Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [55]
Our blood works not only to destroy the uninvited, but also to repair. In sleep, our circulatory system is infused with growth hormone, a product of the pineal gland and essential in helping rebuild damaged tissue. Growth hormone also rouses additional infection-fighting substances called cytokines, which, like a densely worded paragraph, can make us sleepy. It’s an extraordinary give-and-take. As sleep bolsters our immune system, our immune system bolsters sleep.
So, as it turns out, our moms were right all along.
Get back in bed this instant. Or, All you need is a good night’s sleep.
These refrains of countless generations of mothers are grounded not just in the clear messages our bodies send us but also in sound science. And while the mere mention of bed rest as a cure-all inevitably conjures up for me images from childhood, complete with the Vicks VapoRub and those spoonfuls of “grape-flavored” god-awfulness, the fact is, round-the-clock rest as a clinically proven treatment for sickness was first prescribed 150 years ago—the brainchild of a scientist from Paul and Hedwig Ehrlich’s hometown. Hermann Brehmer, a botanist from Silesia, contracted TB during the late 1840s and moved to the Himalayas to live out his final days. The young man’s prognosis was grim. TB, also called consumption, was almost never survivable and, as we now know, this bacterial infection has existed since prehistory; the royal mummies of ancient Egypt show clear evidence of its ravages. Between 1700 and 1900, according to historians, an estimated one billion people died of the disease. Hermann Brehmer did not expect to be an exception. To his great surprise, however, the fresh mountain air and abundant bed rest worked wonders, and he fully recovered. (What Brehmer’s unplanned regimen had done was deprive the bacteria of the conditions they needed to thrive, an immunologist today would explain, thus giving his immune system the edge it needed to fight back.) Following his return to Germany, Brehmer published in 1854 the banner-titled book Tuberculosis Is a Curable Disease, in which he espoused his TB “rest cure.” That same year he opened the world’s first tuberculosis sanatorium, the prototype for thousands built in Europe and the United States in the decades to follow. (By the 1940s these facilities had run their course, made obsolete by the widespread availability of antibiotics.) A mainstay of sanatoriums was the sleeping porch, where patients could rest, soak up sunshine, and “take the airs.” Of course, in true Michelin guide style, sanatoriums ran the full range of stars, from squalid public institutions to luxurious resorts for the well-to-do. In fact, when money was less of a concern, patients such as Paul Ehrlich could even make a vacation of their recovery, just as long as they made the commitment to follow doctor’s orders.
Now, one would think that Paul would’ve taken to forced rest like a cat to bathwater. Even Hedwig expected her thirty-four-year-old husband to go partway ’round the bend. In their five years together, she’d scarcely ever seen him take a day off. And yet, even before the Ehrlichs had reached their final destination of Egypt, the good doctor was showing early promise. The couple and their two daughters had first stopped over at a lakeside spa near Venice, and Hedwig, it was later reported, admitted her wonderment at how quickly Paul was adjusting to full-time R and R. “People always think I’m a hard worker,” he remarked at the time, “but they’re wrong. I can be as lazy as a giant snake.”
True enough. As Hedwig well knew, his favorite