Dr. Gibson

Dr. Gibson was a well-known free thinking physician of the early 20th century. Here are a few short quotes that shed light on his methods. "The ruling stimulant of the world today is not the coffee, tea, beer nor even whisky-but the innocent-looking, pleasant-tasting, alluring white powder known as sugar. Its stimulating power is greater than that of the alcohol, because it is the parent and generator of the alcohol. Candy, says Dr. Woods-Hutchinson, is good for children because it generates energy, and energy is needed at that age. Yet the energy which candy brings to the body is very much like the energy which the whip brings to a horse. In either case the system, in its response to the irritation, has received nothing from without, but spends its own constitutional energy, derived from its own cellular storage batteries. As a fuel in the human furnace, sugar explodes rather than burns. Like a wild fire it leaps through the organism along the different nerve conduits, up and down the pneumo-gastric connections to the head, lungs and heart, while the vital detonations send ganglionic shocks to every general or specific center of sensation-from the hair follicles of the scalp, tympanum of the ear, optic nerve of the eye, to the sciatic of the leg-lashing the involved functions into a convulsive activity, which is interpreted as strength and virility, but in reality is a deep-wrought vital loss to the system. For, like money, energy manifests only in its spending-not in its making." And another... "Digestion being an electric process, hunger stands for the phenomenon of unsatisfied affinity, arising in the gastric and somatic cells for elements needed by the system. In other words, hunger is the electric tension arising from the affinity which an exhausted cell experiences towards a replenishment of its constitutional needs. And this hunger, of course, takes the character of specialized appetite for those very elements of foods, from which the system suffers exhaustion."