In this volume, the second of three, Peterson discusses a group of persons whom he designates as the autonomically disintegrated. By this he means persons who are poorly buffered and present an abnormally great swing in alkalinity and acidity with an accompanying exaggeraton of the A. R. S. (anabolism, reduction, spasm) and the C. O. D. (catabolism, oxidation, dilatation) phases. Although particularly interested in the rôle of the weather in intensifying these swings and so precipitating clinical phenomena, he points out many other factors which are operative.
The material is chiefly a careful study of cases, with elaborate graphs giving simultaneous findings in regard to temperature, barometric pressure, blood pressure, the ph of the blood, the potassium-calcium ratio and other findings and clinical phenomena. The principal conditions studied are headache, epilepsy, eclampsia, mucous colitis, gastric ulcer, the neuroses, urticaria, asthma and arthritis. Space is also given to disturbances of