The Royal Road to Health | Page 6

not to offend old errors; for individuals
are very prone to regard arguments levelled against their opinions as
direct attacks upon their personality; and not a few of them mistake
their own deeply rooted prejudices for established certainties.
I shall endeavor to show that the practice of administering drugs to cure
disease is a fallacy, and in so doing, I am bound to incur the
condemnation of my brother practitioners, who prescribe drugs, and the
druggists who vend them.
It may safely be asserted that the drug system of treating disease would
be destroyed if it were to be critically examined; in fact, to defend it is
provocative of unmistakable damage to it. If it is once subjected to the
analysis of calm reason its defects become palpable to the meanest
understanding.

There are three principal schools of medicine, each with a distinctive
title, but they are all one in essential principles. They may differ in
unimportant details; but in the main premises they are a unit. They all
believe 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