The Interior Human:
A Treatise on the New Anatomy

There is an old schoolboy adage which goes something like this: if you were to take the intestines of a single person and stretch them out end to end, it would wrap around the earth three times.

As it turns out, the unknowing author of that gruesome playground tale was not far wrong. He or she had the right idea, but was only misled when it came to dimension and sheer magnitude.

A cursory look at Figure 1-1 will reveal that the "three times around the earth" sing-song is not only rudimentary but woefully uninformed. There is far more in heaven and earth - and under the skin of every man and woman - than is dreamt of in our philosophies.

Simple physics might wish to disagree, but our exploration of the distances between various glandular systems and others, or one vascular network to the next, reveals that day-to-day notions of common sense and perceived depth and breadth of the human experience (read: the human body, as viewed through the eyes of another human being) are nothing like what they seem. Once we enter this realm, it seems that our measurements and benchmarks are nothing more than arbitrary, nothing less than useless.

Take, for instance, the crude example of the length of the human excretory chain. School children have, for time immemorial, waxed on the notion that the intestinal tract, if protracted and drew to its maximum length, might turn out to resemble a frighteningly large expanse. Those children, again, had the right idea, but nothing near the amount of perspective needed to undertake such an ambitious mathematical project. Would that the human intestinal tract would only circumvent the earth three times - how much simpler that would make our task!

Indeed, those of us faced with the true details of the startling inner anatomy of the human body must look to such childish notions with nostalgia and desire. If only things were that simple. If only we could measure everything within the human body with basic units of measure, 10 of this to one of that, one half-mile of bloodstream equals ten cubic units of phlagelistic movement. But it is not to be - nostalgia is nothing more than that, nothing more than a wish for simpler times when simplicity is simply not in the cards.

And so, we are faced with the paradox in front of us: namely, man.

What makes man so singularly unintelligible at first glance is the fact that the numbers simply do not add up: measure his outside cubic inches, measure his inside cubic inches, and the two are not the same. Not by a long shot.

It has been estimated at various times over the course of human experience, what the monetary value of a man's constituent parts would equal. That is, if one of us were to be reduced to merely the minerals and chemical substances that comprise our form - if any notion of a soul, tricky thing which we shall get to later, is removed from the equation - how much would our bodies themselves be worth?

At one time, the average market value of the chemical composition of a human being fluctuated around the ten dollar mark. Of course, the value of a dollar changes over the years, and, oddly enough, so too does the value of those same elements. In today's currency, we are probably worth something in the neighborhood of $8.90. A nice dinner for a family of four.

And strangely enough, this whole notion of the balance sheet that does not balance out comes back to haunt us: just as the interior measurement of the human circulatory system is in fact larger than the cubic capacity of the body itself - making the very existence of that piping and those organs technically impossible - the idea of value, too, is out of whack.

It is here, then, that we must resume a thread I dropped just a few paragraphs earlier, and return to the notion of the soul. For this, it seems, is the great equalizing journal entry on the Creator's ledger, and it must therefore be paid some attention, even if our measurements of this elusive quality are lacking.

Refer to the figures on the right. You will notice an asymmetry in the structure of the nodes along the muscular paths. These nodes, known to practitioners of alternative medicine for countless decades, are called the "Daphyian progression." Careful measurement of electrical discharges at these points, moving in orderly fashion from one to the next, reveals much about the wellness of the body - and always has.

But it is only recently - through the work of this writer, if modesty permit me to claim - that the fuller implications of the Daphyian progression have become known. For if we measure not only electrical discharge along these nodes - but differences in heat at each node, as well - we begin to see a measurable quality that could make all the difference in scientific matters of this ilk.