Ask Dr. Schund
                    (C)1990 Alan M. Schwartz

Dr. Schund, why do people bite their nails?

The consumption of self as food, autophagy, is an all but 
ubiquitous phenomenon avidly and compulsively practiced by most 
children and many adults.  The bitten fingernail says a lot about 
its owner, both in volume and in substance.  All categories of 
individuals who engage in this exotic practice may be lumped into 
a single cohort -- Human beings who are bound and compressed into 
a screaming white hot nodule of distress find extraordinary 
comfort and a path to survival in the nibbling of their nails.  
So intense is the release afforded by the eating of fingernails 
that practitioners of the art will pursue those cuticular tidbits 
to the point of drawing blood and beyond, to the risk of 
infection and even self-mutilation.

Strangely potent erotic promises are embodied within a woman's 
sensuously long nails, lightly drawn across your skin, pausing 
with delicate pressure upon your lower lip.  Many societies 
across the planet and through the ages have revered and even 
worshipped the extraordinarily long fingernail.  America is 
currently seized within a fetish of artificiality and anatomic 
distortion.  The bustle, the girdle and the padded bra have given 
way to cosmetic surgery and the implant.  Prominent among the 
appliances for the tantalizing reconfiguration of the human body 
is the artificial nail, to the tune of more than $70 million 
dollars each year.  Why is that?

Rather than condemn the devourer of fingernails as a sick puppy 
engaged in compulsive neurotic behavior, let us view him for what 
he truly is, an expert practitioner of self-medication and a 
voluptuary.  The freedoms of America embodied within the Bill of 
Rights are being eroded.  The rights of privacy, religious 
practice, self-defense, artistic and literary expression...  are 
being progressively expunged by a Supreme Court intoxicated with 
the power to define propriety and a constabulary that will not be 
held in thralldom to the small print.  Your moral rectitude will 
be splattered across the newspapers as word of your fleshly 
excesses is seized upon by those who would with yellow journalism 
and shrill cries grind your bones to make their bread.  Your 
fingernails are overhanging the precipice of government 
regulation and confiscation as drug substances.  

Herbal practitioners in the Far East have for millennia known of 
the potencies inherent in natural substances.  Their 
pharmacopoeia has been derided and scoffed at by Western 
physicians and pharmacologists who have unashamedly raided those 
very pages for their own chemical drugs.  The foxglove begat 
digitalis for congestive heart failure.  Rauwolfia tea became 
reserpine, the first tranquilizer and an effective 
antihypertensive agent.  Cinchona bark is 8% by weight quinine, 
and why a tree needs protection from malaria remains an 
unanswered question.  The Oriental formularies encoded the 
awesome black magic of fingernails, punctiliously doled out to 
the very wealthy and the ultimately powerful members of their own 
societies.

The rhinoceros is an extremely stupid, nearsighted and ugly 
herbivore.  It marks its territory through a unique anatomical 
adaptation allowing it to urinate in a broad horizontal fan, 
straight back.  This detestable evolutionary dead end has been 
avidly sought for its extraordinarily valued horn, worth more 
than twenty five thousand dollars the kilo on the international 
black market.  That wart-like excrescence topping its snout is 
not a horn at all, not a bony protrusion growing from its skull, 
but a keratinaceous projection growing from its skin.  The 
breathtakingly potent and officially discredited ultimate 
aphrodisiac, rhinoceros horn, is biochemically indistinguishable 
from the human fingernail.

The autophagic nail biter engages in an impassioned habit, 
entrapped as he is within a whirlpool of biochemical fantasy and 
sustained pleasure.  The tender membranes beneath the tongue are 
bathed with permeable substances leached from the masticated 
keratin of the fingernail, offering immediate entry into the 
bloodstream and an express trip to the innermost structures of 
the brain where the id dwells, waiting and lusting.  When your 
mother examined your nails, we know what she, unconsciously in 
her heart of hearts, was seeking.  When your finger inches toward 
your incisors, your tongue darting and touching that blade of 
keratin growing from its tip, we know what thoughts and solace 
await.

Take your finger out of your mouth.