as drugs in the ordinary sense, may then act as a poison to the tissue. In like manner the substances formed in the body from the processes of tissue waste may themselves act as drugs in their effect upon living tissue. This occurs when elimination is inadequate. Hence the auto-toxins, through which tissue resistance, i. e., immunity from disease, is reduced, and the way opened for the large group of so-called infectious maladies.
It cannot fairly be assumed that, upon viewing a body after death in the fast, the lesions that may be present in any organ are due solely to previous drugging. Where two such agencies as disease and drugs have been simultaneously acting upon a patient, it is difficult, in the absence of criteria, to decide whether a specific result is due to one or to the other, or to both. But it is a significant fact that, in every instance of death that has occurred in the fast, as covered by the writer's experience, each of the subjects with but a single exception, had been drugged in early life, and that the effects upon organs, as shown in lack of development, were such as would have resulted from impeded nerve action caused by an active poison ; and the preponderance of evidence gathered in these
