Medical Fads and Fancies 35 
vast number of people, he would find no two alike but 
instead a great dissimilarity in bodily proportions, 
length of chest and abdomen, width of pelvis and so 
forth; just as great dissimilarity as in their faces. We 
do not become educated along these lines on account 
of clothes. Now if we had an X-ray study of the organs 
housed in these different bodies, we would find if any- 
thing a more striking dissimilarity. The stomach of 
the one looks little or nothing like the stomach of the 
other. We should see, that in a general way, certain 
types of stomachs corresponded to certain types of 
bodies, just as in a certain type of person we expect cer- 
tain bodily and mental peculiarities. The heavyweight 
prize fighter is a different type from the artist or musi- 
cian. A correspondence of types of viscera to types of 
bodies is in large measure a natural result. The abdo- 
men of certain capacities in its various regions can only 
house viscera of a certain form. For instance, a long 
body may only have a long straight up-and-down stom- 
ach—there is no room for a stomach anywhere else or 
of any other kind. A woman with an unusually wide 
pelvis will have a low position of the viscera because 
something must fill the pelvis. So we must be cautious 
before we speak of a dropped stomach. A low position 
of the stomach or of the kidneys is perfectly normal 
in people of a certain type. All physicians do not sub- 
scribe to this theory so you must take it as you will. 
However, the tendency is more and more to drive these 
doubting ones from their position of espousing a one- 
type standard with all other persons considered as ab- 
normal deviations from such. To repeat, the old idea led 
us nowhere, unless to conclude that almost no one was 
normal. 
In the same way physiological manifestations, the ac- 
