The Royal Road to Health | Page 6

in the principle of "curing one disease by producing another." In other words, their practice is, to induce a drug disease to cure a primary one, for this is exactly what is done when drugs are administered, in pathological conditions as we shall prove later on by testimony from authorities on medical practice.
The materia medica of the schools, to-day, includes upwards of two thousand substances the number increasing daily and when viewed dispassionately it presents what? A list of drugs, chemicals, dye- stuffs, all subversive of organic structures. They are all antagonistic to living matter: all produce disease when brought in contact in any manner with the living domain as a matter of fact, all are poisons. Now, what logical standing can a system have, that employs, as remedies for diseases, those things that produce disease in healthy persons? No advocate of the drug system has ever advanced a reason that would bear one moment's scientific examination, why poisonous substances should be administered to the sick, and no one will ever be able to give a satisfactory explanation of the theory that underlies the practice, for none exists. When once the public fully grasps the true import of this glaring anomaly, the days of the drug system will be numbered.
Physicians of ability and long experience, who have devoted their lives to the relief of suffering humanity, both in this and other countries, have declared after close observation, that they were fully and thoroughly convinced that medicines do not cure patients, that they do not assist Nature's process of cure, so much as they retard it, and, that they are more hurtful than remedial in all diseases. A still larger number have reached the same conclusion with regard to certain complaints, such as scarlet fever, croup, pneumonia, cholera, rheumatism, diphtheria, measles, small-pox, dysentery, and typhoid fever, and that in every case where they have abandoned all medicine, abjured all drugs and potions, their success has been marvellously increased.
Professor B. F. Parker, of the New York Medical College, once said to a medical class: "I have recently given no medicine in the treatment of measles and scarlet fever, and I have had excellent success."
Dr. Snow, Health Officer of Providence, R. I., reported for the information of his professional brethren, through the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal that he had treated all the cases of small-pox, which had prevailed endemically in that city, without a particle of medicine, and that all of the cases some of which were very grave ones recovered.
Dr. John Bell, Professor of Materia Medica in one of the Philadelphia Colleges, and also in the Medical College of Baltimore, testified in a work which he published ("Bell on Baths"), that he and others had treated many cases of scarlet fever with bathing, and without medicines of any kind, and without losing a patient.
Dr. Ames, of Montgomery, Alabama, some years since published in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, his experience and observation in the treatment of pneumonia. He had been led to notice for many years, that patients who were treated with the ordinary remedies--bleeding, mercury, and remedies--breeding certain complications which always aggravated the malady, and rendered the convalescence more lingering and recovery less complete. Such patients were always liable to collapses and re-lapses; to "run into typhoid"; to sink suddenly, and die very unexpectedly.
He noticed particularly that patients who took calomel and antimony were found, on post-mortem examinations, to have serious and even fatal inflammation of the stomach and small intestines, attended with great prostration, delirium, and other symptoms of drug poisoning. These "complications" were nothing more or less than drug diseases. And Dr. Ames found, on changing his plan of treatment to milder and simpler remedies, that he lost no patients.
The late Professor Win. Tully, M.D., of Yale College, and of the Vermont Academy of Medicine at Gastleton, Vt., informed his medical class, that on one occasion the typhoid pneumonia was so fatal in some places in the valley of the Connecticut River, that the people became suspicious that the physicians were doing more harm than good; and in their desperation they actually combined against the doctors and refused to employ them at all; "after which," said Professor Tully, "no deaths occurred." And I might add, as an historical incident of some pertinency in this place, that regular physicians were once banished from Rome, so fatal did their practice seem, so far as the people could judge of it.
The great Magendie, of France, who long stood at the very head of Physiology and Pathology in the French Academy which, by the way, has claimed to be, and perhaps is, the most learned body of men in the world performed this experiment. He divided the patients of one of the large Paris hospitals into three classes. To one