Selections from Therapeutic Sarcognomy

Joseph Rodes Buchanan · Constitution of Man Series · 61 pages

Sixty-one pages of selections from Joseph Rodes Buchanan's Therapeutic Sarcognomy — the 683-page edition published in Boston by J.G. Cupples Co. in 1891 — opened by an abstract of central ideas giving each position with its page number. The passages are taken from ten chapters spread across the whole book, IV and V, X to XIII, XVI, XVII, XIX and XXVI, so this is a reader's selection rather than a continuous argument. A biography of Buchanan by Boris de Zirkoff, from H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings volume VI, closes the file, together with a bibliography of his eight books, two reference works on the Eclectic physicians of his generation, and pointers to three related study notes elsewhere on this site. The frontispiece is by Elena Aviar and the drawing on page 32 by Rushofart.

Buchanan gives his own definition first. He coined the word in 1842, from the Greek sarx, flesh, and gnome, judgement, for what he took to be a new science: the discovery that the psychic and physiological effects he had produced on the head could be produced on the body as well, and so a knowledge of the powers belonging to each part of the body in health, in excitement and in disease — in his own phrase, an understanding of the correlation of soul, brain and body. The selections work outward from that regional idea. He places the vital and positive forces in the posterior half of the brain and body and the sensitive and negative in the anterior, the relaxing influences in the abdomen and the energetic elsewhere; he holds the upper dorsal region to be the most important part of the spine and the chilling of the shoulders to be peculiarly prostrating, which is his reason for thinking the capes of the old overcoat and the woman's shawl genuinely useful garments. A long practical run follows on what he calls nervauric healing — that the healer should stay on his feet rather than sit passively, should remove morbid nervaura by light rapid dispersive passes, should wear wool or silk rather than linen because linen conducts, and should not let the work be filed under the title of massage, which he contrasts unfavourably both with the Egyptian bath and with what he describes as the untaught skill and vital sympathy of the Polynesians. Warmth, diet, coffee and tea are discussed for their bearing on what he calls susceptibility. Several pages go to the chest, on his view that conversation, declamation and singing expand and vitalise it, with instructions to inflate the lungs fully several times a day; and to posture, the erect position being associated with physical force and the animal appetites and the horizontal with the better thoughts men have on the pillow. The closing pages leave therapeutics for the frame this series is built on: the line from the Phaedrus that the soul which has never perceived the truth cannot pass into human form, the body as the sepulchre of the soul, memory seated in every organ rather than in one place in the brain, and the brain as the organ of a mind which is itself the reflection of a higher Noetic principle, while the heart is the organ of spiritual consciousness.

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