a similar unique and almost incredible perception is revealed. The falling apple had indeed been discerned by many millions of eyes and, in turn, recorded by equal millions of allied intellects; yet