Valere Aude | Page 6

of disease; therefore, we must first of all see that the conditions of this process are uninterrupted.
Food, air, water, light, exercise, must be so provided that they condition the process of nutrition and metamorphosis.
Skin, lungs, kidneys, intestines, must always be in condition to eliminate the abnormal products of decomposition.
If then disease be a derangement of the life process, it is self-evident that disease is not confined to one organ alone, but that the whole body is diseased.
The body, thus, being in fact an indivisible unity, the treatment we employ in disease must, logically, act upon it as a united whole.
The modern school of medicine in its present, bacteria ridden frame of mind or mania, looks upon the bacillus, or microbe, as the sole cause of disease.
The cause, however, is not the bacillus, but rather the impure blood which prepares a fertile soil for the development of those destructive germs.
He who lives strictly in accordance with the rules of hygiene need not fear the bacillus, for man is not born to sickness; he creates sickness for himself by his irrational mode of living.
What does the world profit by bacteriological institutions if the people continue to live in the old sins against health and hygiene?
Man may be born with a predisposition to disease, but not with disease itself.
Our health depends entirely upon the conditions of our life.
In cases of predisposition to disease, therefore, as well as in disease itself, according to the principles of hygiene, we must employ only the hygienic and dietetic methods of treatment.
Is the medical science of the day, then, totally incompetent? You may well ask.--Have the patient studies and researches of nearly two thousand four hundred years, since the days of Hippocrates, been all in vain?
The reply lies ready to your hand, from the lips of one of the brightest scientific spirits that ever illumined this dull earth of ours with knowledge and sincerity.
In Goethe's Faust the following lines are found,--lines which sad memory brings back to the minds of many an unfortunate who, according to the dictates of the medical science of today, is pronounced incurable--a sufferer from one or other of the so-called chronic diseases--and in dire need of both physical and spiritual support.
"I have, alas, philosophy, Medicine, jurisprudence too, And, to my cost, theology With ardent labour studied through, And here I stand with all my lore, Poor fool, no wiser than before"
Like Faust, such sufferers study day and night the opinions of learned doctors and follow their prescriptions with ardent zeal. The more they study, the more doctors they consult, the more rapidly does strength fail them, until at length they realize that, in spite of all their lore, they are but "poor fools, no wiser than before."
For more than two thousand years it has been, in fact, as it is to a great extent today; the physician prescribes to the best of his knowledge, medicines compounded according to certain rules dogmatically laid down in the schools.
Here we have at once the fatal mistake at a glance.
Instead of studying nature and the laws of nature, instead of using natural means to heal disease, they administer deadly poisons to allay suffering, poisons, which doubtless may be able to repress pain or to temporarily suppress the symptoms of disease; but can never remove the cause, which alone may rightly be called healing.
The drugs prescribed by thousands of physicians today, with but a casual acquaintance with their action, are bound by their nature to produce evils worse than the disease itself.
To cite an instance:
Physicians prescribe creosote in cases of consumption to stop the expectoration of blood.
Creosote will do this, and may suppress the cough, as well as the accompanying pain; but will it cure consumption or destroy or remove the cause of this deadliest of diseases?
On the contrary, it inevitably produces laryngeal phthisis after a very short time. It destroys the head of the windpipe and the patient dies in consequence of the destruction of one of the most important organs of the body.
In most instances the physician is either oblivious or unaware of these facts. He follows those old-standing doctrinal sophisms laid down by human "science" but discredited by nature.
His courage is called "audacity" by those who have not lost all feeling for humanity.
Meanwhile, those who regard medical science from a business standpoint only, are very quick to pronounce judgement upon any natural treatment of disease and to condemn the most successful natural physicians as charlatans and frauds.
In order to be competent to decide upon a correct course in the treatment of disease the physician must possess a thorough chemical knowledge of all the fundamental substances of which the human organism is constructed. With the patient therefore rests the responsibility of choosing his physician, since no physician can be of any assistance who cannot define what