Medicine: Defensive Disease

When Dean William de Berniere MacNider of the University of North Carolina medical school has anything to say about the two disposal plants of the living body, the liver and kidneys, all medical scientists come to attention. As blood flows through these organs, it leaves waste products behind to be disposed of through bladder and bowels. Last week Dean MacNider, a sandy-haired man of medium height and 56 years, delivered the second Chandler memorial lecture at Manhattan’s Columbia University, proclaimed that, according to what he has seen in livers and kidneys, disease seems to be a beneficial burden on mankind.

The organs of healthy young dogs, like the organs of healthy young humans, are composed of cuboidal cells. These cells are vulnerable to alcohol, chloroform, uranium nitrate and other poisons. If the poisoning is slight, the destroyed cuboidal cells are promptly replaced. But if the poisoning is serious, peculiar flat cells repair the damage to liver and kidneys. Those flat cells withstand great amounts of intoxication, and possibly explain why mature men and women carry their liquor better than juveniles. “The mechanism which prevents poisons from injuring this type of cells is entirely unknown,” said Dr. MacNider.

The livers of senile men and women, continued Dr. MacNider, and the organs of senile dogs, even those that are known never to have been touched by poison or disease, are composed almost entirely of flat cells. Those senile flat cells are identical in appearance with the flat liver and kidney cells of young dogs which Dr. MacNider experimentally poisoned.

Those flat cells, therefore, indicate at least one method by which the body may defend itself against destruction by disease or poison. Since those agents of death cause the formation of flat cells, Dr. MacNider found himself logically bound to conclude: “Certain tissue changes which we now designate as disease and consider essentially harmful and opposed to life may be changes in terms of adaptation which enable an organ or an organism not to die but to live, even though as a result of such changes the organ or the individual has to live at a lower level of physiological effectiveness. Such changes, therefore, become a mechanism of defense and impart resistance of an acquired nature.”