Stimulants like alcohol, tea and coffee are not to be used.  Weak cocoa is all right in most cases.  Hot water, if any drink must be taken, at meals.  Such a patient in order to live and live comfortably, must take life easy.  He cannot afford to run, to over lift, or over exert, to walk fast upstairs, hurry or to “catch the car.”  He must not get angry or excited.  Games of all kinds that have a tendency to make him nervous must be avoided.  The same caution applies to exciting literature.  In short, a patient with organic heart disease must be a drone in the hum of this busy, fast-rushing life, if he would hope to keep the spark of life for many years.  Sleep, rest and quiet is a better motto for you than the strenuous life.

[340 Mothers’ remedies]

The Heart.—­The heart is the central organ of the entire system and consists of a hollow muscle; by its contraction the blood is pumped to all parts of the body through a complicated series of tubes, termed arteries.  The arteries undergo enormous ramifications (branchings) in their course throughout the body and end in very minute vessels, called arterioles, which in their turn open into a close meshed network of microscopic (very minute) vessels, termed capillaries.  After the blood has passed through the capillaries it is collected into a series of larger vessels called veins by which it is returned to the heart.  The passage of the blood through the heart and blood vessels constitutes what is termed the circulation of the blood.  The human heart is divided by a septum (partition) into two halves, right and left, each half being further constricted into, two cavities, the upper of the two being termed the auricle and the lower the ventricle.  The heart consists of four chambers or cavities, two forming the right half, the right auricle and right ventricle, and two forming the left half, the left auricle and left ventricle.  The right half of the heart contains the venous or impure blood; the left the arterial or pure blood.  From the cavity of the left ventricle the pure blood is carried into a large artery, the aorta, through the numerous branches of which it is distributed to all parts of the body, with the exception of the lungs.  In its passage through the capillaries of the body the blood gives up to the tissues the material necessary for their growth and nourishment and at the same time receives from the tissues the waste products resulting from their metabolism, that is, the building up and tearing down of the tissues, and in so doing becomes changed from arterial or pure blood into venous or impure blood, which is collected by the veins and through them returned to the right auricle of the heart.