Sir,

While Major Reginald Austin very rightly applauds Dr. Beddow Bayly for his condemnation of methods of treatment which cannot be proven to be useful, is he as right in saying that "proper metabolism and nutrition, the outcome of right living habits" is more useful to doctors when few of us have any very clear ideas as to what right living habits are? It may be true that the trends of medicine based on the bacteriological concept have yielded no very practical fruits, but if it be granted this is so, where shall we turn to find the education which will teach us means of living so that our resistances may be high and our responses directed towards the preservation of our health as well as to the satisfaction of our wants and needs?

The work of a non-medical man, F. Matthias Alexander, has revealed that a large proportion of society are mal-coordinated and that the mechanism upon which the proper utilisation of even the most appropriate foods and even air is functioning inadequately. If this be so, as it can justly be demonstrated, how can the study of metabolism or nutrition help us unless we are first prepared to recognise our faulty use of ourselves, the failure of present accepted educational methods, both lay and medical, to eradicate these faulty uses, and are prepared to substitute instead methods of education in which the use of the self will be the first consideration? The only method so far evolved which aims by means of a practical technique in teaching pupils an improved use of themselves is that of Mr. F. Matthias Alexander and it would be to the permanent credit of the medical profession if they saw to it that his methods were made part of the medical curriculum and so gave the future graduate a firm, solid, and remunerative alternative principle to that of the germ or infective notion so long barren where wide progress is concerned.

Yours, etc.,
Mungo Douglas, M.B.

Sir,

I was pleased to see Major Austin's reply to my letter in which I claimed that attention to nutrition and metabolism was valueless unless the mal-co-ordinations of the human machine so widely prevalent were first corrected, and I do not see that he has succeeded in bringing forward proof that my first statement is in error.

Quoting from Man's Supreme Inheritance, it certainly appears clear that in an example given, Mr. Alexander agrees that faulty feeding will produce mal-adjustments and disordered functions; but he does not contend that correct feeding will remove mal adjustments, nor that correct feeding is the primary controller of the human mechanism. On the contrary, he knows and can demonstrate that the primary control of the human mechanism is a certain use of the head and neck which conditions the use of the secondary controls throughout the body and that the harmonious use of these controls in turn, conditions the general psycho-physical functioning and so the senses themselves upon which not only our whole behaviour, but of particular interest to Major Austin, our sense of taste, depends. This primary control is not a new invention, but is as old as man and animal life itself and is familiar to physiologists in Magnus's Körperstellung, and sometimes goes by the name of "central control" among physiologists.

Where Mr. Alexander has triumphed beyond all others is in bringing this control into conscious usage and to give it that sway in the human economy which nature or evolution, or what you will, purposed it should have, and no doubt saw that it did have, until man with most incomprehensible recklessness sought to survive disregardful of the claims of his own physiology. It might be that different foods in the manner of any new stimulus might fortuitously set the disordered mechanism of the body working aright, but if by some miracle they did, how could this stimulus maintain the newly-secured working when the whole history of man up to our time shows only too clearly his inability to manage the body on an instinctive, unconscious or blind guidance.

Were Major Austin dealing with people functioning at their maximum, then a constantly improved use of food might be of primary importance, but I cannot too emphatically point out, and the people walking about any city street will bear out what I claim, that society at large is mal-co-ordinated and that unless this mal-co-ordination is removed, study of nutrition and metabolism will ultimately be useless.

Yours, etc.,
Mungo Douglas, M.B.