1 source·Sep 1, 2026

This report highlights the historical efforts of Dr. J. H. Tilden and his successor, Dr. Arthur Vos, to promote natural healing over conventional medical interventions like surgery and drugs. The text explains how these practitioners sought to improve the healthspan of their patients by addressing the root causes of illness rather than merely masking symptoms. While Dr. Tilden successfully managed a global clientele through his health school and publications, his methods were eventually marginalized by the financial dominance of the modern pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Vos is recognized as a dedicated student of these techniques, even briefly managing Tilden’s influential magazine during the 1920s. Today, researchers are working to archive and revive these historical archives to provide modern readers with alternative perspectives on wellness and longevity. This project aims to preserve a complete database of their writings to ensure these non-invasive medical philosophies are not lost to time.

EDISON’S LIMITATIONS.

HOW A MAN CAN KEEP WELL.

DOES FASTING CURE DISEASE?

NO DANGER IN REMOVING ADENOIDS AND TONSILS.

SENATOR WORKS AND THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SOCIETY.

DO GERMS CAUSE DISEASE?

A FEW MAY GO TO HEAVEN.

FEE SPLITTING

A NEW SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

OBESITY.

PURE SCIENCE INTERESTS GREAT MINDS.

SUBTERFUGE.

SURGEON ALDEN OPERATES UPON HIMSELF!

DISEASES OF WOMEN

MENSTRUAL DISORDERS

Menstruation begins in a small percent of girls from eight to twelve years of age. Under twelve years means precocity, and, with an environment that feeds and at the same time restrains the emotions, may make a shipwreck of health and life.

It is a safe statement to make that feeding has been of a nature to hasten physical development, in all cases of sex precocity—too much nitrogenous food, such as meat, eggs, and cereals. If the ingestion of carbohydrates—sugar and starch—were not also great, possibly the consumption of the nitrogenous foods would not be too much. It should be remembered that sugar and starch furnish heat and force, which, in connection with the heat and force properties contained in the tissue-making foods, make the supply of heat and force too great, and overstimulation takes place, which oversupply hastens maturity in the young, and decay in the old.

When children are fed oatmeal, or other breakfast cereals, with sugar and milk, for breakfast, they should not be given other foods. Lunch should be fruit, cooked or raw, with milk and sugar; then a dinner of eggs, meat or nuts, with vegetables, salad and cake, cookies, pies or pudding, but no bread.

It is a mistake to give children cereals, bread, butter, eggs or meat, and fruit for the three meals, and, as many do, allow them to eat between meals.

Overeating hastens maturity; and when the attributes of puberty begin to manifest, in forcing children under sixteen to show a decided preference for companions of the opposite sex, parents begin to grow uneasy, and suspect their young daughters of unnaturalness or degeneracy; instead of correcting the cause of their precocity, they restrain them; this restraint often grows bad feelings, and causes parents and children to grow apart. Parents, through their ignorance, build in their children an unnatural sex development, and then, to cap the climax of their stupidity, they believe that by punishing severely enough they can suppress what they interpret in their children as vicious tendencies.

What happens? If they succeed in controlling the actions of a few, those so controlled die of either acute or chronic disease, tuberculosis being a common ending; others go insane; while the majority either run away and go to the bad, or marry the first man who offers himself in marriage. These are the senseless weddings, where lust predominates.

To undertake to control precocity coming from forced development by punishment is like undertaking to confine steam, or ignite, and at the same time try to suppress the explosion of dynamite.

There are many degrees of intensity shown in those afflicted with precocious development.

Excessive menstruation is one form. Blessed is the girl whom nature protects with this safety-valve. Those who are troubled with too frequent and too profuse menstruation are often saved a worse fate; namely, tuberculosis, sexual insanity, a life of disgrace, an unsuitable marriage, fibroid or ovarian tumor, chronic nervous invalidism, or a life of abandonment ending in suicide.

Irregular menstruation.— Only about 50 percent of girls menstruate regularly; a third menstruate every twenty-five to twenty-eight days; and the remaining fifth develop either amenorrhea (absent menstruation) or menstruate every forty to sixty days.

Painful menstruation. — About two-thirds to three-fourths suffer more or less. The average menstrual period lasts from four to five days. The amount of pain suffered ranges all the way from slight discomfort to complete disability during the period.

Treatment: The treatment for all these different phases of derangement is to correct the habits of life that build precocity, or any sex derangement. Wrong eating must be righted, and bathing, clothing, exercise, and the mental or emotional nature must be given the proper attention.

To relieve the pain of menstruation, no treatment equals the hot bath. The water should be as hot as can be borne, and the bath continued until completely relieved; if the pain returns, the bath should be repeated.

Whatever the prevailing medical opinion as to cause, I know from experience that there is no cure except the correcting of the errors of life, whatever they are.

Dilation, and even curetting, is recommended; but palliation for a short time is all that can be expected from this treatment. Marriage and childbirth are thought to bring about a cure; but it amounts very often to swapping off one disease for another; for childbirth, among those who suffer from dysmenorrhea, is accompanied with laceration. See previous articles on diseases of women.

Amenorrhea (absent menstruation) — When menstruation ceases, and pregnancy or advanced tuberculosis can be eliminated as a cause, no special concern should be attached; but when tuberculosis is present, amenorrhea indicates conservatism, and that the body needs building; but this symptom per se should receive little attention. If this symptom appears in other than chronic wasting diseases, the health impairment, whatever it is, must be corrected; when the health appears normal, no treatment is necessary. To attempt to establish the menstrual flow is not wise. All that should ever be done should be in the line of establishing a better general state of health.

When all menstrual disorders are recognized as symptoms of constitutional derangement, the correct treatment is suggested; namely, correct the general health. To give remedies for forcing menstruation is not uncommon, but such treatment is unnecessary, inexcusable, and harmful.

Many undertake to force menstruation by taking drugs, hoping to bring on abortion. Not once in a hundred times are they successful. Such practice is crude and bungling, and usually creates uterine disease.

When abortion is necessary, which is not often, it should be performed by a physician who is skilled in gynecological operations. Thousands give up their lives every year from malpractice, because they employ unskilled doctors and midwives. Successful malpractice in this line is carried on by skilled physicians in the hospitals of the country under the guise of curetting the womb.

The most skillful work in this line is followed sooner or later by pelvic diseases, and not infrequently by death.

Menorrhagia. — Prolonged and excessive menstrual flow is brought on from overstimulating foods, creating violent emotions and sexual excitement. Girls suffering from this disease become victims of libertines who are also sex neurotics. Such unfortunate girls are pronounced degenerates and incorrigibles, and treated accordingly, instead of being put under a regimen and medical treatment that will relieve the neurotic stress.

These subjects have a quick pulse, and often a tumultuous heart palpitation; they are irritable and hard to control; they are easily excited, and take correction as a personal affront. Many of these unfortunate patients turn against their parents, because their conduct compels the latter to watch them, and do much reproving.

Not many parents recognize the conduct of such daughters as due to disease, but too often believe that their conduct is due to viciousness.

Too often these unfortunate girls are driven into lives of shame, or unfortunate marriages, because parents turn against them, and drive them from home, instead of giving them sympathy and protection.

The physically weaker of this class die early in life from tuberculosis; the stronger may experience a change after childbirth, if fortunate in securing a kind husband; the love of husband and children saves a few; others live lives of sensuality, and still others go into crime.

Where the flow is very excessive and almost continuous, sufficient relief to the sex neurosis may be had to prevent the development of extreme so-called viciousness, and then, if the home life furnishes sympathy and love, the patient may be able to control abnormal longings.

There is always great danger of these unfortunate invalids making mistakes—going astray!

When married, and the husband falls into habits of neglect, these patients are liable to come under the influence of the omnipresent social flatterer, who is ever on the lookout for neglected wives; his sympathy is sweet, even if it is the dew of hell; and before the neurotic wife learns of the falseness of her new friend, she has lost the respect of her best, even if neglectful, friend.

A wife should be very sure that neglect really means waning love; and if it does, she should examine herself and life thoroughly to find, if possible, if the fault lies in her. Life should be something more than show, and earnest men have something more to think about than the social whirl. Earnest, busy men should not have added to their burdens the nerve-wracking thought that if they do not keep in the swim their wives will be jobbing out their smiles to men of more leisure. When busy men are made jealous, they either neglect business and dance attendance on their wives, converting themselves into puppets, or dig deeper in their work, and resent the usurpation of their wives by society with neglect.

Sex neurotics are fast becoming the dominating personnel of society. The style of life necessary to an entree into society evolves neurosis, and when enervation is once established, the sex function often predominates. Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Noble, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Thaw, Mr. and Mrs. Patterson, and Messrs. Henwood, Von Phul, and others recently in the limelight, are types of sex neurotics.

The treatment for menorrhagia must be in line with getting rid of excitement: foods that will not overstimulate, such as fruits, vegetable salads; very little meat, eggs and desserts; bread not to exceed once a day; cotton or linen underwear; hot baths every night, of not more than five minutes’ duration; no tea, coffee, tobacco or alcoholics. Everything of an exciting character must be avoided. All the rest possible must be had. These patients must retire early and get up late. No two cases can be treated the same; yet all will be benefited by these general suggestions.

Metrorrhagia, or hemorrhage from the uterus, where fibroid tumor, menorrhagia, and cancer can be eliminated as the cause, comes from abortion. If the hemorrhage comes on suddenly in ordinary health, without previous symptoms of any kind, it is safe to diagnose abortion, and proceed with appropriate treatment. If the hemorrhage has been profuse, and accompanied with pain, and that pain subsides, but a slow or irregular bleeding continues, it is safe to diagnose incomplete abortion.

If a patient is attacked with periodic hemorrhages, coming on monthly, or every two or three months, and the flow is profuse, lasting for ten days or two weeks, accompanied with more or less discomfort, not amounting to pain, and there is a history of two or three miscarriages at from the third to the fourth month, it is safe to diagnose the case as one of chronic auto-abortion—the abortion habit. I have had such cases giving histories of five to seven years, in which time no fewer than fifteen to forty conceptions had taken place, with almost immediate expulsion, with hemorrhage. In every case a cure has been followed by normal pregnancies.

It is no uncommon occurrence to have the disease diagnosed as tumor, and even cancer; and, all too frequently, painful menstruation.

Treatment: Rest in bed; very light eating; and, where symptoms appear to demand, curetting should be performed with a dull curet. These cases respond favorably to rest—physiological, physical, and sexual.

This is a type of uterine derangement found more often among farmers’ wives than any other class of women.

Change of life is a very large bogy, which, like teething in children, has to stand for a multitude of sins. About all the diseases troubling women from thirty to fifty have been pronounced change of life by old women, and doctors in their class. From thirty-five to forty-five years of age, men as well as women come to the “parting of the ways.” At about this time in life the best organisms begin to show enervation from the imprudence of youth, and young manhood and womanhood; and fortunate indeed are those who, wittingly or unwittingly, change to a more rational style of living; those who do not, force themselves into premature old age; and a majority die before sixty. Those who work hard, and live on coarse food, and overeat, die before forty-five years of age.

Farmers and their wives die early; there is an appalling waste of life in all branches of society, but nowhere as great as in the country, due to overwork and improper eating—bread, meat, potatoes, pie, cake and preserves. Only in the summer, and then for a very short time, do most farmers have green vegetables. The farmer knows the importance of grass for his stock, but his family can live on dry foods the year round.

When a woman is sick or feeling badly between thirty-five and forty-five, the cause should be found and removed. In this enlightened age change of life should mean nothing; it is inexcusable ignorance to give this as a reason for ill-health.

Many women are highly nervous at this time in life; it is a red light, and attention should be given to it. There are errors of life, and unless they are corrected, premature death will be the price of careless indifference. When your doctor tells you that your disease is change of life, dismiss him, and get another.

EDISON’S LIMITATIONS.

THOMAS A. EDISON is a great man in his line; but it should not be forgotten that even great men have their mental blind spots.

Among the great things achieved in 1911, Mr. Edison included:

Discovery by Ehrlich of salvarsan, for the cure of a specific infectious disease. Important discoveries in surgical technique at the Rockefeller Institute. Final proof of the efficiency of typhoid vaccination.

At the head of the list Edison places the discovery of salvarsan. This, he declared, was a specific for a disease with which nine-tenths of humanity is unknowingly afflicted.

What does Mr. Edison know of syphilis and its cure? Nothing! Then why shall he publish his opinion on this subject, when it is not worth any more than the opinion of any other layman? He should not forget that errors published by him are farther reaching than errors of the same nature published by other less famous men, who know no more nor less than he does.

Famous men can do much harm by publishing their opinions. The more famous men are, the more careful they should be about rushing into print with their opinions.

Mr. Edison should not air the undeveloped side of his knowledge in the public press, for he certainly knows enough of truth to furnish him all the subjects he needs to write about for some time to come.

Mr. Edison springs the old platitude that is used by specialists to scare up consultants, namely: “Nine-tenths of humanity is unknowingly afflicted with syphilis.” I say this is a damnable lie; and reputable laymen should be careful about what they peddle as professional facts, until they know the truth.

Readers, always keep in mind, when you are reading Edison on health subjects, that he writes opinions; he has no facts. Mr. Edison is not an authority on medical subjects; hence I would advise those who read his immature medical opinions to put a little salt on their tails.

HOW A MAN CAN KEEP WELL.

In the February, 1912, Ladies’ Home Journal, Mr. Thomas A. Edison, through Richard Cole Newton, M. D., tells how a man can keep well and grow old. I don’t know but that it strikes the average reader as somewhat incongruous to have laymen speak through the mouths of doctors, in telling the people how they may keep well and grow old; but it makes me feel bitterly sarcastic to think that men who are supposed to be educated in the healing art must take whatever of value they give to the public from laymen who know nothing of the science and practice of medicine.

The CLUB has been trying to educate the people for the last dozen years to understand why, if they want to get well and stay well, they will have to learn how outside of the regular profession; for the average regular doesn’t pretend to know anything, except to doctor. The science and practice of medicine has evolved into the specialty of doctoring people. And when these scientific medical men undertake to tell people, through one of the leading popular magazines, how to keep well and grow old, they interview some prominent layman—a man who has the reputation of having made a success in some particular line, a layman who has made a more than average success—and give his opinion and manner of living; and indorse same. As stated above, this may appear somewhat incongruous; in fact, some may think it ridiculous; but it is not, when we remember that physicians are educated in medical colleges to know how to doctor people; how to hold post-mortem examinations, and to manipulate test-tubes; and to examine microscopically the blood and excretions. The most pronounced authorities on the healing art, and so recognized by the profession, are men who are not physicians, and have not had any practical experience; such men as Koch, Pasteur, the Flexners, Ehrlich, and many others unnecessary to name. Besides these alleged medical scientists, there are many druggists who furnish physicians with the information they use in giving drugs; and for obvious reasons prominent laymen are courted for their very wise judgment on health matters.

But anyone who is foolish enough to believe that there is anything taught bearing seriously on the subject of eradicating disease, is not posted, to say the least. He doesn’t know anything about the real truth concerning the profession in its relation to cure.

Isn’t it a sad reflection on the curing ability of physicians when men who have spent thirty-five years in the profession are forced to go to Edison or Edison’s authority, Cornaro, to get material for writing on the subject of how to keep well and grow old?

The reason is exactly as the doctor states: “We do not want to believe that nine-tenths of the ills and ails of the human body emanate from overeating, overdrinking, and bad ventilation, and that there is no truth so full of truth as that which tells us that ‘we dig our graves with our teeth.’”

No, indeed, regular medicine does not want to believe it, and, aside from playing to the popular grandstand occasionally, doctors pay no attention to correcting the errors of life when treating patients.

In this Edison write-up there is not anything new—nothing but what all intelligent laymen know. No doubt the majority of professional men, especially the “regular” physicians, know but little about the points brought out in this article under criticism. Indeed, if such knowledge were as common as it should be among doctors, Dr. Newton would not think it necessary to write up the opinion of a layman.

If doctoring had not supplanted common sense among medical men, laymen would not have to be run into hospitals for appendicitis operations; and “useful men” would “not drop dead from fifty-four to sixty years of age.”

The doctor declares that the

great inventor finds himself today, at the age of sixty-five, in sound health; with the wonderful record that he has been sick just four times in sixty-five years; he has had three or four headaches, and two or three winters ago he had a slight cold, the first in ten years. He has also had an attack of so-called middle-ear disease, from which he recovered in two or three weeks. This was in 1908, since which time he has been very well and hard at work.

That “so-called middle-ear disease” forced this authority on health matters to undergo an operation for mastoiditis—a very serious disease, and a very serious operation. It is a disease that will not attack a healthy man. Whatever may be said about Mr. Edison’s extraordinary health, it must not be forgotten that well men—men free from food-poisoning—will not have mastoiditis nor appendicitis.

I have not had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Edison; but, if I may judge him from his pictures, I will say that some of them do not indicate that he is the prudent man reporters make him out to be in their write-ups.

Much is said about the amount he eats: “The whole day’s food would equal in bulk an ordinary mutton chop, and three or four slices of bread and butter. That is, in quantity.”

That amount of eating will not build middle-ear disease! Most people eat and sleep too much; but there is an extreme in the opposite direction. Whether Mr. Edison errs in taking too little sleep or not, I leave him to settle with time. I know I have, in times gone by, and have enjoyed the exquisite state of being so wide-awake that time spent in bed impressed me as being just so much lost opportunity. I have been very near a state of perpetual wakefulness—in truth, close to nerve bankruptcy—a state of mental stimulation that is on the border-land of complete prostration. I felt fine, and if I had not known the danger I was in, I might not have called a halt until I had gone to pieces. I’m through. I’ve cut out such dissipation; for that is what such abuse of the body means.

I received several clippings of this article, “How a Man Can Keep Well,” from the L. H. J., with requests for comment. I have done so to the extent I believe necessary. I do not care to take up all the various points in the article, for there isn’t anything new in it. Such an article as that found in the CLUB would be looked upon as commonplace indeed. To prove that every point brought out is commonplace—a platitude and the following of Cornaro a decided afterthought, I refer to my comments on Mr. Edison’s health ideas, his disease and surgical operation, in the July, 1908, CLUB. For the information of recent subscribers, I will quote that article. Those who are wise will have no trouble in seeing that, despite Mr. Edison’s supposed correct life, he is quite like other men.

EDISON ON HEALTH.

“New York, April 26, 1908. Thomas A. Edison has become a convert to a form of vegetarianism as a result of his study on the question of diet following his most recent illness. Mr. Edison went to his southern home at Fort Myers, Fla., to recuperate from the serious operations performed in this city some weeks ago, and there took up the study of dieting.

“’I have come to the conclusion that nearly all of the serious diseases of the stomach are the result of overloading the digestive organs,’ said Mr. Edison today. ‘We are afflicted with them because we do not exercise enough care in the matter of foods, and proper diet is the solution of good health in many respects.’

“In the diet that he has adopted for his own case, Mr. Edison has almost eliminated meats. His principal articles of food are fish and vegetables. He has almost the enthusiasm of a new convert in living up to the theory of dieting and in teaching its advantages.

“While at his southern home Mr. Edison spent much of his time in fishing and reading, and his three meals a day were composed largely of his own catch of fish.

“It was only learned on the return of the Edisons to West Orange that Harold, the nine-year-old son of the inventor, had recently been seriously afflicted with mastoiditis in the same manner as his father and was compelled to undergo a similar operation to that which endangered the life of Mr. Edison.

“On the trip Mr. Edison improved steadily, but on April 8 Harold began to show symptoms of mastoiditis. He suffered great pain, and an examination by the physicians brought them to the conclusion that an immediate operation was necessary. The operation was successful, and both the son and father are now rapidly mending at their home at the Oranges.”

Pride goes before a fall. Whether true or not, the papers and magazines have quoted Mr. Edison as quite an authority on health. For several years the papers have made him say some quite dogmatic things about health and how to keep it. And there are others. When men have made a financial success and are in the public eye, the papers make them say things on health subjects.

It is a prerogative of all mankind, from the lowest to the highest, from the ignorant to the wise, to be an authority on health matters, and the rule is their knowledge is the reverse of their pretensions.

Of course, Mr. Edison, being an electricity authority, one of the subtle forces of nature, it stands to reason that his opinions on other subjects must necessarily be worthy of consideration.

The fact that he got sick and was caught in the surgical drag-net proves that he was not cabled to any very reliable health laws; for if he had been, he would have known enough to have got out of his trouble without pushing the disease until a resort to surgery was necessary.

After such experiences, victims are prone to change their opinions; if not radically, at least quite a good deal.

According to the above clipping, which was sent to me by a lady in New Orleans, the wizard who chains lightning as the great Jove never dreamt of, has changed his style of eating. Fish now takes the place of meat. According to the Bible, fish is not flesh. Well, call it by whatever name you like, fish can poison equal to flesh, and if overeating is of fish instead of flesh, mastoiditis or any other catarrhal inflammation can be produced just as readily.

My dear CLUB readers, if you don’t know it by this time, I will tell you now: Overeating causes most of our troubles; for if we do not overeat we can get along fairly well with incompatibles, but if we indulge beyond our digestive capacity, and then add to this crime the mixing of all sorts of foods, we must come to grief.

The elimination of meat is not all that is necessary to be saved; in fact, if it were possible to compile all the harm that meat does, and all the harm that bread does, I think neither could boast over the other. Of course, we have the meat advocates and the bread (I mean, by bread-eating, cereal eating in all its forms) advocates, and probably they never will get together to compare notes, but both will go on and suffer because of their fanatical prejudice.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Edison will find a way to live that will save him any more attacks of sickness like this; for such a disease as mastoiditis, when established, means a surgical operation, and very often death.

Yes, indeed, surgery is necessary in some forms of disease, and often it is the only thing that will save life; but, alas, too frequently even surgery will not save.

The best aid to surgery in such cases is a good constitution—one that has been well cared for.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Edison will have no recurrence of this disease and will enjoy full health for many years to come, for the world needs him—we need more of his inventive skill—but he should not waste his time theorizing on food, for he has begun the study too late in life. If he had waited until this time in life to turn his attention to electricity, he would never have given us his electrical inventions.

The subject of health and diet is as large as that of electricity, and requires a well-disciplined lifetime to accomplish anything of merit. We can get up and push a button and illuminate a house, a hall, or a city. We can get on a street car and in a few days learn to be a motorman, and we can apply the electrodes of our batteries to patients; but that does not make us an Edison or a master of electrical science, any more than Mr. Edison’s opinion that people eat too much, that fish should supplant meat, that the people do not “exercise enough care in the matter of foods and proper diet,” etc., makes him an authority on diet. Nor does holding the degree of M. D., with a knowledge of how much and what kinds of foods are required to maintain a physiological equilibrium, make a dietitian. Neither does the knowledge of foods and their proper combinations qualify the food chemist and make of him a capable adviser of the sick. The knowledge of food chemistry must be linked to a thorough knowledge of physiology and pathology as found, not only in text-books and lectures, but at the bedside and in contact with sick people.

The physician must know the sick man; not that the sick man’s bowels are constipated, but what the cause of the constipation is; not that the patient has mastoiditis, but what caused it; and the true physician will not be satisfied to know that the disease was brought on by cold, but he will go after the cause of the cold, and not stop with drafts and change in the weather, but will find the cause of the lost resisting power on the part of the patient that made him susceptible to these influences.

Curing sick people—I don’t mean going through a formulary or routine of doctoring—is a large occupation, requiring all the knowledge contained in the archives of medical literature, and as comprehensive an understanding of natural science—in fact, as large a liberal education—as is required by any business or profession on earth. The more a physician knows about everything, the better physician he is; the less he knows outside of the education that gave him his degree of M. D., the poorer physician he is. A physician must get all the knowledge possible out of the medical science, and then modify the bigoted influence by striving for an understanding of all the knowledge he can get outside of the profession. There is danger in specialization to the exclusion of generalization. The physician can’t know too much; every bit of knowledge and experience that he can get outside of the profession can be utilized to advantage in educating the people out of the sick habit.

Getting rid of beefsteak is not going to put us in a safe state of health. No indeed! It requires knowing how to eat beefsteak without experiencing the evil effects of meat-poisoning; and it requires knowing how to eat anything and everything without evil effects. To sum up: It requires lots of good common sense to live well and long.

“After all, sleep is only a habit; there is nothing to prove that men really need it,” Thomas A. Edison said the other day. “Men first learned to sleep because when darkness came they had nothing else to do. Through the ages their descendants, doing likewise, made sleep a custom—a matter of course. But if men had always lived in a land of perpetual light and sunshine, I don’t suppose we would sleep at all.”

“The famous inventor backed up the idea by telling of a practical test. It was not his own ability to live with little sleep. As is well known, Mr. Edison limits himself to four or five hours’ sleep in the twenty-four. He said he had not slept more than five hours in a night for forty years. In much of that time he averaged only four hours. Nor was it the case of his wife, which he mentioned incidentally. Mrs. Edison, he said, sleeps only five hours in a night, and the habit seems to agree with her. The test he described involved nearly 100 men of average physique in Mr. Edison’s laboratory.

“’The test was made,’ Mr. Edison said, ‘while I was experimenting with my assistants at Menlo Park. I limited each man to four hours’ sleep in twenty-four. They kept it up for two years. It did not seem to hurt them.’

“’Were they aided by special diet or treatment to make up for the loss of sleep?’

“’No, except that there were four meals a day instead of three. We had breakfast, dinner, and supper in the daytime as usual, and an extra supper at midnight. There was nothing peculiar about the food. The meals consisted of the meats, vegetables, bread, and the rest which ordinary people eat.

“’Each man was assigned to four hours in the twenty-four in which he was entitled to sleep. When the time came he went to our bunkhouse near the laboratory, tumbled into one of the bunks, and was sound asleep in a moment. He didn’t get his full four hours either, for we would call him a trifle ahead of time. I suppose he slept three hours and 99 percent of the last hour.

“’What was the effect of cutting down their sleep? For the first week or so it was hard—very hard. They would come back to work limp and heavy-footed, their eyes sometimes looking as if they had been drinking heavily. The old habit of sleeping which men had followed for so many ages was telling on them. The habit was hard to break. But after the first week or so, the reduction in their hours of sleep seemed to make no difference in their work or mental capacity. Indeed, they gained in agility. They seemed to be lighter on their feet.

“’There is this significant point in such a test: The men who slept four hours in twenty-four had absolute rest. The person who sleeps too much not only experiences a heavy feeling in the body, but usually does not enjoy absolute unconsciousness while he sleeps.’” — New York Times.

This is not the first time we have seen alleged interviews with Mr. Edison regarding sleep. All of them had much the same ring as the above.

It is a fact that people of the nervous mental temperament do not need the sleep that the sluggish, lymphatic temperaments need; yet sleep is needed for all life.

Mental workers can live for a long time on four hours’ sleep, but it is a dangerous delusion to believe that Mr. Edison, or any other man, can live all the years that are coming to him on four, five or six hours’ sleep. Seven hours for the mental temperament is as little as can be taken without shortening life from this cause.

Suppose Mr. Edison did limit his men to four hours’ sleep for two years and it did not seem to hurt them, does that prove anything? Not a thing. Sow-belly, beans, hardtack and coffee were given the soldiers of our late war, and some people point to that as proof that it is an ideal food for an army. How many died of bowel diseases, and other diseases? How many were ruined for life? Of course, exposure and lots of other meaningless and mysterious influences are charged with the heavy mortality; but it should go on record that such a diet will kill nine out of every ten who die in a protracted war, lasting from three to five years.

The fact that Mr. Edison has lived for years on five hours’ sleep or less establishes no set facts regarding how much sleep is needed by him or anyone else.

He is now suffering from lost resistance, and unless he begins to pay the bill that he has been running with nature, he will be forced to settle soon, or a receiver will be appointed.

In my own case: I have abused myself disgracefully. I did it with eyes wide open, and with full knowledge of the cost. I do not believe I could detect any evil effects after ten or more years of this practice; and if I were in the habit of fooling myself, I could now declare that I cannot detect any special bad results even after many years of such abuse; for I am as light on my feet, and can climb four flights of stairs, two steps at a time, with apparently as little effort as I ever could; yet I know that I have squandered life-force, and I know that what I have squandered is gone—I know that I can’t eat my cake and keep it.

Mr. Edison says that there was no change in diet, except the men were fed one meal more, which, according to the law of compensation, was adding just that much more burden. Going without sleep, or with half enough, is always an extra tax in one sense, but properly expressed it should be said: Cutting down on sleep means depriving the system of one of its sources of revenue; then eating an extra meal adds an extra drain on a depleted resistance.

This argument of Mr. Edison’s looks nice on paper, but it is along the line of one of humanity’s greatest idiocies; namely, getting something for nothing.

Mr. Edison and your humble servant will be held strictly accountable for our sins against natural law. The truth of the matter is, he and I should be doing our best work from the age of ninety to one hundred and ten; but in all probability we shall be in Abraham’s bosom long before that time.

When we lose sleep, we can even up the outrage somewhat by light eating and being careful to avoid mixing explosives—incompatibles. If we confine ourselves to one bad habit, we can be more excessive with that one than we can if we have several.

If we would live out our full time, we cannot abuse ourselves in any way, not even in losing sleep.

There are few people able to do with as little sleep as I understand Mr. Edison does. It is not a wise thing for anyone to do; yet men of active mental temperaments, when interested in work, can live a long time without sleep; but it is a false idea to believe they will not pay in full for this abuse.

Those who have read the Ladies’ Home Journal article, and then read this, should see that every point brought out by Dr. Newton is old, and has been said, over and over, in the public press, by Mr. Edison, for several years, without much variation.

These platitudes are now being repeated by “regular” physicians. The past week I have noticed in various papers and magazines such expressions as: “Sickness is caused by what we eat;” it was said with such emphasis and feeling as to convey the impression that the doctor had really just discovered the fact, and believed himself the discoverer.

Dozens of doctors have discovered this great truth no longer ago than yesterday.

Look out! This belief is just now soaking into the profession; and when it does get into the bone, what will become of specifics and germs?

Dr. Newton’s naivete in telling the public how Thomas A. Edison lives to keep well and grow old is so virginal that I really thought that he must be a medical fledgling—some young doctor who had just got out of college—who was willing to stand in the reflected light of any prominent person of influence; but, on consulting the American Medical Directory, I find that Richard Cole Newton, M. D., was born in 1851, and graduated in medicine in 1877; therefore, a practitioner of the so-called healing art for thirty-five years.

After thirty-five years of medical priesthood he bows to a layman! Is there any wonder that “regular” physicians are striving for laws to protect them from quacks?

DOES FASTING CURE DISEASE?

A FEW HINTS IN CAUSE AND CURE OF DISEASE.

The question, “Does fasting cure disease?” has been answered directly and indirectly in almost every number of the CLUB, but evidently not often enough; hence, I shall endeavor to answer it again and again, so long as it is necessary to meet the demands of any of the readers. It does not appear possible that old readers of the CLUB should need such questions answered; nevertheless, there are a few who certainly do not know what I stand for, or they would not lead people, unacquainted with me and my work, to think I cure people by fasting, or cure people at all. I have stated so often that not anything cures except nature—the recuperating powers of the body—that I should not be misunderstood; yet I am, and every few days someone asks me if I cure by fasting, or if I cure by feeding in some peculiar way.

No! I do not cure by fasting my patients, nor do I cure with food. Fasting will not cure any disease; neither will feeding any particular food, or fad diet, cure anything.

We cannot talk intelligently about cures until we know what causes disease. We must have an understanding of what constitutes health and disease before we can know anything about establishing the one or doing away with the other.

In the matter of cause, the medical world—or that part of the world that devotes its time to attempting to cure disease—is divided, and apparently without hope of reconciliation, into two grand divisions, consisting of those who believe that “all is mind,” and those who believe that all is body. The former believe that all diseases are of mental origin; the latter believe that all diseases are caused by entities—something from without that causes physical disease.

There are as many phases of those two beliefs as there are people who think they believe them, and any particular phase of either belief depends upon the innate and acquired intelligence of the one holding the belief.

Average intelligence is not capable of forming a valuable opinion on this subject without study, thought and reflection, and this requires more time than most people can or will give; hence, the majority must follow leaders, and if the leaders have false ideas, the people will be misled. Simply because an individual assumes to have knowledge to impart on a given subject signifies nothing, for all egomaniacs are self-appointed teachers. Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish between false and true teaching.

In this connection it will be well to state a truth that has appeared in the CLUB frequently, either in one form or in another; namely: Logic can be made to prove that fallacy is a fact as easily as it can be made to prove that truth is truth. Logic is a vehicle, and should not be held responsible for what it conveys. It is quite common to hear such remarks as: “He is logical;” “He talks and writes logically;” and this reason is given for believing what is said.

It should not be forgotten that logic bears the same relation to truth that a pump bears to water: If the water is pure, the pump delivers it; and if the water is impure, or even poisonous, the pump will just as faithfully deliver it as it delivers the purest and most potable water. The simplest mind should see that the pump and conduit cannot possibly have anything to do with the character of the fluid they transmit. Logic is simply a trustworthy formula for trying out certain thought-propositions. It, like figures, is believed to be incapable of lying, but if either tells the truth, it will be because of being made to do so.

It is unfortunate that many people accept a conclusion as true simply because it is logically presented to them. Their only reason for accepting it is because “it is logical.” But they are so careless in their habits of reasoning that they overlook the very important truth that the chief part of a syllogism is its premise, or the antecedent proposition, which they must be sure is true; then, if it is, the conclusion may be depended upon to be true.

To illustrate how false opinions are arrived at, let us examine into the supposed facts about the cause and cure of diphtheria: A particular germ is found in the throats of all those suffering from diphtheria, and it is named Klebs-Loeffler bacillus. This germ has not been found in other varieties of sore throat; hence the conclusion that it must be peculiar to this form of sore throat. That this is a premature and hasty decision is probable, because the germ has been discovered in the mouths and throats of people who were in usual health. If the germ is found in those who are not sick, it is reasonable to believe it can be found in the mouths of those who are sick from diseases other than diphtheria; and probably the only reason it has not been found is because it has not been looked for. Until it is proven that this germ is not found in other diseases, inasmuch as it has been found in health, it cannot be truthfully said that it is exclusively confined to diphtheria. It has been found by experimenting that this particular germ is possessed of reproductive power, and also of the power to impart a retrograde change in living structure, and this change is on the order of those changes that follow low grades of fever and inflammation; therefore, these germs must be the cause of the disease known as diphtheria. It is not conclusively proven that the retrograde change said to be induced by the germs is due to the germ, per se; for there are germs found that have no such action. This fact forces another conclusion; namely, that germs, capable of producing retrograde change, must have been feeding upon decomposition, else they could not be toxic.

To strengthen this conclusion, it has been found that these germs are not always possessed of disease-producing power—that they are often found in the mouths and throats of those who are well.

Another conclusion that is supposed to be logical is that those who carry these germs without inconvenience are immune to their influence, and the immunity is supposed to be a developed toleration. But this is disproved by the fact that these subjects have not been sick and have never suffered from germ intoxication; and, again, this conclusion is made improbable by the fact that non-toxic as well as toxic germs have been found. Another illuminating truth has been discovered in this connection, and that is, that the toxicity of the germ is in keeping with the intensity of the disease; and to prove that the disease adds toxicity to the germ, rather than that the germ intensifies the disease, we see very malignant types of the disease developing in families, and running a rapidly fatal course, without leaving an impression or a trace of infection on a single member of a large family of children that have been exposed all that it is possible—in truth, all that is necessary to secure infection, if the disease is infectious and contagious, as is commonly understood. The advocates of contagion declare that the disease goes through families, and sometimes annihilates all the young folks or children. True; but this does not occur as often as where only one of a family is stricken down, followed with apparent immunity for all the rest of the family. But this will be answered by the declaration that as soon as one member of a family is stricken down the rest are immunized with antitoxin. This is true in a small percentage of families, but we have a world of past experience to offset this belief. Before the said-to-be immunizing material was discovered, we had the same results without any resort to prevention.

We are told that this disease is lighter, and that there are not so many deaths from it as formerly. Granting this claim, we must refer to, and ask if we are not to consider, better living and improved public hygiene. Has it not changed the whole face of the country? People now sleep with windows open, and bathe, and otherwise keep clean, when a few years ago they wore flannel underwear, slept in closed bedrooms, and avoided drafts.

Only yesterday people were advised by doctors to avoid drafts and night air, and to wear wool next to the skin, and to eat all they possibly could. Even yet, some who really think they are respectable cling to their sheep’s wool for underwear—and that, too, on a prescription from a physician.

Diphtheria and all other filth diseases have diminished in proportion as bedroom ventilation, and light-weight cotton or linen underwear, have become adopted.

This attempt at showing how possible it is for logic to prove a falsehood about diphtheria, as well as a fact, I hope will prove a profitable digression from the subject proper. It must be admitted that all the time spent in teaching how to get at truth is not thrown away, for if reasoning is wrong, all conclusions must be chaotic.

To get at a cure, the one thing needful is to know what causes a disease. If germs cause diseases, the cures must be to give germicides. If, however, germs cause disease, all members of a family exposed to them, through the suffering and death of a member of the family from a malignant type, should take the disease; and if they do not take the disease after being exposed to it, germs cannot truthfully be said to be the cause of the disease. Then it becomes necessary to learn what really does cause disease.

With close observation, if it can be found that a certain style of life breaks down the bodily resistance, and that, after this resistance is once lost, a peculiar environment and certain daily habits are followed by disease, it is reasonable to decide that disease comes from this many-factored causation, and that a cure must consist in setting all these influences right. Thus a correct prophylaxis is suggested to the thinking mind.

Will fasting cure? This must be answered by asking another question: What cause does fasting remove? It cures overeating for the time; but eating is necessary to life, and as no one can live without eating, to fast indefinitely is impracticable. Then, as man must eat to keep alive, a fasting cure is not a cure at all; at most, it is only a palliative. The patient has been eating more than he can take care of, and is sick as a consequence. If he fasts, and the symptoms caused by overeating pass away, is he cured? No; he overate, and suffered from the effects of overeating; the extreme opposite was used as a cure, but did it cure? No; for he must eat, and if he knows no more than he did before he took the fast, he will resume the same style of eating, which will result in the same sickness, of course; and as his resistance to overeating is broken down, the second sickness from overeating will come much sooner. Fasting will relieve, but a cure consists in educating him into knowing his food limitations; then, if he will respect them, he can expect to run on indefinitely without a recurrence of his disease. What is food-poisoning? Light can be shed on this subject, and the answer anticipated, by asking and answering a few other questions belonging to the same category: What is alcohol-poisoning? What are tobacco, cocaine, opium and other drug-poisonings?

Tobacco is one of the most common poisons. Does it deteriorate the blood? Only indirectly, by lowering the life-forces—impairing nerve force; and as the nerve force is impaired, the vegetative functions of the body are impaired; and this leads to imperfect blood-making, and imperfect blood-making means imperfect tissue-building; in a word, malnutrition—imperfect body-building, a lowered general tone. In time this state brings on general languor, weak heart action, lowered breathing function, more or less impotency of mind and body, and a lowered general efficiency. An individual in this state cannot know the cost to himself of such a handicap. Thousands are cursing their luck, and finding fault with social and political economy, when in reality there is nothing standing between them and success except their wits, which are kept wool-gathering by the enervating effects of the chronic habit of overstimulation.

There are very few normal human beings. It is not uncommon to hear someone say: “Most people dig their graves with their teeth.” Few know what it really means. I will try to explain.

Overeating means taking food beyond the needs of the body, or beyond the present assimilative ability. Food in proper amounts is stimulating, and this effect is as necessary as it is to take building material into the body. When the nervous system is normally stimulated, it ensures the proper nerve supply. A proper nerve supply is necessary to keep up a balanced nutrition—tissue-building. When more than enough food is taken, or when coffee and tea are used to the extent of nerve dissipation, or tobacco, alcohol or any other stimulating drugs are used, the nervous system is over-stimulated; and if the stimulation is continued, enervation and nerve degeneration follow; and just as the nervous system is impaired, so does the individual lose his power to resist shocks—loses power to maintain equilibrium.

The first sign of a deviation from the normal is a tendency to become irritable and nervous; to tire easily; to lose weight, or become encumbered; and in either case there are nervous symptoms, such as a desire for overeating and for frequent eating. This should always be interpreted as a sure sign of overstimulation, even if the subject does not so understand it.

Any habit that uses up nerve force strikes at the very foundations of life. Indigestion and mal-assimilation are the first symptoms of degeneration, and, in any rational system of cure, must be corrected before anything else can be done. The rule is that when this correction is made there is little else to do.

Does fasting cure disease? No more than resting cures tire. It is well to fast and to rest, but not with the object of curing overeating or overworking.

A cure consists in respecting limitations.

NO DANGER IN REMOVING ADENOIDS AND TONSILS.

Read more

Although not mentioned, Dr. Reams spent his lifetime verifying those truths with lab research analysis that was transported to farms across the world.

You may enjoy this short audio where our avatars, John & Helen, discuss the letter that explains how to be healthy and avoid the maze of a drug-crazed world we should start with nutrition. Whether using a brixmeter or some other device to evaluate higher quality food, we must always start with nutrition.

Rex Harrill brixmanus@gmail.com

http://www.brixman.com/
Brixtalk@groups.io
RBTI@groups.io

THE NEW YORK EVENING JOURNAL INFECTED WITH HYDROPHOBOPHOBIA.

HYDROPHOBOPHOBIA. (Hi-dro-fo-bo-fo-by-ah.)

DISEASES OF WOMEN.

HEATING THE HOME.

FOOD DANGEROUS.

NATIONAL BUREAU OF HEALTH.

PUPPY’S SCRATCH KILLS VACCINATED CHILD.

WEIGHTY PROBLEMS.

DENTAL PLATE POISONING.

HINTS REGARDING SLEEPING.

A KNOCK.

SAYS MILLENNIUM IS NEAR.

OSTEOPATHY VS. MEDICATION.

AN AWFUL PRICE.

“STARTLES THE MEDICAL WORLD.”

BARNUM is said to have been the most successful showman the world has ever had, and his success is conceded to have come from his supreme ability to “startle the world” by springing new discoveries on it. His fertile imagination, clothed in its characteristic hyperbolic vocabulary, his lexiphanic skill was always amazingly fetching; he was always successful in gathering the mob to see his startling discoveries. The spirit of this great, world-renowned entertainer has been reincarnated and is now stalking the earth in the guise of political doctors, and they are Barnumizing the world in that stupendous farce-comedy entitled “Modern Medical Science.” The repertoire is made up of such popular plays as Cures and Preventions for Phthisis, Enteric Fever, Smallpox, Vaccination, Serum Therapy, Syphilis, Germs, Mosquitoes, Flies, Adulterated Foods, and, neither last nor least, Surgical Specialties.

The personnel of this great farce-comedy company are made up of scientists and M. D.’s; a veritable constellation of stars. This gigantic aggregation of all-stars makes an organization so large it can’t be accommodated in any amphitheater on earth; hence, the company is divided, and performances are given simultaneously in all parts of the country. At this writing, the Pure Food contingent is enacting its great farce, in which it is using the secretary of agriculture as its goat, and the chief chemist of the department is riding him. From the applause sent up by the Colorado aggregation, the Pure Food star must be an expert manipulator.

The great immunizing farce is on at Washington. Surgeon-General Torney and other officers of the Medical Corps have recommended that the army be immunized from typhoid fever by having the soldiery vaccinated with anti-typhoid serum. Secretary Stimson has given Major-General Wood, chief of staff, authority to issue a general order requiring every officer and enlisted man under forty-five years of age who has not had typhoid fever, or has not already been vaccinated, to undergo that operation.

It is said that the army medical corps is “convinced” (it does not require any more to convince a “regular” doctor than it does to startle him)

“of the efficacy of the ‘typhoid prophylactic’ in guarding against the introduction and spread of the fever. The serum is prepared at the Army Medical School on Thirteenth Street, under the personal supervision of Major F. F. Russell, of the army, a typhoid-fever expert, and a leader in the inoculation movement. From here, the serum is distributed to all the military posts in the country.

“It is the hope of the officers in the army,’ said Surgeon-General Torney, ‘that by the use of this vaccine we may make all troops immune from typhoid fever. In the hope of having an “immune army,” it is proposed not only to vaccinate every officer and man now serving, but every applicant for service. While the work of vaccinating the troops now in service will not require a long period of time, it will be three years before every recruit and cadet has been given this treatment.’

“Colonel Kean, of the Medical Corps, said that the inoculation process is very easy. The site of the puncture,’ said he, ‘is usually the outer side of the left arm, and is sponged off with alcohol, and a small area of the arm is then sterilized with tincture of iodine. The injection of the prophylactic is made with a sterilized syringe and the puncture in the arm sealed with collodion.’

“In the recent four months’ camp of the regular army at San Antonio, there were 12,801 men, and the medical records show that there was only one typhoid case, with no deaths from typhoid, and only eleven deaths all told from all other diseases. This one case of typhoid was that of a man who had not been completely immunized.

“This remarkable showing in favor of the recent camp is attributed to the fact that every man sent to the front in the recent Mexican mobilization had to submit to inoculation against typhoid fever.

“As evidence of his personal faith in the treatment, Secretary Stimson was vaccinated with the anti-typhoid serum by Major Russell last June, and twenty days later was declared immune. He suffered no ill effects whatever from the operation, and said he was convinced of the value of the treatment.”

San Antonio is certainly a healthy spot, if there is one in the United States. It is an ideal place to try the virtues of the startling discoveries of modern medical science.

If a camp of soldiers, in times of peace, with no arduous duties, cannot stay well in as pure air as can be found at all times in San Antonio, it certainly would reflect badly on the sanitary science of our army, or on the efficiency of our recruiting officers, or both. I see no great reason for the self-adulation on the part of the army medical officers over a success that would have been criminal had it been less. Neither is there any evidence of the immunizing effect of anti-typhoid serum. A mind that can honestly declare that the army medical experiment with anti-typhoid serum at San Antonio, Texas, for the four months the troops were stationed there, is either unacquainted with the steps—elements—required in determining the truth about an unknown subject, or is possessed of the enthusiasm of a novice.

As usual, Fate will have it that the only case of typhoid fever was one “who was not completely immunized.” I don’t know if this was intended for an Irish bull or not; it is self-evident that if he had typhoid fever, he was not completely immunized. While the case was being mentioned, it would have been interesting if we could have been told just how much he was immunized, and how the fact was determined. It would also have been informing if we had been told what caused the “eleven deaths, all told, from all other diseases,” that took place in that army of picked men, in a new camp, in one of the most salubrious atmospheres to be found, on a soil that is powerfully antiseptic, and, neither last nor least, in time of peace, and in four of the healthiest months of the year.

Time will refute all these theories of immunization, but there is no way to prevent these supposed-to-be-proven experiments from being accepted by laymen and doctors, for the present.

At the last meeting of the Colorado Medical Society, one of its members “startled the medical world” by declaring that he thought he had discovered a sure cure for tuberculosis.” The dear medical world has become so neurasthenic that these innumerable shocks from new discoveries are threatening its mental integrity.

And now comes the Sunset Magazine for July, 1911, exploiting a doctor in its state who has just emerged from obscurity and is “amazing old, conservative medical practitioners” with cures that seem miraculous. “Within one month, he has attracted the notice of scientists all over the world.” This is hard on the medical world, to be yanked up by “606,” and then laid out by “a modest country doctor,” with a discovered serum that simply stops the entire freight train of diseases; and all this discovery in less than a year!

Perhaps it will be well to quote a little of the good stuff said about this amazing discovery by the Sunset Magazine:

“A modest country doctor is the man of the hour in the medical world. He is Dr. August Francis Schafer, of Bakersfield, California, who has just emerged from ten years of toil in silence and obscurity to amaze conservative and older medical practitioners with cures that seem miraculous. Within one month, he had attracted notice of scientists all over the world, at a time when professional and public skepticism regarding medical treatment of disease was never more acute and general.

Dr. Schafer has, through years of laboratory work, developed a revolutionary principle in the preparation and application of vaccines, or antitoxins, made from the bacteria of human diseases.

There is absolutely no doubt left about his amazing cures. After several years of trial in Kern County, Dr. Schafer came to San Francisco and treated scores of cases in the big local hospitals, observed by a dozen of the most representative physicians of the metropolis.

The results obtained staggered old practitioners.

In pneumonia, typhoid, and rheumatism, the Schafer treatment appeared almost infallible. Cases that appeared hopeless were sent away from the hospitals within a few days with no necessity of the usual long periods of convalescence.

Some enthusiastic physicians have declared the belief that Dr. Schafer actually has hit upon a principle that may lead to the long-sought cure-all. The majority of the profession cautiously decline to make any predictions, though testifying to the marvelous results they have seen.

The treatment is yet to be perfected; for Dr. Schafer was literally dragged from his research work in his Bakersfield laboratory to come to San Francisco and demonstrate his principle to the metropolitan scientists, when the results of practice in his hometown could no longer be ignored.

The facilities of the great new Southern Pacific Hospital, at the gateway of Golden Gate Park, were turned over to him, and difficult cases of all descriptions were presented for the new treatment. Almost instantly, favorable results followed the injection of the Schafer vaccines in the vast majority of acute and chronic cases. Some pneumonia sufferers who seemed in extremis walked from the hospital within eight or ten days. Rheumatics with stiff and painful limbs and joints were relieved often relieved within a few hours. Typhoid yielded in almost every instance.

A score of distinguished physicians of San Francisco have testified privately to these results, though disclaiming knowledge of how they were accomplished, and urging deliberation and extreme conservatism in making public any claims or predictions.

Many physicians are now using the Schafer vaccines regularly, and pressing forward with the study and trial of the new principle that the ‘country doctor’ introduced. Meanwhile, perhaps the greatest of the manufacturing drug firms of the country dispatched its chief bacteriologist to investigate, with the result that Dr. Schafer is now in the East superintending arrangements to prepare his proved vaccines on a large scale for free distribution to medical men all over the world.

It is Dr. Schafer’s theory that every human disease is caused by germs. Further, that every germ produces its own antidote. He takes from the patient’s body the particular germs of various varieties which produce disease, cultures them artificially, and during their growth takes off a watery fluid which they exude. This solution he reinjects into the patient’s body in very large doses, as many as five hundred drops being introduced directly into the veins at one inoculation. These staggering doses he declares cause immediate neutralization of the germ colonies, and, though causing a severe reactionary chill, are harmless. He contends that the customary use of small doses of antitoxins, with a view to avoiding reaction, really serves to acclimate and intrench the micro-organisms that it is sought to arrest and destroy.

Dr. Schafer combines his vaccines in proportion to the quantity and virulence of those existing in the body being treated. This reduces medicine to an exact science, the treatment being mathematically in accord with the germs existing. Tuberculosis and a wide variety of ordinary diseases have been treated with uniformly favorable early results by vaccines prepared from these germs by the Schafer method, but of course, the vaccines do not rebuild tissue that has been wasted away by the ravages of bacteria, nor restore recuperative power that is gone in cases far advanced.

The inoculation of healthy persons with the vaccines is claimed to have afforded immunity against specific diseases. In particular, previous inoculation with vaccines prepared from the germs which commonly cause blood poisoning in surgical operations has made it possible to operate without the use of any antiseptic precautions, and no sepsis followed. Dr. Schafer himself declares he has demonstrated this in seventy serious operations, though he emphatically does not recommend the abandonment of septic precautions at this stage of the experimenting.

The early tests by Dr. Schafer were made upon animals. Then, to be assured of their harmlessness, he injected large quantities of the vaccines he developed from each of the various germs or combinations of germs into his own body. He has declared that he inoculated himself with more than five hundred drops of the vaccine he took from the germs of tetanus (lockjaw), which are among the most virulent and deadly known, without any harmful result aside from the customary chill lasting half an hour. % % —PITT P. HAND.

The reader will kindly note that we have the word of a Mr. Pitt P. Hand for it that “there is absolutely no doubt left of his amazing cures.” Thinking people are really getting a little shy of “amazing,” “startling,” “staggering,” heart-paralyzing, mania-producing, chronic-disease-building, and death-dealing “discoveries and cures.” If someone had the inventive genius to discover a cure for demonism, then “miraculous cures” would not be needed.

This age will go down in history as one of the most “amazing,” as one obsessed with a very subtle form of mania on the subject of disease and cure.

This man Hand, who assumes the very great responsibility of declaring that “there is absolutely no doubt” about the cures wrought by this “amazing discovery,” would have disarmed any suspicion that might have come up of a possible collusion between him and this “modest country doctor” to “do” the credulous, if he had explained to us his reasons for writing up this “amazing cure”: If he were paid for the write-up; or, if he did it for humanity’s sake, and if prompted by a humane spirit, he should have Hand (ed) out a little proof of some kind, showing that his opinion is worth something. If he is not a scientist or a physician, what proof can he give that he knows anything at all about this cure, except what the “modest” doctor told him? And if this is all he knows of the virtues of the cure, his declarative evidence becomes very commonplace testimony, and reflects on his knowledge of what constitutes scientific facts.

Mr. Hand can be excused, however, when high officials of this government assume to know that vaccines and antitoxins have been conclusively proven to render immunization from disease. I venture the suggestion, in this connection, that it is never safe to render a verdict on the testimony of prejudiced witnesses, as in the matter of “germs being the cause of every human disease,” and vaccines made from the germs being a specific cure and prevention, notwithstanding this is the prevailing belief among a large and influential class of physicians, especially those who style themselves the representatives of modern medical science. These physicians have their minds made up; they know that germs cause disease, and they know that germs will cure the disease. Hence, when a man is vaccinated and remains well for a month or a year, it is due to the protection rendered by the vaccine; but if he falls sick, it is because the vaccine was impure and failed to immunize. Just what enabled him to live for thirty-five or forty years before he was vaccinated does not appear necessary to enter into the calculation.

There isn’t anything new about this “amazing” cure. Everybody who knows anything about modern medical science knows that it believes germs are the cause of all diseases, and that cures must be made by using a product made from these same germs as the therapeutic agents. Hence, the only real discovery is the “country doctor” and his modesty.

After telling us that there is absolutely no doubt about the specificity of this amazing cure, we are told that it is not perfected. That is like the Colorado doctor’s Startling Discovery, which he has not yet perfected, but there is no question but that it will work. Work what? The quills of newspaper reporters-that’s all.

Some pneumonia sufferers walked from the hospital within eight to ten days. This may be amazing and startling to modern medical science, but physicians who are not creed-bound have been securing such results for years and were not aware that there was anything amazing about the cures.

The declaration that inoculating healthy persons with vaccines affords immunity from specific diseases is about as credible as the other startling discoveries. Good health is doing this all the time. If all the people who are exposed to syphilis were to contract it, there would be some excuse for the “joy riders” of hobbies on this subject, rending the air with their delirium. But those who have not contracted it may, if they reduce their resistance. This is a game that is not out until it is played out. It is childish, or knavish, to send out word that such prevention has been secured; for to prove such a thing would take a lifetime or longer. As regards immunizing subjects against septic poisoning, the doctor appears not to know that all the immunization necessary in surgical cases is cleanliness, and if he really believes that he can prevent septic infection without cleanliness and drainage, his zeal has run away with his knowledge, or he is dangerously short of technical surgical knowledge.

The enthusiasm of these discoverers of vaccine cures has a legitimate foundation. Up to the time of losing faith in drug treatment, these doctors have had no satisfaction; in their treatment, they caused injury to all bad cases, and they lived in a maze of guesswork. After cutting loose from dope and trusting to “insidious, harm-working injections of large quantities of vaccines,” they have been able to secure, occasionally, such results as Christian Science, Suggestive Therapeutics, Osteopathy, and other plans of drugless healing have secured; and, like these systems, they do not know how the change is brought about, unless it comes from the treatment.

The average physician does not know that the majority of sick people will get well if they are not killed, and all they need is any old favorable suggestion. This is all there is to Schafer’s amazing discovery.

The child’s mind jumps to conclusions. In no other way could the following opinions gain an advocate:

“With the issue of orders by the Secretary of War, on the recommendation of the surgeon general, the United States Army is to be put into a condition of virtual immunity from typhoid fever, one of the most dreaded evils against which military authorities have to fight. Experiments have been conducted for some time, with the result of a reduction of typhoid to a negligible ratio. The figures speak eloquently. Among the soldiers not inoculated with the newly discovered serum, the typhoid ratio was 4.11 cases to the thousand, while among those vaccinated, the ratio was .26 to the thousand. These tests have proved beyond any question that the serum prevents infection almost completely.

It is estimated that during the year 1910, there were 39,000 deaths in this country from typhoid fever, a frightful sacrifice of human life, which must be regarded as absolutely unnecessary. Typhoid is a strictly preventable disease. It is spread through the violation of certain simple laws of sanitation. Food and drink supplies are polluted from initial centers of infection, partly through ignorance and partly through indifference. Persistent efforts have been made for several years to teach the people of this country the danger involved in the careless handling of typhoid cases and the comparative ease of prevention. Federal and state officials, with the co-operation of the newspapers and magazines, have striven to teach this lesson in all quarters, but there remains a degree of ignorance and indifference in practically all sections of the country, constituting a national menace.

If the army experiments are regarded as satisfactory, and the orders of the Secretary of War must be considered as establishing the fact, it becomes the imperative duty of state and federal health officials to adopt the serum treatment of prevention. Smallpox has been practically eliminated by vaccination. Whereas once it was a scourge from which every part of the world suffered, it is now practically unknown in civilized countries. The same may become true of typhoid. It is, of course, too much to expect that vaccination will prevent it absolutely. There would still be a few cases of the disease even though everybody was preventively treated. What are called imported cases would occur from time to time. But the percentage of morbidity would be so greatly reduced that typhoid would become as rare as smallpox, and, considering the manner of its spread, probably even less frequent.”-WASHINGTON STAR.

All this is as unreasonable as it would be to declare that there are no biological laws—that there are no organs in the body, and that physiology is a myth. For if there is biology and physiology, there must be the opposite. Physiology must be subjected to such states of deviation from the normal as excess, defect, and perversion; and these conditions must be brought on from varying environmental influences, such as excess, defect, and perversion of nerve supply or of food supply; also, deviations of atmospheric and mental influences. And when all or a part of these perversions have existed long enough to interfere with the normal state and ruin the physiological balance, then, whatever the detrimental influence is, it must be righted. Can any but a child’s mind believe that germs account for all the changes indicated? To declare that typhoid fever can be prevented by vaccination to a negligible ratio (out of consideration) is to deny that there is any influence except the germ. It really suggests a mind incapable of observation and reasoning.

The people should try to hold to a little common-sense truth while modern medical science is struggling with its paranoia. It will be well to remember that there are laws of health and life, and to break any of them brings a penalty. It is well to remember that a normal, healthy animal, even man, will not be sick. Health always means being possessed of enough resistance to stay well under all influences that are liable to develop in one’s environment. It should not be forgotten that the human animal is in existence because it has become adjusted to the world in which it lives- that it is more resistant than any normal opposition influence in its environment can overcome; and if he appears to succumb to any influence in his environment, including germs, it is because he ignorantly, or willfully, has reduced his life-force (power to live), and has become a prey to the very influences which are his allies when in full health and vigor.

It is unwarranted bombast to declare that the thirty-nine thousand yearly deaths from typhoid fever can be controlled or overcome by vaccination. If modern medical science knew how, it might cut that death-rate down to probably nine thousand. The only show it has now for reducing the death-rate is for it to take a vacation and allow the people to suffer for want of skilled attention.

Pure water and food, clean bodies inside and out, with proper drainage and ventilation, will prevent typhoid fever, smallpox, and all diseases that come from filth. When vaccination is applied to people who live sanitarily, typhoid and all other diseases will be controlled; but when vaccination is applied to people who live unsanitarily, then so-called immunization will fail. Isn’t this proven all the time? Of course, the truth is suppressed as much as possible; those who believe in vaccination turn their eyes and minds away from such facts, and most of the leading newspapers are coerced, in one way or another, into ignoring unfavorable reports.

“It becomes the imperative duty of state and federal health officers to adopt the serum treatment of prevention.” This statement is followed by the stereotyped false statement: “Smallpox has been practically eliminated by vaccination.” Why not say cholera is controlled by vaccination? Because, just now, there is a demonstration to the contrary going on in Italy, and such nonsense is being refuted all the time in Russia. As soon, however, as the disease subsides, medical politics will declare that the subsidence was due to vaccination; then, when asked what caused previous subsidences, they will not find it incumbent upon them to answer such silly questions. Modern medical science does not think it at all necessary to tell us why-in years gone by, when the world was ignorant and dirty, and fully as superstitious as it is now, before vaccination was discovered, and people were so appalled by the deaths taking place all about them from smallpox that many died of fright-why all the people did not die, if smallpox is contagious, as it declares that it is. It does not even tell us why everybody exposed to it today doesn’t take it, I mean those without protection; nor why cases without protection often have it light, and others who are protected by many re-vaccinations take the disease in a virulent form and die. Some of the wise medical politicians think it necessary to hedge a little and are saying that disease cannot be wholly prevented by vaccination, etc. The above editorial talks two ways: It declares that typhoid is strictly preventable, and that it is “the imperative duty of state and federal officials to adopt the serum treatment;” then it hedges by saying: “It is, of course, too much to expect that vaccination will prevent it absolutely.” The editor who wrote that article had it dictated to him by a doctor, and just such a doctor passed upon the following case:

“George W. Hennessey, a life-saver, examined by a physician of the United States Marine Hospital in New York and pronounced ‘physically fit,’ dropped dead a moment later.”-NEW YORK WORLD.

And the rank and file who endeavor to force their systematic delusions on the people are the sort referred to in the following item:

“John R. Millspaugh, serving a short sentence in the Detroit house of correction for a minor offense, boasted that he could deceive the physician attached to that institution. He was taken ill, and the doctors believed he was feigning illness—until he died. Then they found they had deceived themselves. Years ago, a clever woman reporter visited the offices of a number of physicians, gave them an identical statement, and each named a separate complaint and prescribed a different course of treatment.

From time to time, the news columns of the daily press tell how some unfortunate has died of injuries and disease after having been taken in an ambulance to a hospital where his or her ailment was diagnosed as ‘intoxication.’

Yet, against any record of blunders, it may be worthwhile to offset the action of Dr. Michael K. Warner, of Baltimore, who destroyed his accounts before he died in order that his patients should not be pressed for payment by his administrators. There was the spirit that exalts the medical profession above any mere science.”—NEW YORK WORLD.

The last item has a sermon in it for those who can read the motive for human action. There are physicians who have consciences that compel them to make restitution for the advantages they are compelled to take of their patients in order to secure bread and butter. They know that they do not render value received, even if their patients do not know it, and to ease their consciences, they often give service free of charge and are often ready to cut bills in half. I heard of a physician a few days ago who had the name of being the poor man’s doctor; it is said he seldom sent a bill, and freely gave his services to any and all who asked for them. It is the general belief that the medical profession is a noble profession, and that physicians are self-sacrificing, philanthropic, and ready to work for the poor. This all comes from the doctors’ subconscious knowledge that they can’t do much good, and often do harm, and at all times they are groping in the dark. This dishonest life is made somewhat tolerable by doing much charity, or so-called charity. Dr. Warner no doubt felt that his conscience would be relieved if he should destroy all his accounts. If his medical vision had been cleared of the mysticism of so-called modern medical science, and he had been able to give value received, he would not have hesitated to insist on demanding his own.

Instead of practicing in such a haphazard way, and knowing that services, most of the time, have little, if any, value, it would be better to refuse to palliate-refuse to give any services-and learn to educate the people into health; learn not only to cure present derangements, but impart to patients a knowledge which, if followed, will do away entirely with the need of sickness for life. When the physician can do this, he will not hesitate to demand compensation. When the physician knows how to educate people into health, he will know that discipline is one of the necessary remedies, and he will soon find that few, if any, will be disciplined unless they are forced to do so; and there is but one way to force them, and that is to compel them to pay for services in advance. When patients pay in advance, they stay with the physician and try to get their money’s worth. People who do not pay in advance will take offense at being urged and criticized, and will justify wounded pride by refusing to pay for services rendered. I have learned at heavy cost that no one will follow instructions without being urged, and urging offends, and when people are offended, they refuse to pay their bills; hence, I take my pay in advance.

When the world becomes educated into right ideas, there will be no more alms-giving, no more charity; and eulogiums and premiums for a philanthropy which, if interpreted correctly, would read penance conscience services, will not be heard of any more; while today it is taken advantage of and used by many as a cloak for hiding a social wolf.

The price charged by the average physician is a bagatelle― a pittance compared with the services he is supposed to render. If his services were really as important as the people think they are, and if he could render the services modern medical science pretends to be able to do, such a social crime as an impecunious physician would not be known.

A service that is worth anything leaves the patient wiser than he was before; the only immunization worth anything is information. If the people will defend themselves, they will demand an immunizing knowledge, and refuse a so-called immunization that is nothing more than a refined quality of demonism. The germ theory cannot be squared with any categorical principle involved in a synthetic philosophy. It is strictly in line with the untenable special-creation theory that has held progress back for so many hundreds of years.

There can be but one successful healing system, and it must square itself with the principles of evolution.

It would be impossible for me to mention and comment on all the farce-comedy being enacted by modern medical science each month, in one issue of the CLUB, and it would be more impossible for me to notice all the newspaper editors who are assuming to teach the people profound truths on the subject of medicine, when they know nothing about it.

The New York Evening Journal is endeavoring to amuse, edify, and educate the people on medical matters, and its tone is that of one who is quite sure he can’t be mistaken. I have pointed out some of its shortcomings in other articles, comments, and criticisms, and, as it is Barnumizing the people equal to any two or three other subsidized papers, I feel it is my duty to show my readers that, despite all the coaching it receives from “doctors of the old school,” it can’t make many truthful statements. Why? Because there aren’t many that can be made when confined to modern medical science.

In its issue for August 3, 1911, it comments on an article by Mrs. Wilcox, and among other statements, it declares that a physician who teaches a neurotic girl the morphine habit should be put in jail. Such a display of ignorance of actual conditions places the editor of that statement in a class unfit to administer to the public’s needs educationally. Little does he know that, if all the doctors who are killing the people and educating them into the morphine habit were put in jail, there would not be jails enough, and then there would be more doctors in jail, ten to one, than there would be outside of it. Even those who are coaching him would be there.

Just this week, I have had two cases come to me from the East: one suffering from arteriosclerosis, a cerebellar hemorrhage and hemiplegia, complicated with a morphine habit (built by first- class doctors); and the other a case of gallstone, addicted to the morphine habit (it, too, built by first-class doctors).

It is incongruous for the Journal to declare against such practice and at the same time root for the only school of medicine that really treats patients in this way.

The editor shows how very little he knows when he talks of the mind and its diseases. If he knew more, he would certainly write less nonsense. He appears to think that there are no diseases for the mind to cure except diseases of the mind. The mind can create cancer, arteriosclerosis, and all kinds of stomach and bowel troubles. For these diseases, the doctors of the old school can do nothing but complicate and make worse by building fear, and drugging.

Faith cures have been exceedingly busy for the past twenty- five years curing diseases that have been built by the quacks who advocate modern medical science and the quacks of irregular type.

Osteopathy has had a snap curing diseases created by modern medical science.

The editor’s ears take on unusual length when he makes the following smart comment on mental healing: “Mental healers can cure every disease that you haven’t got.”

He talks the common slush about adenoids: that “they cannot be cured except by surgery.” If he knew half as much as he thinks he does, he would know that they cannot be cured with surgery; besides, children die occasionally from the operation. Cutting out an effect never removes a cause. Adenoids are the products of a vile style of feeding and caring for children, and they cannot be gotten rid of until bad habits are cured.

The Journal says we need a dentist to attend to our teeth. True; and if we would cure pyorrhea and other diseases of the mouth and teeth, we shall have to have a better doctor than any who coaches the Journal’s editor; for all such diseases are local manifestations of constitutional diseases and are beyond the jurisdiction of dentists.

We are told that we need a skillful doctor “of the old school” in childbirth. Twenty-seven years ago, I was sent for by an irregular physician, a doctor whom the “doctors of the old school” called a quack. He sent a note which read: “Come as soon as possible; bring instruments and chloroform; a complicated labor.” I went as soon as I could; the doctor and patient were twelve miles away. When I arrived at the patient’s house, the doctor came out to meet me. In answer to my inquiry, “What’s the matter with your patient?” he replied: “I don’t know, Doctor; that is why I sent for you. I have been counseling the woman to keep quiet and refrain from making any efforts at bearing down, so as to hold labor back all that she possibly could until you could get here. Now that you are here, I hope that all will be righted soon.”

On examination, I found full relaxation, membranes intact, and an elbow presentation. I gave the chloroform to the doctor and requested him to bring his patient under its influence while I prepared for my work, which was rupturing the membranes and turning the child; and all was over in thirty minutes after my arrival.

How different was my experience in another case a short time after this! I was sent for at three o’clock one morning by a “physician of the old school,” ordered, as in the other case, to bring instruments and chloroform. When I arrived at the bedside of the patient, I found a very complicated case. The doctor had been with the woman since nine o’clock the morning before. The case, to start with, was exactly the same as the one just reported, but, instead of this doctor acknowledging his ignorance and sending for help in time to save life, he attempted the impossible feat of delivering the child by bringing down the hand and pulling on it; such inexcusable stupidity wedged the child’s body so compactly in the pelvis that there was not a thing that could be done but to cut the child away, it having been dead for hours. The woman was greatly exhausted, but came out all right.

I relate these cases to show that not all “physicians of the old school” are wise, and that irregulars sometimes called quacks are not always quacks. A quack is a man who pretends to be able to do what he cannot do. In the above cases, the regular physician was the quack, and the irregular physician was a trustworthy counselor; for he did not assume to know what he did not know, but gave good advice and asked for help when he needed it, and that, too, in time to get it.

So far as doctors being needed to take charge of childbirth, isn’t it a fact that most of humanity is born without such help? It should be common knowledge that doctors meddle so much in midwifery practice, in attempting to hurry the case along, that they do much damage. The hospitals are very much frequented by women who are forced to go there for the repair of injuries brought on by the meddling of “physicians of the old school.” How do I know this? Because I have been in active practice for nearly forty years, I have learned the truth from experience. I have always found so-called irregular physicians inclined to allow labor to advance normally and naturally. The reason for this conservatism is that these doctors do not believe in meddling with nature, and probably most of them are not quite so daring, for they know if they have an accident, they will receive more condemnation than they would if they belonged to the regular school.

The Journal talks quite as if it really knew something about contagious and non-contagious diseases, but it is simply parroting what its coaches teach it.

People who know the killing ability of the class of doctors the Journal recommends can appreciate the nonchalance of this quotation: “If the adult is willing to die of a non-contagious disease in order to demonstrate a theory, let him. Such an adult can be spared.” One would naturally suppose that people who secure treatment outside of modern medical science were in the habit of dying. Perish the thought! It is when they are compelled to receive regular treatment that they are compelled to resist both doctor and disease.

The Journal really believes that there are good doctors. So do I, but they are not spending their time lobbying for federal laws and advertising their insanity on the germ theory. They are busy attending to their own business.

The Journal winds up its editorial by telling what little it knows of Thought, Force, and Matter. What it says about these subjects is the same jargon it gets off about healing.

I will give an account of one more farce and be done. The NORTH AMERICAN, of Philadelphia, for August 7, 1911, gives a glowing account of the success of a surgical specialty that has been running at the Medico-Chirurgical Hospital for six years. The play consisted of operating upon a girl, Margaret Doyle, thirty-two times. When this play began, the victim was thirteen years old, and when it ended, she was nineteen; and, strange as it may appear, this lady stepped from the operating-room to the great pleasure resort, Atlantic City. The reporter makes no mention of her education, but I presume this was not neglected in any line because of her operation for appendicitis and the following “twenty-six operations made necessary by the complications following the first operation.” There were six operations performed upon her feet, and the last serious operation caused the doctors to despair of her life; but, thanks to their skill, they can now “startle the world” by displaying their victim in full mental and physical vigor at one of the leading pleasure resorts.

THE NEW YORK EVENING JOURNAL INFECTED WITH HYDROPHOBOPHOBIA.

A MAN who occupies a public office, and who does not care to have his name printed, calls attention to the fact that the doctors take too lightly cases brought before them of children or others bitten by dogs that may have had hydrophobia.

The man calls attention to one recent case in which a child was bitten by a dog. The doctor cauterized the wound, made light of it, and told the child to forget about it.

In a few days, the child died of hydrophobia, and there appears to be no doubt that it was a genuine case of the awful disease.

The day after this man’s letter was received, the newspapers described the case of Eugene Miano, a boy nine years old, attacked and bitten by a mongrel dog. There were very serious lacerations on the child’s leg. These were cauterized at the hospital. There was no Pasteur treatment.

The man that writes this suggests that, inasmuch as the Pasteur treatment for hydrophobia is administered free of charge by the public authorities, and the parents of the children need only call upon the Health Board for proper treatment, the doctors have no right to treat such cases lightly or to assume, as some of the ignorant do, ‘that there is really no such thing’ as a mad dog.

Our correspondent suggests that the doctors are not interested in the Pasteur treatment for hydrophobia, because there is no profit in it for the doctors. We do not accept this suggestion. Doctors are as conscientious as any other class of men, just about as conscientious, and no more. If you take men in large groups, they are about the same.

Doctors do not necessarily get accustomed to suffering and to pain. It is inevitable that they should view with calmness suffering, which is a daily incident in their lives. It is for the public authorities to impress upon them the importance of taking seriously accidents or illnesses that may result in death.

When a doctor makes light of a case in which a child is bitten by a dog, and when the child dies of hydrophobia as a result, the fact should be impressed upon the doctor very emphatically that it is not right to play with human life.

When, as happens at least once a week, some doctor diagnoses typhoid fever as grippe or indigestion or ‘nothing in particular,’ and when a competent physician called in too late helps the man to die quietly and smooths things over out of professional courtesy toward a fellow-physician,’ there ought to be some public authority that would smooth the path of the ‘fellow-physician’ out of the medical profession and into the profession of ditch-digging.

There is no more hard-working, conscientious, learned, useful body of men in the world than the really able doctors. And no body of men is more utterly worthless than fifty or seventy-five percent of all the doctors.

If the worthless doctors could be eliminated, and the competent doctors kept busy and properly paid, it would be a great thing for the profession as well as the public.

At present, it is a fact that the majority of the doctors are unfit to treat any kind of animal, and that the good doctors and the able doctors, from a mistaken sense of professional courtesy, conceal the ignorance and the almost criminal carelessness of the incompetent. Hence the flourishing of ‘faith cures’ under various labels, quacks, etc.”-NEW YORK EVENING JOURNAL.

It will take the writer of the above editorial a long time to learn that real ethical doctors are prone to find that they are usually called too late. This is an ethical excuse for incompetence. Ethical quacks use it.

Who was that man who called the attention of the Evening Journal to the grave responsibility of doctors? An attaché of a Pasteur Institute, of course! After the institute made it interesting for the Journal to take notice of the doctors’ laxness, how very easy it is for the Journal’s editor to fall into a very knowing attitude and tell what doctors should do! How does he know? He knows nothing except as it is pumped into him. How do I know that it is pumped into him? Because it has the ring of the stereotyped material furnished by the headquarters of the medical political ring.

This very wise paper assumes that there is such a thing as a mad dog. ‘I have no doubt that dogs do have dog diseases; and there may be a disease, with specific symptoms, known as rabies. My opinion is that it is the same with dog diseases as it is with human diseases, in that dog diseases must receive a special form of treatment, or mal-treatment, if they develop into ideal types.

There cannot be an ideal type of typhoid fever unless it is treated according to modern medical science, and the same is true of hydrophobia.

One of the surest plans of treatment for converting a dog bite, a rusty-nail prick, or a wound from any cause, into hydrophobia, lockjaw, or other forms of septic infection, is to cauterize the wound, as most professional men do, even if they afterwards send their victims to a mad-dog cure.

I have had a little experience in forty years of arduous professional labor, and I have learned that nature always responds kindly to kindly treatment, and vice versa. A dog bite, a jagged puncture wound made by a metallic or wooden prick, will respond kindly to a gentle, rational treatment. Wash the parts; use a syringe to cleanse the wound; be sure to thoroughly cleanse the wound, and then push a small bit of gauze into it, down to the bottom of the wound, so that drainage will be perfect; change the drain every day for three days; then put just enough gauze into the mouth of the wound to keep the edges of the skin from closing together, for two or three days; then leave the drain out so that the wound will close. The top dressing should be a light gauze wet in dilute alcohol, tincture of arnica, or warm water. The saving dressing is the cleaning of the wound and drainage.

The kind of dressing to create septic poisoning, which may take several forms—namely, rabies, lockjaw, or septemia—is to cauterize the wound—seal it up, as it were, with coagulated blood. The cautery causes a coagulation of the blood and serum, and this coagulation coats the ragged wound and retains the secretions, which rapidly decompose and are absorbed. As soon as septic symptoms develop, if the wound has been made by a dog, the disease must be hydrophobia; suggestions of doctors and friends make it so. Imagination plus a hydrophobic doctor and a little septic poisoning is the formula for making hydrophobia.

To cauterize a wound is the height of ignorance and superstition, and the acme of crude surgery. It is adding injury to injury and preventing nature from establishing drainage.

It takes a state of mind bordering on egomania for an editor of a secular paper to presume to advance ideas on medical subjects that not only require a medical education but also years of experience.

The Journal is right to condemn physicians for treating dog bites with indifference. It should go further and condemn doctors for treating the wound caused by vaccination with indifference, or rather for recognizing the operation as of no concern; for children frequently die from lockjaw brought on from vaccination, and cases are being reported from time to time which have been produced by puncture wounds caused by various accidents.

It is as necessary for those who are vaccinated, or those who are suffering from a puncture wound of any kind, to go to a Pasteur institute as it is necessary to send those there who have been bitten by a rabid dog. A puncture wound from a dog’s tooth, a nail or a sharp piece of wood must be properly treated, else there is liable to be a death; and I declare, without fear of successful contradiction, that the cauterizing treatment is coarse, stupid and unscientific, and has as much to do with building fatal cases as the wound itself.

This editor would be a lot wiser than he is if he could know that there are people all over the country dying from malpractice administered by the class of physicians who are coaching him.

The CLUB has pointed out a few cases of fatal septicemia brought on by M. D.’s in high places. The Journal “should impress on such doctors very emphatically that it is not right to play with human life.”

The Journal ought to know, with all its knowing, that there never would be a real, typical typhoid-fever case unless it was made by treating fever cases according to “modern medical science.”

The doctors who gave the Journal the pointers used in this editorial complain because the “weak sisters” sometimes diagnose a case as grippe and it turns out to be typhoid fever; the editor’s coaches should be reminded that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones, etc. When such men as Beverly Robinson declare in medical convention that doctors can neither diagnose nor cure disease, it is time for hot-air medical lobbyists and phobophobiacs to send their opinions to cold storage.

I am not upholding carelessness in the practice of my profession, but I despise unscrupulous abuse of weak, conscientious members.

I do not believe in hysteria and fanaticism; these elements are shown by many who are advisers of the Journal’s editor. Doctors should carefully examine all puncture wounds, it matters not in what way they were made. Where there is only an abrasion of the skin without puncture, cleanse the parts thoroughly with soap and water, then rinse with pure, fresh water and apply gauze dressing, using white vaseline to prevent the gauze from adhering. Dress twice the first day, and then once a day as long as necessary.

If the skin has been punctured, it is the duty of the physician to examine carefully and discover where the integument had slipped to before the puncturing instrument entered. Bear in mind that the pressure necessary to penetrate the skin will often carry the skin a considerable distance from its normal location. This causes the tissue at the point of entrance to be wounded, and after the pressure is removed, the skin resumes its normal location, covering up out of sight the subcutaneous wound.

To treat such cases successfully, the skin must be pushed in the direction indicated by the injury until the deep wound is exposed. The cleansing then must be thorough. If necessary, in order to thoroughly cleanse the deep injury, enlarge it and pack the wound from the bottom to the top with gauze.

If the subcutaneous tissue can be seen and cleansed thoroughly without enlarging the skin puncture, all well and good; but a string of gauze must be forced to the bottom of the wound to insure thorough drainage.

I say there is no need for so-called rabies, lockjaw or septic poisoning, if these hints for dressing are carried out. If all wounds made by well or sick dogs are taken care of in this way, there will be no fatalities; but so long as physicians are hydro-phobophobiacs and continue to use cautery and the Pasteur cure, we shall have the usual number of deaths. It is a notorious fact that there are a lot of “hard-working, conscientious, learned, useful” medical men in the world, whose opinions are not worth the paper necessary to write them out.

There is a sight of difference between a good fellow, a smart fellow, a scientist, and one who can really save life. The world is full of negative men with negative ideas.

Medical science, balanced by a thoroughly worked-out empiricism (medical art), can do all that is required in the curing of disease; but science alone, or empiricism alone, will play the havoc we see going on all the time.

HYDROPHOBOPHOBIA. (Hi-dro-fo-bo-fo-by-ah.)

THE world-famous Louis Pasteur was the high- priest of the hydrophobophobiacs. He was brought up as a child to believe in hydrophobia, and spent most of his life in a strenuous endeavor to prove his preconceptions. That he succeeded in satisfying himself there is no question, and, as he was a scientist, his conclusions were accepted by modern medical science without a question; for M. M. S. has the faith of “a grain of mustard seed”-the faith that is peculiar to the mind that accepts mysteries without proof.

Professor Pasteur was an indefatigable worker in the lines he selected as his life-work, and he was like all scientists in being honest and humane. But being honest and hard-working and scientific is not all that is needed in dealing with a subject that has to do with health and disease. If the professor had been a physician, and had become acquainted with the peculiarities of man in health and disease, by being compelled to account for the thousand-and-one evil influences that suggestion has upon him; if he had diagnosed and treated confiding patients for peritonitis, tumor, pregnancy-in fact, all diseases, from the simplest to the most profound and afterwards discovered that he was mistaken, that what he thought was a real disease was a figment of a morbid imagination which he helped to build, he would in time have learned to know that a nervous frenzy could be built that would take whatever form the doctor with a morbid imagination might mold. The profession is building disease all the time, and hydrophobia is one of the diseases that are built out of the imagination. Rabies is not the only imaginative cause about which science and logic have built a systematic medical theory and practice.

Wise people these days should know the great necessity of looking well to the premise before declaring for the conclusion; for it must not be thought that logic can be held responsible for truth; it is unmoral and can be used to prove a lie as well as the truth.

The Pasteur cult is exactly on the order of the Jennerian cult. Jenner jumped to the conclusion that milkmaid’s disease of the hands was a prophylaxis to smallpox, and spent his life proving same. It is not hard to prove anything to a class professional men who accept without question and without investigation.

The fathers of these two most pronounced medical fallacies of modern times illustrate a fact that is becoming generally recognized; namely, that people usually find what they go looking for. That is, ideals become objectified and materialized. Hydrophobia has become a reality to the majority of doctors and laymen. It really exists for them. Why? Because they believe it, and in believing it they proceed, when opportunity offers, to materialize their belief. The way to manufacture a case is to find a nervous person who believes in the superstition; then have a medical “phobophobiac” declare that a rabid dog has crossed his path to the windward; or if a nervous or imaginative person has been the unfortunate possessor of a sick dog-or, if not a dog, then a monkey, horse, cat, or even a biting husband-the nucleus for building a case of hydrophobia is at hand, and medical superstition will do the rest.

In this connection I think that to quote from the Los Angeles Times a case to the point will be of interest to the readers:

“Without chance of recovery and surrounded by loving hearts and willing hands, including those of skilled physicians who are helpless to give assistance, Charles V. Brennan, fifteen years old, is slowly dying of rabies at the home of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. William A. Brennan, 4350 Lockwood Avenue.

Last night Dr. W. V. C. Francis, who has charge of the case, stated that the boy’s death is a matter of but a short time. There is no hope for a change for the better. Of all diseases to which the human body is subjected, that of rabies is pronounced the worst. There is nothing to alleviate the pain and check the suffering. The tortures are described as almost unbearable to see.

A few days ago young Brennan, who has been a lad of exceptionally good habits, an athlete, and loved by his schoolmates, became ill. He had a fever, and seemed tired and sleepy. Physicians were called, but could give no relief. Gradually the boy’s throat became useless. He cried for drink and

food, but could not swallow. He became delirious at times. In his delirium he began to rave. Each spell became worse. Then he lost control of his feet. The paralysis grew higher.

Inch by inch the infection grew. As the disease approached, each nerve cell refused to answer to its duty. They became dead. All day and night Friday he grew worse. The least noise set him into a furious rage or delirium. Yesterday morning the telltale spasms began. The scene about the bedside of the dying boy was painful even to trained physicians who were called in consultation. Nothing was done. There was nothing to do but wait for the end. Several months ago a stray dog, a miserable mongrel, came to the Bren- nan home. Charles was a boy fond of dogs and he took it in and made a pet of it. Two months ago the dog became sick. It became partially paralyzed, could not drink water; then frothed at the mouth and soon died. Charles took care of the sick dog. He did not know what was the matter with it, but thought it has been poisoned. He did not remember having been bitten by the animal nor did he remember of having a sore on his hand or body through which the poison of the rabies could have entered.

The history of rabies shows that the disease may break out months after the person or animal has been inoculated.

Yesterday Health Commissioner Powers was called in to see the suffering boy. He pronounced it a genuine case of rabies and absolutely incurable.

The death of Charles Brennan, which is declared sure to be within a very short time, will be the third one in this city within the last eighteen months, according to the records of the Health Department. The first was that of the young son of Joseph Scott, the second was a little girl living out on East Fifty- first Street.

From time to time the health inspectors have their attention drawn to dogs sick with rabies. The dogs are always promptly killed, and what little author- ity the inspectors have is exerted to try to stop a spread of the dreaded disease. ‘We do everything we can,’ said Health Commissioner Powers, yesterday; ‘but what can we do? There are probably a lot of dogs in this city now which have the rabies. We are finding them right along. Only a few days ago we killed one which had bitten three persons. These persons are taking the Pasteur treatment. Within the last year Dr. Stanley Black, of Pasadena, who gives the Pasteur treatment in south ern California, has treated more than 175 cases, and has been successful each instance. We have no laws in this city to stop the spread of rabies. If we could have a drastic ordinance passed and then enforced (the difficult thing is to get it enforced), we could absolutely stamp out the disease in six months. The people seem to think more of the dogs than of the boys and girls. Whenever an ordinance is passed to curb the rabies there is a tremendous howl set up. Dog fanciers who don’t have children make more noise than do the parents of children who don’t have dogs, and they are able to prevent drastic enforcement of the ordinance.”“

The young man had no history of having been bitten, but he unfortunately contracted a nervous disorder at an inopportune time. He had become the master of a “miserable mongrel” which died a few weeks previous to his sickness. This was an unhappy coincident, for his physician, in casting about to find a cause for his morbid symptoms, hit upon the dog incident, after which it was but a step farther to rabies, and then hydrophobia.

The reader will note that according to the doctors there is nothing to be done; the pain cannot be alleviated. “Nothing was done. There was nothing to do but wait for the end.” There are ptomaine poisons that are fatal, and this poor boy may have suffered from one of them; and it may be that he was the center of a hydrophobophobiac nerve-storm, and was killed by having a morbid imagination fed by doctors, nurses and friends. All that is necessary to precipitate a nerve-storm is to have a person suffering from some little derangement that can be associated coincidentally with a sick dog.

The following news item from the LOS ANGELES TIMES is apropos to the subject:

“Mrs. Johnson believes she was infected early in May while treating her favorite Chihuahua dog ‘Money,’ who had been ill for some days. She says: ‘I have no fear, as I have been guarded against infection by every possible means. But should I feel, even for a moment, that my life was in danger, I

would not hesitate to put an end to it. I am well prepared; for, from the very first, I purchased enough chloroform to assuage even the most excruciating pain. I went from drug store to drug store until I had obtained fifteen bottles.” In explaining why she thought it right to take her own life, Mrs. Johnson said: ‘I feel that it would be a most painful as well as a trying task to care for such a patient, and why should I cause lingering pain to my dear ones when there is absolutely no chance for my recovery?’

Continuing, Mrs. Johnson said: ‘I cannot explain how this terrible thing happened. The only circumstance I might possibly connect it with is the fact that while out walking “Money” wandered from my side and joined a companion a splendid red setter. The two became very friendly-so much so, that the setter followed us to our own door, where she insisted that we let her come in, barking until we did so. We named her “Orphan Annie” and kept her for about a month, after which we gave her to a Mr. Brown of Mount Lowe. She died there a month later under rather suspicious circumstances. An autopsy showed that she had rabies. I believe that “Money” must have been infected.

‘I treated her with various home remedies at first, and, finally, when nothing seemed to help her, called in a veterinary, who informed me that the dog had rabies, and that I had best send for the Health Department. Still I was skeptical, and tried to do what I could for the animal.

Just before this I had changed Jap boys. I had been puttering around in my pantry and kitchen, and my hands were much scarred. The wounds were not healed, and in putting some pellets down the dog’s throat I was infected.

‘As soon as possible thereafter my physician ordered me to the Pasteur Institute, where I took the cure for twenty-one days. However, that is all done with now, and there is very little possibility even of my becoming infected. Just think of it! I have so many interests in life which keep me busy and occupy all my time. My pictures and my social duties are most engrossing, and then, too, I have my dogs, who come in for a fair share of attention. I don’t know what I would do without them.’

Mrs. Johnson’s dogs are the tiniest in the world. They are of the rare Chihuahua species, and were originally bred by the Terass family of Mexico. These diminutive animals are most valuable, and bring from $100 to $2,700 each.”

The reader will note that the dogs are very valuable; much more valuable than human animals. Twenty-seven hundred dollars would buy a freight-train load of human babies; but Mexican dogs are of so much more value!

If this woman escapes a fatal ending, it will be by the narrowest margin. If she should happen to have any unusual symptoms, either real or imaginary, she could develop hydrophobia; for she and her medical guardians are hydrophobophobiacs, and a severe pain that would cause nervousness for a short time would be interpreted by her and her friends as premonitory symptoms, and a nerve-storm would result in hydrophobia, of course.

She has the benefit of a Pasteur cure which may offset all other suggestions. Yes, the Pasteur cure does its work, when it does any, in restoring confidence. It is a powerful suggestion treatment. The disease is brought on by suggestion. Those cases that have a material basis-such as an improperly treated bite of any kind, ending in septicemia, or a coincidental nervous derangement, ptomaine or food poisoning, or meningeal, or other head diseases may, when complicated by a hydrophobophobiac physician, die. The majority die because of fright and lost hope; these are the cases for which nothing can be done; these are the cases that take the Pasteur treatment too late.

Before the evolution of the Pasteur institute and modern medical hydrophobophobia, dog bites received the treatment usual to punctured wounds, unless the incident was accompanied by a dog that ran through the streets or roads with his tail down, and saliva running from his mouth, and biting at everyone he came near. Such actions on the part of a dog would set everyone talking, and the owners of madstones would get busy.

The madstone was a sure test. If it stuck to the wound, it was a sign that the dog was mad; if it fell off, or refused to adhere, the dog was not mad. If it stuck, it drew out the poison; if it did not, there was no poison to draw. The old superstition was better than the new, for the suggestions that gathered about the stone were better than those sent out by the Pasteur institutes. The patient was happy if the stone adhered, for it meant that it would draw the poison out; and if the stone refused to stick, there was no poison, and the dog was not mad.

Is there nothing to be done when a boy is in the condition in which young Brennen was said to have been? Yes. Remove all evil suggestions as soon as possible, and when in a nerve-storm, and suffering hysteria peculiar to morphine and fear, give a hot bath. The bath must be prolonged to complete relaxation-an hour or longer, if necessary.

There isn’t any remedy equal to a hot bath when “tortures are unbearable.” Pain will surely kill, and so do many remedies given to relieve pain. The judicious administration of a hot bath will relieve, and it will not kill.

The treatment that the boy received from his friends, nurse and physicians was of such a character as to throw him into hydrophobophobia. Some idea of the extent to which this superstition prevails in the United States can be had from the following, which I quote from a report sent out by the Pasteur Institute of Chicago, in March, 1910. It states that that institute has treated, since its inauguration in July, 1890, a grand total of 4,158 patients, all of whom received this anti-hydrophobia treatment. To make it interesting, it told the manner in which 3,651 of its patients had been inoculated; namely, 151 by cats, 134 by horses, 137 by skunks, 6 by wolves, 65 by cows, 14 by calve 2 by burros, 7 by coyotes, 1 by a rat, 8 by mules, 9 by pigs, 2 by sheep, 14 by squirrels, 1 by a monkey, 56 infections were by human beings, and the remainder were presumably by dogs. According to the report, 2,167 persons received severe and multiple lacerated bites on the hands and wrists, 584 on the head and face, 487 on the arms, 846 on the legs and thighs, and 74 on the trunk.

I have no doubt that, if these people had been treated sanely, they would have recovered, the same as those thousands who, in the same time, had run against buzz-saws, the common farming utensils, and tools in general use by mechanics; and if the thousands who received mechanical injuries had been converted into hydrophobophobiacs, the usual psychological storms would have been the result.

The fact that more people do not die in these Pasteur institutes and at the hands of professional hydrophobophobiacs, is because the subjects are not as susceptible to the scare influence as this Los Angeles boy and the lady writer of that city. People are dying all over the country from so-called hydrophobia, but the Pasteur institutes have themselves so thoroughly fortified that they reap credit for curing those who cannot be killed by suggestion and those who really do not have anything the matter with them.

A nervous subject can easily be influenced by suggestion, and a train of morbid symptoms may be immediately set up by the suggestion that hydrophobia is possible. Then, if delay is made in taking the Pasteur treatment, the institute’s doctors throw up their hands and declare that it is too late, and the profession is educated to say, “There is nothing to alleviate the pain and check suffering; the tortures described are almost unbearable to

see;” and, “Nothing was done; there was nothing to be done but wait for the end.” Who does not know that a mental suggestion of that nature is fatal? It is a damnable professional crime!

Dr. John W. Hodge, of Niagara Falls, New York, is one of the most knowing men in this country on the subject of rabies and hydrophobia. In this connection it will be well to extract from an article of his in the Naturopath for September, 1911:

“In the annual report of the Morris Shelter of Philadelphia, Pa., for stray dogs, it is stated that during last year (1910) nearly 56,000 stray dogs, picked up from the streets of the metropolis, were cared for in this shelter. Not a case of rabies was found among these thousands of ‘strays.’

The above recorded fact that 56,000 stray dogs of all sorts and in all conditions of misery and want were picked up from the public streets of a great metropolis in a single year, during which year canine rabies was said to be prevalent throughout this continent, without having come across a single case of the dread disease, should be all-sufficient to convince any rational mind that the hue and cry of the ‘rabies’ fanatics about the alarming prevalence of ‘rabies’ in America is wholly devoid of reason and common sense.

The data presented in the above quoted article furnish irrefragible proof of the utter absurdity and gross unreasonableness of the wave of popular frenzy which has of late swept over this country in consequence of the alleged prevalence of so-called ‘rabies’ in dogs and the asserted danger to be apprehended from the bites of so-called ‘mad dogs’ in persons who neglect to avail themselves of the saving grace of the Pasteur treatment.

The statements above given of the condition of affairs which has existed during the past year in the Morris Refuge of Philadelphia for stray dogs is a repetition of the reports constantly coming from humane institutions in which vast numbers of sick and homeless dogs are being regularly confined and cared for by humane and intelligent persons. In such institutions cases or ‘rabies’ have never been known to occur, for the simple reason that the humane and benevolent persons in charge of these refuges for sick and homeless animals (dogs and cats) are not actuated by mercenary motives, nor are they financially interested in the manufacture or the sale of the pernicious quack-nostrum, miscalled Pasteur’s ‘anti-rabic serum.’

The writer is fully convinced that the widespread fear of mad dogs which has been worked up and fostered in this era of political corruption and medico-political graft has been the direct result of the mercenary gang of purse-hungry politicians, quack doctors and enterprising serum-manufacturers whose business it is to fleece gullible persons and to diddle the public purse. >> These are grave charges to bring against a coterie of political and professional gentry who lay claims to honesty and respectability, but I feel fully assured by the stern logic of facts that the charges here preferred are fully warranted and can be substantiated by rigid proof. It is well to speak plainly on this important matter. These conclusions have not been hastily arrived at. I have during the last five years been making a careful and conscientious study of the ‘rabies’ enterprise, and noting the despicable tactics to which its unscrupulous instigators and promoters have regularly resorted in their studied efforts to deceive the public. From this study the unavoidable conviction has been forced upon me that the ‘rabies’ industry is a venal scheme, conducted, not for the protection of the public, as its foxy and mercenary promoters would have us believe, but for the purpose of procuring patients and profits for the proprietors of Pasteur shambles, supplying fat fees for impecunious quack doctors, and lucrative places for political heelers and party henchmen, all of whom are wont to receive emoluments through the operation of this pernicious scheme of graft and persecution. From all the observations that I have been able to make, I am thoroughly convinced that the ‘rabies’ industry is a medico-political skin game devised and assiduously worked by a gang of mercenaries for the furtherance of their own selfish interest, regardless of any consideration for the public weal.

It is a fact, well known to veterinarians and physicians, that dogs, like human beings, are subject to many nervous and other disorders which cause disturbances of the animals brain-functions. In these days of popular hysteria about rabies, if a poor dog chances to lose his mental equipoise and acts in a strange and unusual manner, just as a human being is wont to do under similar circumstances, the poor dog is at once assumed to have ‘rabies,’ and he is treated in the most senseless, cruel and inhuman manner by those who should be his friends and protectors.

Scientific veterinarians and canine clinicians assure us that mental perturbation and delirium are symptomatic of various canine ailments, such as heatstroke, fever, cerebral hyperaemia, cerebral meningitis, epilepsy, helminthiasis,

hunger, thirst, etc. When a human subject becomes delirious from any cause, nobody thinks of setting up the cry of ‘mad man.’ But let a poor, homeless, thirsty, half-starved, maltreated, frightened dog lose his mental equilibrium and fall by the wayside in a fit or a convulsion, and the terrifying cry of ‘mad dag’ is at once set up and passed along by an excited rabble of hysterical bystanders, and the poor sick dog’s life-blood is summarily demanded by the howling mob. A patrolman rushes to the scene of chaos and confusion, and forthwith shoots, or clubs to death, the poor defenseless animal without knowing why he commits the insane act, except that Mrs. Grundy demanded the dog’s life. The poor dog having been brutally slaughtered, his head is next severed from his body and rushed to a Pasteur institute for analysis of the brain, with the invariable result that ‘Negri bodies’ are discovered in the brain-cells of the dead dog.

The next step in the farce-tragedy is the blatant dogmatic announcement of the mad-dog expert through the columns of the newspapers that the suspected dog had been suffering from ‘unmistakable rabies in the advanced stages of the dread disease. A mad-dog scare now being in order, the politicians of the State Department of Agriculture take a hand in the con game, and with great unction and flourish of trumpets ‘quarantine against rabies’ is laid upon the district in which the farce-tragedy was enacted; then the quarantined district is flooded with sensational scare literature from the Department of Agriculture, and a raging mad panic is the expected result. Then begins the scramble by political heelers for fat jobs, at the taxpayer’s expense, as inspectors of quarantine, especial quarantine agents, etc. While it is barely ‘possible that there may be such an affection of the dog as ‘rabies,’ there is no - valid reason for the belief that the hypothetical affection is communicable to the human subject.

After having corresponded with distinguished pathologists and canine clini cians of world-wide repute on this subject, I feel fully justified in my belief that there is no distinctive disease in either man or dog to which the term ‘rabies’ can be correctly applied. Some of the world’s most distinguished clinicists have assured me that they have never seen a case of ‘rabies’ in the dog, and do not profess to know what malady is meant by that term. These distinguished canine pathologists tell me that the madness or delirium manifested in a so-called ‘mad dog’ is merely symptomatic of some brain disorder in the canine patient.

It is a significant fact that, while this country is said to be overrun with rabid dogs and Pasteur institutes, in England, where Pasteur institutes are not allowed to ply their trade, ‘rabies’ or hydrophobia is unheard of. The boom- ers of the high-priced Pasteur serum will tell you that this rarity of cases of ‘hydrophobia in England is due to the fact that rabies’ was stamped out in England through the rigid enforcement of muzzling laws in that country. This assertion is untrue. The muzzling laws have been no more rigidly or effectively enforced in England than they have in America. The real reason for the absence of ‘rabies’ in England is found in the circumstances that Pasteur fakeries were outlawed and are not permitted to ply their trade on English territory. Wherever Pasteur institutes hold forth there is sure to arise a plentiful supply of rabies.’

The Pasteur people and their confederates manufacture it.

Previous to the discovery of Pasteur’s alleged preventive of ‘hydrophobia’ in the human subject, a case of rabies’ was scarcely ever heard of, while ‘mad dog’ scares and ‘quarantine against rabies’ was unheard of; but since the discovery of the preventive serum ‘rabies’ has become universally prevalent all over America, and ‘mad dogs’ are as plentiful, as pickaninnies in Alabama. The result of this big crop of mad dogs is a great demand for ‘anti-rabic serum’ to counteract the effects of the mad-dog bites. It is a rule in trade that the supply must be made to meet the demand. If there were no ‘mad dogs’ running at large, what would become of Pasteur institutes and their lucrative trade?

The writer has in his possession the names and addresses of more than 2,500 persons reported as having died of ‘hydrophobia’ shortly after having received the Pasteur preventive treatment. Nearly 300 of these victims of medical quackery had no recollection of ever having been bitten by a dog or other animal, and could therefore have been in no danger of ‘hydrophobia’ until they had received the Pasteur treatment whereby they were inoculated with the infective virus of ‘Pasteur’s disease.’ Such are some of the deplorable results of the insane medical quackery of inoculating healthy human beings with the morbid virus derived from the diseased carcasses of dead animals whose death had been induced by inoculation with ‘mad-dog virus.’

If I may be allowed to prophesy, I venture the confident prediction that future generations will look back upon the present-day delusion about “hydrophobia,’ and the Pasteur treatment therefor, with feelings akin to those which

we experience when reading the history of the witchcraft delusion which afflicted the people of the sixteenth century.”-THE NATUROPATH.

Reader! Please read Dr. Hodges’ article the second time, and the paragraph before the last ten times, if necessary for you to get its facts in your mind.

If I did not know that Dr. Hodge is reliable, I would not recommend his conclusions on this subject to my readers; but he has given the Pasteur treatment and rabies as much investigation as perhaps all the other physicians in this country. The truth of the matter is that the average physician never gives any subject a critical investigation, and that is why a fallacy is safely ensconced within the rank and file of the profession.

If all medical subjects were investigated as faithfully as Dr. Hodge has investigated rabies, the people would not be suffering from popular medical fallacies in the shape of modern medical science. The reader will note that the “miserable mongrels” which are especially alluded to in the first Los Angeles item, and also in the New York Evening Journal, are not the only dogs that figure in the creation of a hydrophobophobiac nerve-storms. The $2,700 Mexican blooded pups can create a panic when mixed up with literary folks. There isn’t much difference, after all, in blood, except that some is thick and dark, and some is thin and blue. Those possessing the former die of apoplexy, and are often stupid; while those possessing the latter are white-livered, cowardly and easy to take on phobias.

DISEASES OF WOMEN.

Read more

WHAT ARE THE REAL DANGERS IN CHILDHOOD?

DR. HUTCHINSON AND I ARE FAR APART.

TREATMENT OF SYPHILIS.

RABIES AND ITS CURE.

SUGAR PILLS.

PERSECUTION AND PROSECUTION OF CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS.

MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN.

FROM ocean to ocean, from the Gulf to the frozen fields of Canada’s northern wilderness, womanhood is praying for the life of one of their sex. Petitions in mighty volume from every town and farm and city throughout the length and breadth of North America meet at the desk of Earl Grey, governor general of Canada—one and all having this for its theme:

“Remove the shadow of the noose from beyond the other side of that valley of the shadow of death through which Angelina Napolitano must pass!’ “That a woman should be hanged by man-made laws for violating laws, the making of which was not permitted her nor any of her sex, is unjust. “That a woman, the most sacred and most beautiful, the most fragile and faultless of the Creator’s creatures, should be doomed to die the most ignoble death of all on the scaffold, and at the grim, hardened hangman’s hands, is monstrous.

“That the woman, with a hangman’s rope coiled as a choking serpent about her thin, weak neck, should be a mother—the mother of four children, all mere babies, the oldest just seven wee years this side of the great eternity from which you and all of us sprang; that a mother should climb that scaffold is more terribly monstrous still.

“But that is not the horrible picture before the eyes of Angelina Napolitano, sentenced to death for killing a husband as despicably evil and vile as ever lived.

“In less than one short month, this woman and mother will again become a mother. To give birth to the image of mankind, she will follow that path trodden by woman throughout all the years of time, down into the very shadow of death, alone, deserted, friendless, and with the fearful noose of the gallows rope dangling at the other side.

“Canada’s laws do not permit the taking of two lives for one, and Angelina Napolitano will be permitted to live until the babe is born, and then she must die! The courts of man have so decreed, and the hangman will carry the decree into execution, unless the governor general, Earl Grey, commutes the sentence to a milder form of punishment.

“To persuade him to do this, you, and you, and you may petition him. “Oh, if only you could see this with the eyes of a mother! As she looks forward to the coming of her child, the culmination of her hopes, prayers, and longings! Maybe, even now, this young Italian woman, who preferred being a murderess to becoming a white slave, is sewing those little garments for the baby she will never nurse, she will never hold in her arms and kiss and coddle and coo over, save for one brief while.

“And then at the hangman’s coming, as her cell door swings wide, this young mother even now sees herself walking with trembling step away from life and baby, into the great unknown land of eternity.

“What picture is this for a prospective mother to have in her mind’s vision:

“The body of her baby’s mother, with the head all hid beneath a black hood of death, which covers the terrible contortions of pain from all but her, the heavings and twitchings, the spasms of anguish, until the dangling body at the rope’s end stills in death!

“That is the picture which we may erase from this poor woman’s vision by deluging the Canadian officials with petitions.”—DENVER EXPRESS, JUNE 19, 1911.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE CRIME. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and when man-made laws run in opposition to the natural laws of self-protection and self-preservation, society is resting on a precarious foundation, and social morals and ethics are grotesque and without sense or reason.

Natural law and order are protective—evolutionary, and when they fail to protect man and give him comfort and health, it is because they are not understood and man fails to adjust himself to the law’s requirements, which are the laws of his nature plus his environment.

When it can be shown that man, because of viciousness, ignorance or insanity, is a menace to society, his liberty should be taken away from him, and he should be given an opportunity to reform, become wise or overcome disease; and if he has not enough intelligence to do this, then he must be cared for; but under no circumstances should he be put to death, for such punishment is neither corrective, educational nor economical. When criminals are put to death, the world is cheated of an opportunity to study their diseases and to investigate the cause and effect of their diseases. Every time society kills a subject in the name of law, it acknowledges that it is not large enough nor wise enough to meet the requirements of life intelligently; it is a case parallel to that of the unworthy servant who buried the talents loaned him, instead of using them so that when the master called for them, he could return them with a reasonable usury.

Must we blacken the pages of twentieth-century history with legal murder? Our fathers became too intelligent to disgrace the nineteenth century with the perpetuation of witchcraft, and the present-day legal murder is a child of witchcraft parents.

So long as society remains cruel and revengeful, so long as law and order punish except for correction, we need not expect the vicious and degenerate units of society to rise higher than the source of their inspiration.

It should soon become common knowledge that crimes of all kinds take their origins in perverted nutrition. When law is founded on this truth, then we shall be in line for humanely treating so-called criminals; but so long as modern medical science continues to look for entities as causes for disease, we need not look for our jurisprudence to rest on a more rational ethical foundation than it does.

The right understanding of physiology and the physiological perversions necessary to cause pathology of both body and mind will enable us to evolve an ethical foundation worthy of our age, after which we may expect to see our present-day barbarisms relegated to oblivion, and not before.

Physicians of intelligence know, or ought to know, that the mother of four children and enceinte with another can be driven insane by unnatural treatment. The commonest intelligence, it seems to me, should know that pregnancy is sacred, and all physiological and psychological impulses are in opposition to lust. It is time that a little wholesome knowledge of the purifying effects of reproduction on the woman’s psychology should become popular knowledge.

A woman during the reproductive period, if properly cared for, renews her body, which means that her body is purified; and, as the body is purified, the mind will also be. If a woman is vicious during that period, it invariably comes from unnatural treatment because she is subjected to physical and mental treatment wholly incompatible, unnatural, and unsuited to the period. If man is to evolve into a higher and better type of being, his mother must be protected from vicious treatment and even from vicious suggestions. The evolutionary urge is so great in this direction that when it meets great obstructions, such as opposition as Angelina Napolitano was subjected to, reason is dethroned for the time, and the subconscious mother instinct rises in all its might to protect the unborn child. Is this unique? No, the subconscious is everywhere at work directing the work of man; but, shame to so-called civilization, it is suppressed everywhere it can be.

A woman cannot maintain her mental equilibrium when abused during this state—when her instincts, which are always in the line of virtue, are opposed, as she can in the non-pregnant state. This is a period when she needs love and protection, or, if she cannot have the benefit of such treatment, the very least that the most brutal of humanity may do is to leave her alone without interruption.

But how is it with the unfortunate, condemned woman in Canada, Mrs. Angelina Napolitano? She had a fiend for a husband, a devil incarnate, who endeavored to force her into white slavery at a period of her life when her entire being revolted against it. This desire on the part of her husband was low and revolting enough to drive a normal woman insane; but to have such a proposal made, and coercion added, by the one of all the world who should protect her was quite sufficient to throw her into puerperal mania, which, when it takes on homicidal form, has no compunctions, no pity.

She was forced into a mental state known to doctors as puerperal mania, a state of irresponsibility. If we were superstitiously inclined, we should believe that the hand of providence forced her into removing from the sight of man the basest of fiends, her husband. Then, to further the work of diabolism, a judge (heaven spare the mark!) felt it incumbent on him to avenge an outraged law, and in doing so, he outraged every moral law of nature. He passed the death sentence upon this mother; but he did not have enough mercy in his heart to kill also the unborn

child to save it from the curse of its inheritance, but, to help build it a worse fiend than the circumstances had already done, he respited the mother until after its birth, and in so doing, condemned it to all the morbid nervous impressions that months of anticipation of execution on the part of the mother could give it. If hell can hatch a more fiendish plot to damn a human being, that resort of the devil goes beyond my imagination.

Is the word “civilization” a chimera? Or can we depend on humanity, at this late hour, to rally and save this woman, or, what is greater, save humanity the disgrace of such a barbarous execution?

WHAT ARE THE REAL DANGERS IN CHILDHOOD?

IN the Cosmopolitan for July, Dr. Hutchinson has an article entitled “Danger Signals in the Kindergarten Age,” which has caused several CLUB readers to feel that I should refute what, to them, appears to be unsound advice. There appears to be a disposition on the part of many people to enjoy a scrap if it does not involve them—when the responsibility of its outcome can be assumed by others.

The CLUB gives the erroneous impression that its editor enjoys fighting—enjoys finding fault with individuals; and it matters not how often I declare that my fight is against principles and not individuals, I am persistently represented as being hostile to the doctors themselves, instead of to what the majority of them stand for.

Dr. Hutchinson’s danger signals in the kindergarten age are the kindergarten schoolroom and indoor work, especially that which is done sitting:

“Nothing could be much worse for an active, sturdy, growing child, who wants to run and tumble, wave his arms about, and kick his legs in the air and shout, than to be planted in a foolish little chair at a doll ‘s-house table, picking tiny holes in a sweet little piece of perforated cardboard. It would be better for him to be out in the street learning to fight and crawl through sewer pipes.”

The doctor declares that between four and seven years of age, there is great danger of eye-strain causing myopia, or short sight, and he knows few institutions more wasteful of the time, the health, and the temper of both children and teachers than our present school system; yet, he declares it doesn’t do much harm, because the young human animal is most providentially tough. The hygienic conditions of the schoolroom, he thinks, are always worse than those of the playground, which is self-evident.

In spite of these dangers, the doctor consoles parents with the assurance that there “still abideth the trinity of growth—food, air, exercise; these three, and the greatest of these is food.”

The most pertinent statements he makes throughout his article are italicized. For the benefit of those who will not have the pleasure of reading the entire article, I shall quote most of these passages:

“The healthy child should eat, eat, eat.

“Three square meals a day for a healthy boy are just the mere foundation for his day’s eating.

“Upon what physiological or rational basis the great, sacred dietetic principle of Three Square Meals a Day and No Eating Between Meals was founded, is difficult of discovery even for adults, and impossible for children. Most animals in a state of nature eat whenever they can get food and until they can hold no more. Cows and horses, for instance, in pasture graze steadily from half to two-thirds of the day, or, in summertime, night. The healthy human stomach ought to be able to take care of any article of food within reason, in any amount within the cubic capacity of its walls at any hour of the day or night.”

Please note that this statement has a cable on it; “the healthy human stomach ought to” do so and so! If it doesn’t, of course, it is not healthy; all of which is obvious.

“The notion that the stomach requires rest between tasks has been completely exploded.

“Youth is the period of growth, and if children are to enlarge their bodies, they must be supplied with an abundance of those materials out of which their bodies are built.

“The nursery is and always has been right in demanding plenty of butter on its bread. Children should be allowed, yes, encouraged, to eat butter and bread, rather than bread and butter.

“Food-and-play-and-sleep, sleep-and-food-and-play—these are the magic circles of childhood. Our best tonic for improving a child’s appetite is to put it to bed.

“Sleeping to grow and get an appetite, playing to get another one—this is the whole duty of a child.

“Any child that does not eat, and eat, at least once a day, like a sawmill, with an eagerness, avidity, and an audible noise, unless restrained, is not healthy.

“If your child has no appetite, do not fuss at him, or pile things on his plate to try to tempt his appetite with dainties; send him to get one—to the woods or the garden, or, if necessary, to the gutter—anywhere he will meet other young animals, human and otherwise, and roll and tumble and fight with them. Pay no attention to his schoolhouse,” etc.

The last paragraph is grand. It matters not what else the doctor says or does not say; that statement redeems all. It is worth the price of the whole article.

There are many other good things that I cannot quote. If the doctor had given us all the danger signals that account for so much sickness in the first half of the first third of man’s life, and especially in the kindergarten age, his article would have been a classic.

In attempting to analyze the medical philosophy of “The Dangers of the Kindergarten Age,” I shall not promise to do more than hint at some of the most important problems, for the subject is large enough to require volumes to encompass it.

DR. HUTCHINSON AND I ARE FAR APART.

Dr. Hutchinson and I are as far apart as the poles on many vital subjects pertaining to our profession; yet that does not prevent me from recognizing his ability as a clever writer who pushes an exceedingly facile pen.

The public cannot see that his and my interests are separated as far apart as disease and health. He is a physician, and his vocation is that of a journalist; while my vocation is that of a physician, and writing is my avocation. He makes his living by writing, and his profession is an intellectual embellishment, while I make my living out of my profession, in spite of the inhibiting influences of my writing.

There is a world of difference between writing to uphold people in their disease-producing habits and writing against such habits. Indulgent parents, indulgent teachers, and those who flatter and wink at the people’s habits and weaknesses are always more popular with those who are in need of such patronage than are those who declare that there is a positive and unavoidable penalty for all infractions of health laws.

The man who writes for “popular reading on health subjects” must write to please the people. It is doubtful if the popular magazines of the day would make a business of publishing medical articles that would be of vital benefit to the people, for all such articles must show up the errors of life that lead to disease, and the public is not ready to believe that it is the author and builder of its own diseases. It is not ready to become its own physician.

· MUST FLATTER THE PEOPLE.

A successful magazine writer on health subjects must flatter the people and tell them what they like to know. He must tell them that instinct is wiser than all doctors, and that disease is accidental, mysterious, a dispensation of providence, the result of germ infection that cannot be avoided except by swatting the fly, shooing the mosquito, or being inoculated; that appetite is given to man for his guidance; and that, if five meals a day are wanted, they should be eaten. It is necessary to reiterate that, if people have a desire for anything, that desire should be indulged; for “God never implanted a desire, a belief, a hope, a wish, unless it were possible for Him to supply them;” and for people to gratify such desires is an evidence of rationality; whereas those who oppose man in being guided by his instincts are calamity howlers, and beings with sadly neglected educations.

The people, however, who write in favor of indulgence, and those who read such writings with great appreciation, appear to be possessed of a dual philosophy which contradicts itself. For example, those who indulge what I call a morbid appetite, or overindulge a normal appetite until it becomes morbid, develop mental and moral perversions from the enervating effects of over-stimulation. Some will steal, others commit homicide, and still others will show more or less moral obliquity in other directions. It is then that the advocates of physical indulgences, those who prescribe, “Eat, eat, eat—eat, drink and marry, and tomorrow you will be in the divorce court”—will be in favor of disciplining and punishing those who indulge their perversions—mental appetites brought on by indulgences.

The medical profession works on the principle of indulging its patients. If average physicians ever oppose their patients, it is always in a patronizing way. If it is in regard to tobacco, the advice will be to use the weed moderately; if regarding food, the advice will be: “Eat good, nourishing food, but avoid any that disagrees.” Of course, this means that their patients’ instincts will tell them what to eat, what to wear, what to think, what to believe, and when to satisfy anger, passion, revenge, etc. Doctors and preachers are for saving man from the misfortunes that come to him accidentally, and the causes which are beyond the ken of professional men, except as I have mentioned before.

The whole plan of medical practice has been, and is yet, that of palliation—pleasing the people.

· DR. HUTCHINSON SUCCESSFUL.

If I am informed correctly, Dr. Hutchinson has given but little attention to practice, but found early in his career that he had a mission to perform in educating the public through writing articles for magazines on matters medical from the regular physicians’ standpoint; and he has made a success of it. He certainly writes very interestingly, and he clothes “regular” medical sophistry with a honeyed style that shows him to be no stranger to the need of sugar-coating for unpalatable dope. The public for whom he writes is pleased. He has the faculty of entertaining, edifying, and causing his readers to believe that he gives valuable information. He is possessed of an ideal genius for mixing medical sophistry with the obvious and commonplace so as to make the whole look like the real. He is ambitiously extravagant in attempting to free people from all ideas that they need to restrain themselves in eating, drinking, and making merry. In this, he expresses his lack of familiarity with cause and effect, or he deliberately writes against his convictions just to gain public approval. It may be that he doesn’t know any better; for this is one of the striking characteristics of the political element of the profession. Some of these days, the profession will wake up to the truth that disease comes from bad habits, and then it will be as vociferous in innocently declaring this self-evident truth as it now is in clamoring for the obvious— something every clean housewife knows regarding flies.

To please the people is to swim with the tide. I congratulate the doctor on being able to so admirably and felicitously adapt himself to social requirements.

· WHAT DR. HUTCHINSON BELIEVES IN EATING.

Dr. Hutchinson’s article is devoted to children at the kindergarten age, their care, and especially their feeding. The doctor’s feeding ideas have become notorious; everybody knows that he takes no stock in fasting, or even in eating moderately. But he has adopted the profession’s slogan of “Eat! Eat good, nourishing food. If you have no appetite, you must eat to keep from losing strength.” He not only endorses this idea, but he goes further, if possible, in out-Heroding Herod.

When reading the doctor’s health articles, one is impressed with the idea that he must be a sensualist, because of the emphasis he lays on eating and the great variety of good stuff he prescribes to be eaten at a meal, and, neither last nor least, the sarcastic inference he sometimes makes of dietitians or of those who believe in controlling disease through proper feeding. But, judging him from his photographs, he is a well-balanced and self-controlled man.

Before the subject of correct care for children can be dealt with properly, a full knowledge of the child’s prenatal and postnatal care and environment must be known. To know children and how to care for them properly is one of the largest and most important subjects before the twentieth-century intelligence, and one that cannot be encompassed by eat, eat, eat; play, play, play; sleep, sleep, sleep; inspection of eyes, ears, throat, skin, etc., every little while; and, when the child is not feeling well, attribute its illness to some previous infection and send for a specialist.

The doctor’s article is long and interesting, and he says many good things, but I shall confine my comments to the real gist of his philosophy, and I hope that the readers of his article and of mine will derive enough benefit to pay them for going through both.

· THE INFLUENCE OF ENCUMBRANCE ON MOTHER AND CHILD.

The average person of intelligence must know, if he stops and reflects for a moment, that there is suffering all over the world brought on by bad habits. There is an old and well-known biblical command, namely, “Children, obey your parents that your days may be long,” etc. Every sensible, rational person must know that excess, defect, and perversion are possible in every phase of human life. There are people who control their sensual natures, and others—the majority—who indulge their appetites and passions. Our prisons, hospitals, reformatories, and poorhouses are filled with people who have indulged appetites and passions without sense or reason.

The tremendous mortality in the first year of life is due to mothers indulging themselves during the gravid period, beyond all reason. The popular opinion that when mothers are pregnant, they should eat for two causes them to put on more weight than they should. The majority are encumbered far beyond the normal. The excessive eating necessary to encumbrance brings an acid stomach, which means indigestion; the absorption of the acid of decomposition poisons the secretions and evolves a tired, languid feeling, which prevents these food-poisoned people from taking as much exercise as they should. This disposition to rest increases the tendency to take on weight.

The last three months of the gestation period are often spent in disease-producing inactivity; the functions of the various organs of the body are impeded by inactivity and the accumulated fat; frequently, the limbs are badly swollen from edema—dropsical infiltration; the tissues of the body lose their normal elasticity and will rupture instead of dilating. During parturition, this condition favors bruising, denuding, and lacerating, and always means a prolonged, painful labor. As a result of such unnecessarily hard confinements, mothers are exhausted and made to suffer shock, traumatic inflammations and ulcerations, and not infrequently peritonitis. Those who get off with slight injuries have sufficient shock to use up their resistance for a while, and the slight injuries ulcerate instead of healing quickly. The bruised and denuded surfaces not only ulcerate but also become portals of entry for septic poisons. Poisoning under such circumstances varies from a slight septicemia that will render the mother’s milk unwholesome for the babe to a fatal peritonitis. This is often the cause of the milk drying up entirely, and, as a rule, this cause is not suspected.

It is one of nature’s conservative measures, and it certainly saves a few children who would otherwise be destroyed.

Slight injuries to mothers whose bodies are damaged because of the aforementioned wrong life become the direct and indirect cause of infantile sickness and mortality. Avoidable puerperal derangement of mothers can be traced, directly and indirectly, to more than ninety percent of their diseases and deaths, and almost a like percentage of the misfortunes to children.

· KNOWLEDGE OF PARENTS AND HOME LIFE NECESSARY.

A reliable regimen for the care of children during the kindergarten age must take into consideration the prenatal tendencies, and certainly the mothers’ physical state before and after confinement, and the family idiosyncrasies. It must not be forgotten that children born encumbered are born with morbid longings for food stimulation. Is this a “whim,” a senseless notion? It is known to biologists that cell life is one of strife, which results in the survival of the fittest. A child born with its cell-life educated to overstimulation will meet with post-birth care to correspond, which means that a morbid desire will be created for food; hence, the prenatal instincts of such a child are those of craving undue stimulation, and cannot be trusted any more than the instincts of habit-cursed humanity generally.

· THE EFFECTS OF DISCIPLINED MOTHERS ON CHILDREN.

The child born of a disciplined mother, one who has controlled herself mentally and physically, will not be overweight. It will sleep so much that it will not demand nursing oftener than three times in twenty-four hours. If it is cared for properly during its first ten years, its instincts can be trusted, and it will not demand food every three hours; nor will it eat that often, even if offered food.

It is true that we do not see many such children. Why? Because the medical profession as a body has taught the human race to be gluttons and drug fiends. There are few children five years of age who are not more or less neurotic from over-stimulation, and their instincts are to be trusted about as far as the instincts of the inebriate.

To realize the truth of what I am writing requires a much longer medical apprenticeship at the bedside of sick people than the rustling, bustling twentieth-century life will stand for.

· FEW NORMAL CHILDREN.

It must not be forgotten that the average child at birth does not have a normal amount of resistance because of the overstimulation of the mother, and that is why sickness is the rule among nursing children rather than the exception. There is much talk of cholera infantum and other diseases in children who are nursing, due to bad milk supply, etc., but most of these little fellows dying of these diseases, which are peculiar to the first two years of life, are made susceptible to disease influence by being born encumbered with flesh. To a small degree, they are inebriates; they weigh from six to twelve pounds, instead of from three to six pounds.

· PAINFUL LABORS DUE TO ENCUMBERED MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.

Encumbered children always come from encumbered mothers; both unite in causing long and painful labors. A labor that wears the mother out also wears the child out. Children are bruised, and quite a number are killed. Chloroform and instruments are achievements of modern medical science. Instead of boasting of this plan of delivery, it would be the part of wisdom to learn why the civilized woman has departed so far from the normal. Any physician capable of possessing a rational education can be shown, any time he wishes to be, that proper diet and exercise during gestation will save mothers from long, hard labor and the diseases incidental to the injuries accompanying instrumental deliveries, and that the children will be saved equally as much. After being shown, without a doubt, the crimes against health that are incidental to stuffing during the gestation period, it may not be impossible then to convince him that there is such a thing as children eating more than enough, and that the surplus becomes disease-building material.

· EXCITING CAUSES FOR SICK BABIES.

Hard labor, rough handling, and too much feeding before reaction from childbirth lay the groundwork for sick babies. After two to four weeks, in many cases, there will be enough septic poison imbibed by the children through the mothers’ milk to cause bowel diseases, convulsions, infantile paralysis, etc., while a few of the worst cases may escape death to develop into epileptics and idiots.

I have not overdrawn this picture. All physicians who have handled a large practice and permitted their minds to work normally will bear witness to every statement I make. The drama is being enacted in every community in civilization, and will continue to be until civilization learns a lesson in self-control in eating and self-discipline in all lines.

I should like to quote Dr. Hutchinson’s entire article for the CLUB readers, but space will not allow. Those interested should secure a copy of the Cosmopolitan for July. There is much of the article that I heartily agree with.

· OBJECTS TO THE KINDERGARTEN.

The doctor says, “The first danger signal in the kindergarten age is the kindergarten itself.”

I do not approve of the kindergarten, nor of anything having the appearance of a school, rule, or curriculum. I do not approve of all of: “The keynote of the nursery stage of man is food, sunshine, and rest.” Infants at the breast should be allowed to sleep all the time, and for the first few months, they will do so if they are not overfed, handled, pampered, and spoiled. Yes, many children at the breast are born encumbered, and if they are nursed according to modern medical science, every two hours, they will die, as they now do, at the rate of fifty per cent before the close of the first year.

When children are of kindergarten age they need food three times a day, and if they are fed oftener, such diseases as nervousness, grinding of teeth, biting of nails, catarrh or running at nose, enuresis (bed-wetting), vulvitis, ascarides, prepucitis (inflammation of the lining of the prepuce, which often ends in adhesions to the glans, necessitating an operation for breaking up the adhesions), stomach and bowel derangements, chorea and other nervous derangements will develop, the doctor and his “little better than fairy-tales” to the contrary notwithstanding.

To read what he writes regarding diseases of children gives one the impression that there are no diseases of childhood; yet we are reminded in season and out of season by the employed emissaries of political medicine that the mortality at all ages is appalling, and we are made dizzy with figures showing the cost of sickness. When the doctor refers to sickness at all in this article, it is by the merest accident, and then for cause he points back to a possible remote infection from one of the contagious or infectious diseases. He, like many more of his ilk, appears unable to conceive of an auto-generated infection coming from the decomposition of food in the alimentary canals of those who are fed beyond their digestive capacity.

Of course, there are a few healthy children, a very few; and it must not be forgotten that there are a lot who are dead before the tenth year, death coming from throat, lung, stomach, and other acute affections; all of the children being made susceptible to disease-producing influences by wrong life, the principal error being that of wrong feeding.

· CHILDREN MUST HAVE PLENTY OF FOOD.

Children must have plenty of food, not too much; all the sunshine possible; all the activity desired, which is a great amount for healthy children; and the opportunity to go to bed at eight o’clock; they should be up at six and have one or two hours’ sleep both in the forenoon and in the afternoon.

If children under ten years of age are sent to any kind of school, it should be to the school of nature. The schoolroom should be the hills, valleys, fields, and orchards, with a teacher competent to teach natural history in all its branches. There should positively be no books, no lessons, no memorizing, and no rewards of merit; for every child must be supreme in its class.

· TEACHERS FOR CHILDREN SHOULD BE THE MOST KNOWING AND BEST PAID.

There should be no mensuration system—a measuring of one child by another’s standard. Teachers for children under ten years of age should be the most knowledgeable of all in the profession. They should be paid not less than five thousand dollars a year; and if the proper persons cannot be had for that amount, pay twice that sum; and allow them to select for assistants those who will make the best understudies with a view to perfecting themselves for the work. Teachers are too poorly paid to keep them in the physical vigor necessary to evolve the mental virility peculiar to original work. To teach well, the teacher must be at rest from financial worries. Teachers should have enough comfort to generate their ethical, aesthetic, and artistic tastes. Worry is not conducive to the development of the best. No one is fit to teach children who is not capable of answering every one of their questions as they should be answered.

Teaching will never be correct so long as it fails to find each child’s point of view. One child is as comprehensive as another, if its view-point can be understood. Only children with conventional viewpoints are considered bright in our present system of education, and because of this, some of the brightest minds are discouraged and perhaps ruined for life.

I agree in full with Dr. Hutchinson when he declares, “It would be better for him to be out in the street learning to fight and crawl through sewer pipes,” than to be in the house going through the usual kindergarten curriculum.

· REFLEX DISEASES.

The doctor avoids all “fairy tales” by saturating himself with modern medical science, and he gives us the usual latest scientific knowledge regarding eye strain:

“Close work, after ten or twelve years of age, while it may seriously fatigue the muscles of the eye, can do little to change its shape; but between two and seven, there is no question of the serious damage which may be done

by aggravating any short-sightedness with which the child was born, or producing it in those who would otherwise have escaped it. Examinations of the eyes of thousands of young children in all parts of the world—savage, barbarian and civilized—have shown that they all practically start in life with the same shape of eye; viz., a slightly flattened or long-sighted one; and that the percentage of those who develop myopia, or short sight, is in precise relation to the earliness with which they are put into school and the constancy and length of their confinement in the schoolroom.”

I do not believe it is possible to hold the attention of young children long enough to produce eye strain. The eye strain we hear so much about comes from five meals a day—from “eat-and- play-and-sleep” and then “eat-and-play-and-sleep,” but especially from “eat, eat, eat.” There are a lot of so-called causations that are not causations at all. One would be disposed to think that physicians who are sufficiently astute to discover all the diseases produced from reflexes would be wise enough to discover the injuries coming from a crowded nutrition.

The past winter, I visited a children’s hospital in one of the southern cities. The chief of staff was passing through the ward, prescribing and advising for the little folks. He is a physician of more than mediocre attainments and personality. He asked me to look at a case of chorea that had been admitted for the third time. In explaining the case to me and pointing out the patient’s peculiarities, he did so with a flow of technical verbiage that would have done credit to the incumbent of a chair of pediatrics in a college meeting the approval of Dr. Abraham Flexner.

The treatment was, and had been, according to modern medical science. It is doubtful if the girl will ever be cured, for the causes must be discovered and removed, and they will be found in epoikic influences, such as inherited tendencies, a nervous, irritable mother, and probably a dissipated father. She will scarcely be able to find a professional man who will take so much interest.

Chorea is a nervous disorder, and can have a hundred exciting causes. The primary cause, however, will always be found in perverted nutrition from errors in diet. Such children “eat and play” and “eat and play,” but do more eating than playing. The principal remedies for a cure—not relief—are rest in the recumbent position and a fast until all pronounced irritations are subsided. Then they should be fed a moderate supply of eggs, salads, milk, cheese, bread, and fruit (not all at one meal), but in the right combinations. Give fruit and cheese for one meal; bread, butter, and milk for another; and eggs and salad for another. Feed three meals a day, but give nothing between meals, except water. Such children must be kept from people who excite and irritate them.

Before quitting the subject of reflex diseases, I wish to analyze a little what Dr. Hutchinson has to say about myopic eyes. The doctor has imbibed the modern medical science ex cathedra style of announcing modern medical discoveries, and if the profession had not made such an unenviable reputation for mental regurgitation, we might possibly pin our faith to this worldwide proof which the doctor offers us; but we cannot keep from thinking that even in this, he and the profession may be mistaken.

The profession should have found out by this time that all the “savages and barbarians” we have undertaken to educate into civilized life, into clothes, and into “eat, eat, eat” of civilized food have developed diseases peculiar to civilization. The first diseases developed are functional, those peculiar to perverted nutrition; while those of a nervous character are developed later, for such diseases require more time to develop, as they are more of an organic nature.

It is with the regularity of natural order that tuberculosis follows in the wake of clothes and “eat, eat, eat,” yet some of our physicians who set their medical timepieces by the regulator known as modern medical science declare that the disease comes from infection. By the time this medical discovery goes to the bosom of the great medical Abraham, modern medical science will have corralled another great truth to take its place. May the great orthodox God have mercy on fallacy when Great Professional Truths crowd each other so rapidly in making their exits to eternity that they have to take the lock step.

· MEDICAL BUNCOMBE.

“The appetite of a healthy child of the kindergarten age is something appalling! He is a walking famine, a hunger incarnate. All is grist that comes to his mill, and all hours of the day or night are alike to him. But he needs every ounce that he will devour, and not one penny’s worth of it will be wasted. Don’t bother about the child. Just be sure that his food is right, pure, sound, and of the best quality; then let him go ahead! His wisdom is of the ages; yours, where it clashes with his, is of the almanacs, of the catechisms and copybooks, of the silly chatter of the street and the kitchen. If children were not born hungry and continued so as long as they were growing, they would never grow up; for, even with the utmost liberality and kindest intentions on the part of us parents, we never can quite retain a realizing sense, a living memory, of the actual kind of appetite we had when we were boys, and how we absolutely suffered to eat! ‘The boy gets three square meals a day, just as I do, and eats almost as much,’ we exclaim. ‘What more can he want?’ Three square meals a day for a healthy boy are just the mere foundation of his day’s eating.”

The wisdom of the ages has about as much show these days in a world overridden with medical fallacy—modern medical science—as a feather has in a cyclone.

The iteration and reiteration of “food, food, food;” “Eat to keep up strength;” “Food has nothing to do with the building of disease,” is nothing new. Modern medical science uses these great platitudes as its chief cornerstones every time it modernizes, which is as often as the moon quarters. Such teaching has had much to do with eradicating instinct, self-preservation. When the priests of this great medical science have no skill in barring disease and premature death from themselves and their families; when many of the brightest lights of the profession are as helpless as laymen in warding off diseases; when the “wisdom of the ages” plus modern medical science fails utterly to give them any mental and physical immunity from disease; it requires the innocence of mental knighthood to trumpet the representatives of such a system as Oracles. Audacity should be changed to spell doctor.

· THE PROFESSION’S SLOGAN.

“Eat, literally stuff,” has been the slogan of regular medicine for forty years to my knowledge, and this prescribed gluttony has been especially emphasized in the past twenty years; and it is within the past twenty years that regular medicine has lost much of its prestige.

The Great White Plague, we are told, is soon to see its finish. The profession has discovered that it is an infectious disease that travels from one person to another. The newly discovered cure is isolation and quarantine. In passing, it may be well to remark that the disease has been steadily on the increase, more particularly in the past ten years, and it has been the past ten years that the profession discovered that enormous eating, literally stuffing, is the most reliable cure; and the only reason that tuberculous subjects did not get well was that they could not be induced to eat enough. Five meals a day, and then some, has been the prevailing treatment; yet, according to the statistics, the disease has increased steadily.

The “sacred dietetic principle of three square meals a day and no eating between meals” has not had anything to do with prohibiting “eat, eat, eat.” The doctor who believes in “literally stuffing” has certainly had his inning, and, if he could learn from his experience, he would know that his diet, nursing, and medicating ideas have been death’s most accomplished ally.

Why is there mortality in typhoid fever? Because of “eat, eat, eat” on the medical prescriptions of most M. D.’s. Why are doctors all over the country dying from appendicitis? Why do such surgeons as the late Joseph Price, of Philadelphia, and many others of lesser fame, die of appendicitis? Because they rally around the profession’s slogan of “Eat! Eat! Eat!” Why do twenty-five to forty percent of pneumonia cases die, instead of five, or at the most ten percent? Because of “eat, eat, eat,” and morphine to stop the pain caused by eating.

If the world has not had an opportunity to see the evil of “eat, eat, eat” on growing children, on adults, and on the sick, it is because the world is certainly blind.

DOES THE STOMACH NEED REST?

“The notion that the stomach requires a certain definite interval of rest between tasks in order to get up its supply of gastric juice has been completely exploded, inasmuch as it has been found that the resting and empty stomach contains no gastric juice whatever; and it secretes none until food is actually put into it or smelled. In other words, it makes its gastric juice during the process of digestion just as it is needed, and, in all probability, out of the very food which it is digesting. The best, indeed the only, way to r the stomach secrete is to feed it, not rest it!”.

The notion that the stomach does not need rest cannot be exploded except to the theoretical man. The man who is actively engaged every day in advising broken-down stuffers knows that the stomach requires rest, but that nutrition requires more rest than any organ of the body. The physician who has given patients watchful attention knows that the stomach and every organ of the body needs rest. The man who understands physics knows that everything in nature has its seasons of rest and activity. But the stomach does not need rest nearly so much as does metabolism. There must be a limit to food intake; otherwise, there cannot be a balance between waste and repair. These facts are so obvious that I should apologize for stating them, as should Dr. Hutchinson apologize for advocating the exceedingly stale theory that he and “regular” medical science believe in stuffing. No one will dispute the truth of this statement if he takes the trouble to consult the mortuary reports.

· HOW DR. HUTCHINSON FEEDS.

I will quote the doctor’s two sets of menus for the benefit of those readers who are still of the opinion that children should be stuffed:

“As will be seen, the most prominent place in this diet is assumed by the proteins or ‘meats.’ This is for the reason that children are made out of proteins and fats, and would yield, on the most exhaustive analysis, only small percentages of starch. Youth is the period of growth, and if children are to enlarge their bodies, they must be supplied with an abundance of those materials out of which their bodies are built. All animals begin life as pure meat-eaters, devourers of liquid flesh, and the young human animal is no exception to the rule of his kind.

“PROTEINS ARE NECESSARY AND HARMLESS.

“Furthermore, all proteins, or ‘meats,’ including milk, have been shown on careful analysis to contain anywhere from one-third to one-half their bulk of carbohydrates, or animal starches, chiefly in the form of some modification of sugar. These animal sugars and starches are far the best and most digestible form in which starches can be administered to the child. The solid part of milk, for instance, consists of about one part protein, one part fat, and one and a half parts sugar.

“Nearly all the ‘evils’ supposed to result from excessive meat-eating in either children or adults have been proved to be largely imaginary. Uric acid, for instance, has little or nothing to do with the amount of meat in the diet, nor, on the other hand, has it any positive connection with the causation of gout; but it is probably one of the symptoms of an underlying error of metabolism, or chronic infection, which causes both these conditions. Meat, or a protein of any sort, has nothing whatever to do with the causation of Bright’s disease, or any other form of disease of the kidneys. Nine-tenths of these are the after-effects of some previous infection, like scarlet fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid, and even common colds. All the stories about children being made ‘nervous’ or teeth-grinders or bed-wetters or ‘thrown into fits and epilepsy’ are little better than fairy tales.”

The first objection that I have to make to the breakfasts is that there is too great a variety. The second is that I do not consider bacon a proper food for children. A kindergarten child and bacon certainly make an incompatible compound. Eggs are good food for children, but they should be used for dinner. Hot rolls are all right if they are properly baked. Rolls, or a well-made biscuit, with butter and honey and a dish of cottage cheese, cream, and sugar, followed with a glass of milk, will give a child a satisfying breakfast. An all-fruit meal, or all the fruit desired with cottage cheese or milk, either sweet or sour, is a breakfast that may be eaten twice or three times a week. Bread, butter, and a cup of cocoa make a good meal occasionally; however, milk is better than cocoa.

Broiled fish can be given to/children in the morning, if the order of the meals and the variety of food eaten are to receive no consideration; but, as order is the first law of nature, a certain degree of system should obtain in the selection of food and the time of eating.

The second breakfast is a conglomerate hodge-podge which, if eaten often, will bring on tonsillitis or gastric fever; but as the author of the meal is deaf, dumb and blind to the possibility of disease being created by the food we eat, if a child should fall sick under his observation after eating such a variety, he would charge the illness to flies and mosquitoes, or an infection left in the system from an infectious disease that was caused by infection carried by flies or mosquitoes from an infectious case; etc., etc. This is the “magic circle,” the ring that has no end, and it has about as much reason as a dog has for chasing its tail. are as blind as those who are paid for not seeing.

Watercress is all right for any meal, but it is more suitable for dinner, unless a salad is made of strawberries, watercress, and lettuce, dressed with sugar and cream or olive oil. This can be followed with a glass of milk.

Corn muffins, in place of other bread, once a week, are all right. As many baked apples, with cream (or milk) and sugar, as the child wants, followed with a glass of milk, make a splendid breakfast for once or twice a week; but the corn bread should be left out of the fruit meal, unless fermentation is desired. Such a breakfast repeated for a time would surely end in impaired health. Physicians who are looking for causes of disease outside of daily habits are not expected to believe these statements, but this worries me not at all, and I shall go on, as I have been doing for several years, curing children made and kept sick by just such a diet as is recommended in these menus.

I shall not analyze the luncheons, for I do not believe in eating lunch at all, and I certainly would not think of recommending a lunch to be followed in two or three hours by a dinner. If the whole profession should suddenly turn in and prescribe such a style of eating, and the people would follow their instructions, it would not be long before there would be two Owen bills before Congress praying for power to drive sickness and death from our land.

For dinner, eggs, chicken or broth, bouillon or creamed celery, potatoes, and custard are all right. Chicken with rice, spinach, or asparagus, and a cup of custard; or leave the rice out of the meal and take fruit pudding—and you have a reasonable meal.

Tea at 4:30, I do not believe in.

For supper, bread or rice, sponge cake, and milk are acceptable.

Creamed chipped beef is as good for children as bacon. In my judgment, both are good foods to be left alone. Macaroni, if desired, followed by a glass of milk, is acceptable once or twice a week.

A very good general plan can be fruit and milk for breakfast; meat or eggs or nuts, with vegetables, for dinner; and bread, butter, and milk for supper. Substitute plain cake for bread occasionally, if desired.

· THE IMPORTANCE OF PROTEIN FOODS.

Meat, eggs, or fish once a day, and bread, potatoes, rice, or macaroni once or twice a day, should furnish all the proteins necessary.

It is true that all animals begin life on meat. Cows, horses, and chickens start on meat, but drift quickly away. The fore part of life is the time for eating foods made from grains more than the latter part.

“Proteins are necessary and harmless.” Water is necessary and harmless, unless one gets into it and cannot swim. Unless eaten in too large quantities or at improper times, all foods are harmless.

Animal proteins have always been the profession’s sheet anchor as a bodybuilder. Vegetarians have opposed animal food for sentimental reasons as well as for theoretical reasons. Both sides to this controversy, especially the advocates of meat-eating, appear to forget that protein as protein is not admitted to the body. Remember that food in the stomach and bowels is still on the outside of the body. Every animal must build the protein necessary for its maintenance out of the elements that are taken into its body as food and drink. Beef is supposed to be an ideal food because of its special richness in protein, and it is well to remember that this animal begins life “as a pure meat-eater,” a “devourer of liquid flesh;” yet, before the first year of its life has passed, it gives up animal food entirely, and has no trouble whatever in manufacturing enough protein to render its flesh acceptable to the ´most exacting medical man, out of a food the medical man declares contains no protein!

Modern medical science makes much of the necessity of feeding foods that contain proteins. In this, I do not agree; for every animal organism, as well as the vegetal, possesses the power to manufacture this material when supplied with the elements carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; and these the grasses of the field, the water in the running brooks, and the air we breathe furnish in great abundance. The power of self-building, self-existence, cell-proliferation, if you please, means the power to build tissue; and to build tissue certainly declares the power to compound the chemical bodies known as proteins.

It may be as well to remind the reader that the cow has no trouble in manufacturing flesh for herself and milk for children out of grass and water, and milk and meat have been “shown on careful analysis to contain anywhere from one-third to one-half their bulk of carbohydrates, or animal starches, chiefly in the form of some modification of sugar. The solid part of milk consists of about one part protein, one part fat, and one and a half parts sugar; all of which the cow manufactures out of sunshine, air, water, and grass.

· EAT ALL THE TIME.

When the grass is young and succulent, animals must eat nearly all the time to secure enough nourishment; but when matured and dry, and fed in conjunction with grain, which latter food represents the most concentrated form of protein food found in the vegetable world, animals can get all they want, or should have, in a little while, and then they can and must rest from eating. This explains why animals sometimes eat all the time. The same holds true with children. If they are to eat all the time, they must be fed fruits and salads, foods that Dr. Hutchinson takes no stock in, and hardly mentions in his suggested bills of fare for children.

Cows are often made sick by food. If they are turned out on the grass in early spring, they will be compelled to eat “all the time” or starve. As the grass comes on and these half-fed animals are able to satisfy their appetites, they, like the human animal, will eat too much; but no harm comes from it, because a well-known diarrhea acts as a safety valve. This diarrhea in babies is called cholera infantum. If cows are kept on pasture that fails to give them enough to eat, and they succeed in breaking into a field of alfalfa, they will be fortunate if they do not kill themselves, and they will not need to be prepared for this sickness by some “previous infection.”

I have known of cows and horses breaking into cribs and fields of grain and eating so much that they died soon after, supposedly from the effects of the food; however, according to modern medical science, the food had nothing to do with it, for “nine-tenths of these diseases are the results of some previous infection.” The doctor recommends that children have five meals a day of strong, concentrated foods and a variety that will compel a child to eat long after it has had enough, and would not eat more were it not for pleasing its palate. If two of his meals were of fruit, two more of combination salads (grass), and one of meat and eggs, and bread or potatoes, it would be possible for a child to eat all the time. But concentrated protein foods do the same for children that they do for animals; namely, in the latter, they kill by fatty degeneration, or some other diseases, if the animals are not butchered before some fatal disease carries them off; and in children, such eating is the creator and builder of a constitutional state that takes on infectious diseases very readily.

The decomposition of the standard protein foods furnishes the systemic poisoning that is the basis of all so-called infectious and contagious diseases.

When physicians and dietitians realize that all so-called “good, nourishing foods”—such as meat, eggs, and the foods made from grains—are highly complex in their chemical combinations, and that on account of this complexity they are very unstable, liable to take on retrograde metamorphosis, they can see the danger to those who habitually eat too much of them. If physiological fermentation does not take place, pathological fermentation will; and when the latter results from eating, reason declares that poisoning must take place, and the poison will be in keeping with the nature of the foods ingested. The degree of virulence of the poisons will depend on the constituents of the foods; the more complex the chemical constituents, the more poisonous.

Meats, fish, nuts, and eggs stand at the head of the list, in the order named. Meat is the most poisonous. After animal foods come the grains, matured beans and peas, and the dairy products; and after these the vegetables, which I am pleased to denominate non-starchy, because they do not carry granular starch. The milk starch, such as is found in the green peas and beans and in the leafy vegetables, is very easy to digest, and when decomposition overtakes it, the toxic influence is so light that it often passes without notice. Fruits come last on the list and represent food that can be taken with the least danger by those who are not in good health.

The point that I desire to emphasize is that the profession is mistaken in its belief that only those foods that carry protein in abundance are ideal foods. The fact is, our organisms can build their own proteins from the required elements taken into the system in the simpler forms of food; then, if they are taken in excess in such quantities that retrograde fermentation takes place, the organism will not suffer so greatly from the poison thus generated.

Now for the clincher: The elements set free in the course of the digestion of the simpler foods are in every way as fit for tissue-building as those set free in the digestion of the more complex and highly protein-charged foods, and the risk of overeating and its consequences are almost eliminated.

When the profession learns of the reliability of the simpler foods, and the diminution of risk incurred to health and even life in supplanting the highly complex foods with the simpler, it will be declaring the truth as a recent discovery of modern medical science, and its champions will tell the story in the usual enthusiastic manner.

Eating is not the only menace to the health of children; it is possible for children to have too good a time, to yell too loud and too long, race too fast and too strongly. This is true of nervous children, and often they will become too nervous and tired to sleep. Dr. Hutchinson’s prescription of sending them to bed is the best treatment.

It is a great mistake to believe that good things cannot be overworked. Overindulgence is as great a crime to children as to adults. I am convinced that there are too many don’ts in every child’s life for its good. Mothers should learn to govern without force or coercion of any kind. Children should be strictly governed, but not in a way to be observed, and it should always be done in such a way that the child will not know of it. How? Those parents who fail to see the plan after this suggestion cannot be taught by a magazine description. Every child will need special handling, for there are no two alike.

The doctor’s suggestions regarding the “oddities and crankiness of disposition” are very good:

“Nine times out of ten, however, bad temper, waywardness, fretting, and uncertainty of disposition in children are the symptoms of some disease or disturbance of nutrition. Look well to their appetite, their food, their sleep, their eyes, their ears, their teeth, and you will usually find the cause of their ‘fractiousness’ in some one of these.”

If we are to understand by “look well to their appetites” that we are to feed, feed, feed, I certainly do not agree; but special attention to feeding is required, for if their eyes, ears, and teeth are disturbing them, it will be because the child is infected, either by stuffing the proper food or by being fed unwholesome food.

It is true that in the matter of peculiarities, more than in feeding, play, and sleep are to be looked after. The psychology of parents needs to be understood, and the psychological atmosphere of the home life needs to be corrected, if possible. Too much scolding, fault-finding, and nagging ruins the disposition of thousands of human beings and sends them to a social hell.

I agree with the doctor that “a healthy, growing child is happy most of his waking hours, and looks it.” If he is not happy, he should be looked after. If, however, there should be one hundred writers such as Dr. Hutchinson, all advocating his plan of eating, turned loose on the public, only the innate self-preservation sense of humanity could prevent the entire populace from going to the hospital.

The majority of sensible people will sense the danger of his feeding ideas and will not be influenced by them. Those, however, who really need conservative advice will do as he recommends, and it will not be long until they can take his last advice, namely, call a competent specialist.

All in all, I really believe that this article, of which I have given only a very slight analysis, is one of the very best I have ever seen from the doctor’s pen.

TREATMENT OF SYPHILIS.

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NOSEBLEED

TESTIMONY VS. EVIDENCE.

THE AVERAGE PHYSICIAN AND MEDICAL SOCIETIES

I MEAN YOU.

CONSULTATION.

REBUILDING SALE.

MR. BELL’S HICCUPS.

ROYAL CRIMINOLOGY.

SPUDVILLE PHILOSOPHY.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

SANITATION

WHAT PEOPLE THINK OF A STUFFED CLUB

AMBITION’S REWARD.

The woof and warp of our social system are made up of reward and punishment; growing out of this is a quality called ambition, which is the lash that goads the victim on to reward. The reward is awarded by two judges, human and divine; those who fail to get the reward here may get it hereafter. With the majority of people it is a proposition they must die to beat, and as none of them ever return, the settlement of claims on the other side remains just as much of a question now as it did when mind first awoke. Of course, I am aware that our ethics are built upon this as a settled question, but, my dear reader, is not that exactly what is the matter with our ethics? An assumed truth makes a bad foundation unless it can be proven by analogy not peculiar to one type of mind. So important a subject should be settled by reason, and the best reasoners, not by faith, emotion and hope, or because it must be so to correspond with the mass of human misunderstanding. Our sociology rests upon reward and punishment; growing out of this is an unholy ambition that is fed from without; it gets all its nourishment extrinsic-ally, instead of growing from within. The difference between these two forms of growth is that when it is from within the individual evolves self-sustainment; is sufficient unto himself. The things that are required to make the competing man happy become a burden to the self-sufficient, self-poised individual. The individualist finds his greatest satisfaction in self-development, and there is no self-development equal to helping others to grow—making others happy. Individualism is antidotal to selfishness. Selfishness is a legitimate outgrowth of reward and punishment —competition. The spirit of Christianity and every religion on earth is exactly opposite to selfishness and competition, hence it is a fact that organized religion is positively opposite to the spirit of its pretension. It is my intention in this article to show the curse of competition—of reward and punishment—of ambition. I have watched ambition race for victory ever since I was old enough to understand reward, and I am ready to say it is the Slave Driver of Mental Slavery. I do not make this remark before I have thought long and deeply on both sides, and have weighed well the influence of competition.

Begin in babyhood, the rivalries are of looks, size and quality; conditions that the contestants have no more to do with than they have with breathing. One mother has the heaviest baby; her darling is a regular puff-ball; stuffed until it can’t see out of its eyes; a little lump of animated carbo-hydrogen (fat) that represents more of a pathological product than a physiological. Little does the mother dream that the child must pay in some way for its championship of pounds; nor will she believe that fat babies are more liable to die than lean ones, and that they are more susceptible to contagious diseases; more subject to injury, hip-joint and other diseases, leading to deformity. They make up the majority of dyspeptics in school. By this time, however, those that are left from death’s harvest have grown thin and tall, and their flesh feels soft and flabby, their joints appear relaxed—loose-jointed. Compared with their playmates of the same age, but half their size, the flesh and joints of the latter are solid, and in their sports the little fellows have much more endurance and vastly fewer sick spells. The large child may absorb an education faster—often they are very bright— but unfortunately some are stupid. If care be not given to their diet they may remain stupid and grow into dullards, or break down and die of some chronic disease before or about maturity. If fed strong, harsh food they may grow dull, awkward and make exceedingly common men. A peculiar condition of the stomach may set in that causes them to refuse a certain kind of food, or circumstances may cut them off from a style of eating that was sure to end in confirmed stupidity, and from this point intellect grows. When this change takes place we see what was to end in a dullard end in a man of brains.

In no other way can such a contrast as existed between Abraham Lincoln and his father occur. If it were possible to get at the facts it could be shown that the boy had some peculiar idiosyncrasy for a certain style of eating that the father enjoyed, and which kept him the physical and mental nonentity he was. Those great, big, mysterious incongruities of brains and no brains, saints and sinners, poverty and riches in the same family come simply from a small difference in the style of eating, to start with, the difference being so small it does not attract the attention of anyone. Why? Because of the general ignorance of what is required for body and mind building. At the beginning of life man lives as a vegetable; his life consists of taking nourishment. If this supply is wrong—if an ideal life is not secured, it is because the organism is thrown out of plumb—unison—which must act as a handicap to budding mind. If the mind is prevented from expanding in its budding, does not reason say that this hindrance must affect it throughout life? Environments may be changed to advantage in youth or manhood, but nothing can compensate for mistakes and hindrances to mind growth at the budding period. Remove child hindrances and see men grow into gods.

When the average man sees three varieties of brick he reasonably says the difference is caused by making them out of unlike material, but when he sees three varieties of men he is idiot enough to think they are all made alike, but that the Maker of the Universe wanted to show His power by making a variety out of the same material. Common sense rules work with everything except God and man. There is no such thing as chance. Men are made by fixed rules.

Every parent is proud of an ambitious child. It is watched from the cradle, and every indication of ambition is rewarded and applauded. After babyhood, the next contests are at school and with games which tend to unsettle mind and health. There are many young people dying directly and indirectly from rivalry and contests in schools. The heart gives out in some cases, and in others nutrition is ruined, leading to chronic diseases, of which consumption and neurasthenia are neither last nor least. The great desideratum in securing an education is attention—power of attention; but there is no such thing as forcing it. It is an attribute of health. You cannot keep a healthy child from giving attention; the inability to is due to the fact that the nervous system is drawn off in other directions; perhaps attending to the unloading of some toxic product from the system due to wrong living, wrong eating or sleeping. Possibly fighting the vaccine poison, bad air or a poisonous or incompatible psychical influence of teacher or parents. Oh, God pity the child!

The difference between the competition of babyhood and childhood is that the former is a rivalry of parents, while in the latter volitional ambition—self—begins to appear. From this on the individual, if he is entitled to be dubbed ambitious, is growing more and more in competition with the world. It is the individual against the world, except where a few can agree to come together and pool their interests. The struggle from school to the grave is to reach a standard, and if it cannot be reached the sine qua non is to convince the world that it has been. Many expend as much nerve force in an attempt to prove a false attainment as would be required to make the standard. This requires discipline, and to become a successful fraud is to subject the nervous system to a schooling in abnormal, disease-provoking impulses that pervert the physiological functioning and cause various chronic nervous diseases. Business and social standards are raised that are shams, but so long as those interested can keep the fraud from being known it is legitimate and all right; if it ends in a so-called success it is ideal and standard, even if it evaporates like a June frost in the hands of the victimized. Ninety-five percent, go to the bottom in an attempt to succeed. Five percent, succeed for the time being; reap a short and uncertain success. If there are a small percent, of the successful five percent, who make their success without, possibly, outraging their conscience, they must suffer from contact and must bear their share of the general injustice coming from the prevailing business methods.

Ambition is a desire to win the approval of those whose opinion the world recognizes as authority. Remove popular opinion and no individual will struggle for display, and it is a desire for show and display that works all the disaster to the contestants.

Look at what the world calls success! Is it a success for a man who could live to be 125 or 150 to die between 6O and 75? Yes, from 35, 40 to 65. The greater age could be realized if men would become self-centered—sufficient unto themselves. When the world stops working for show and works for self; when man learns to know that this function is the highest possible self-development, and that it is diametrically opposite to the methods on which the ambition of today rests, then man will be in a position to place success on a foundation that is not dependent upon the whims and caprice of reward; reward will be growth. Look at the fortunes and lives that go down and out prematurely. Look at the instability of ambition’s reward based upon present-day methods. If one fails to get what he or his friends imagine is his just recompense, he can have a hope that the readjustment in a future state will make up the loss. This is a good promise to hold out to slaves, and, in fact, is a fraudulent promise, manufactured by the selfish, opulent class, when time was young, to enable them to bind men into slavery. “Servants, obey your masters” was never written by God, nor by servants, but by those who wished to be obeyed. When that was written it meant more than it does now.

Many have died suffering the sting of injustice, yet happy in the hope of future compensation. This is as it should be; a system would not be complete without some provision for injustice, and the promise of future reward is in keeping with a false and fraudulent system, for it can’t be proven erroneous to a mind capable of accepting the plan, and in this way its victims can at least die happy, even if their whole lives have been fraudulently usurped by injustice.

Under our competitive-reward system, life is a struggle; it matters not if the individual is honest or not; if he is, he will be compelled to use dishonest methods, and the end will be the same.

How many are allowed to close their eyes in death without first seeing the idol of their ambition crushed? From the world point of view Henry Ward Beecher lived long enough to see the reward of his ambition melt before his eyes. If he was not self-centered he must get his reward post mortem or not at all. He lives today as a study for those who would select the best type of manhood. Theodore Tilton, one of the brightest men, and one of the best-polished forum diamonds I ever had the pleasure of listening to, went out like a meteor. A living oblivion engulfed him. Ambition forced him into a fatal mistake, and the injustice that made him unmade him in much less time. Grant, the man that history will tower above the heads of all previous generals, was not allowed to go out of the world without seeing his reward tarnished by the injustice that made him. It is to he hoped he was self-centered or had enough superstition to make his last moments, which moments we must all spend to ourselves, happy with contentment.

Horace Greeley, America’s grand old man, died of a broken heart. He had earned reward from an unjust system, and then had it ruthlessly torn from him at the close of life. Samuel Tilden’s life was hurriedly ended by the greatest disappointment of his life.

The glorious career of the obscure boy from Corsica ended in exile at St. Helena. The injustice that built him also killed him at the early age of 53. Cancer was said to be the disease that ended his life. What is cancer? Perverted ambition and passion fed and nourished by our unholy reward system. Many women suffer and die of cancer. I have noted that they are ambitious, passionate and emotional; never self-centered. They live for the world, their secretions are transformed into disease-producing elements. Milton’s end was pitiable. Beside the “drop serene” he lived to see the defeat of the principles he had represented, also to suffer arrest and have two of his books publicly burned. He is a large factor in helping to build men and women to-day, yet his life went out in failure.

Bacon, one of the greatest of English minds, suffered defeat to all public ambition before he died, but we have reason to hope that he was sufficient unto himself. A man who can write on the threshold of his career: “They have nothing at the universities but to believe. They are like a becalmed ship; they never move but by the wind of other men’s breath, and have no oars of their own to steer withal,” should be self-centered, so that to be exiled from political reward would have no power to disturb. His political fame was turned to the wall and this was written on the back: “He spent the remainder of his days in scientific study and among a few friends whom adversity had left him.” In studying that great mind we can hope that ambition did not rob it of its reward at the end. Parnell belongs to the now, the complete failure of the reward of his ambition is known to all. His life can be written: bright and glorious, with as pronounced a failure at the end. We need not call upon the past to bear witness to the failure of ambition’s reward, for we can see it on every hand every day.

The daily papers have just chronicled the double tragedy in the Ford family of Brooklyn, NY. The failure of the successful life of Gordon Leicester Ford was confirmed when he left his $2,000,000 to be divided among five children, cutting off the sixth. That crime culminated in the murder of Paul Leicester Ford and the suicide (murder) of Malcolm Ford. This is the curse of money when it is made to be of more value than the individual. The elder Ford’s failure became marked when the sixth of his wealth became more valuable than one of his children. I cannot imagine a son so low that dollars could rank above him. The curse of this failure will, must go on and on; where can it end?

Sixty-three is the grand climacteric age of man. Given ordinary vital force, this is the beginning of the western slope, just across the divide. Life is a failure when it must end at this age. This abrupt termination of life at its center belongs to the regime of the competitive system —the rewarding of ambition. One issue of the daily papers in the beginning of May reported the death of six distinguished men who died at 62 years of age or less. Rear Admiral Sampson, 62; Bret Harte, 62; Archbishop Corrigan, 62; Mr. Cummings, of New York, 61; Mr. Otey, of Virginia, 62; Mr. Salmon, 56.

Rear Admiral Sampson was killed by the forces that made him. Bret Harte lived to see his constitution wrecked from overwork twenty years before. The church must answer for Archbishop Corrigan’s death. No better evidence can be given that the church and what it teaches is a failure, than to see a man die in his prime. Altgeld, one of the most remarkable men of the century, was caught in the maelstrom of politics and crushed. A system is fatally wrong when the only way to escape injustice, abuse, and enjoy mental and physical freedom is to die.

Under our social system it is said that according to ambition’s estimate only five percent, of lives are a success in the business world, it is doubtful, from the same estimate, if one percent, of those engaged in the professions, arts and sciences are a success, and, of course, all below these are failures, leaving, of the whole human family, a small fraction of one percent, a success. How about this small percent? How many are allowed to close their eyes in death on a success? If allowed to live beyond the years of business capacity, or even long before that, are there not many made to understand that the sooner they get off the earth the better, and that, too, by their own flesh and blood? This is legitimate; it is the reward of unholy ambition. How many are brought to the grave in disgrace from habits that could be covered in the years of their best discretion? How many fail to die before some disgraceful sharp practice, performed early in life, and was the foundation of their wealth, is uncovered? Most will have to die very early if the skeletons they have stored in their closets do not reincarnate and walk out before them to herd them into their graves in disgrace. This being painfully too true, why shall not the victims of such a damnable social system advocate a future compensation, for how or where is happiness to be found? The fear of the coming of failure ruins this life. Then why shall not the doomed look for happiness somewhere? This false hope springing up in the breasts of the fugitives from justice is the material out of which heaven is made.

Analyze success, reader, and if you can make anything but failure out of it, it is because you are living in the imaginative. Success is always to be; it never is. Heaven is the same. Why? Because we have evolved a wrong course to pursue it. Success is within the man. Self-development will lead to the death of selfishness; unholy ambition will die; its offspring, injustice, be no more; then heaven will be a reality, and not before.

Do you say this is ideal, impossible—the vaporing of a fool? I point you back to your ideal of reward and punishment, a heaven in space—no one knows where—and the hell of injustice that results from it, your God that knows all, and loves all, and damns all, and ask you which is the bigger fool, you or I?

NOSEBLEED

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PERSISTENT SPASMS

DR. SULLIVAN FOR VACCINATION.

DR. WILDER THINKS FOR HIMSELF.

A DROP IN THE BUCKET.

SIXTEEN MILLION TO ONE.

HERB GEORGE.

ADVERTISING.

CONSULTATION BY LETTER.

THE STUFF-TO-KILLERS AND THEIR FAD.

THE germ theory has the proud distinction of being the backbone of the “regular” practice of medicine, and it also has the advantage of being too intricately woven into chemistry to be popularized to any great extent. If there is anything on earth more favorable to the fostering of superstition on the masses than a theory of disease intricately lost in the maze of speculative science, I do not know what it is, unless it is a theory of religion that requires faith, not reason, to accept it.

The dominant school is fast approaching the time when it will call upon our lawmakers to put a law upon our statute books compelling everyone to submit to inoculation or injection of virus or antitoxins for every imaginable disease. Individual rights are ignored today, regarding vaccination, to a degree that is disgusting and nauseating to a liberty-loving, self-respecting freeman. The disgraceful, criminal coercion that has been practiced this winter by employers in some of our larger institutions, urged and forced by health officers, is an earnest of what the public may look for when the “regular” profession gets the grip that it is working for, on the people.

It will be a desirable world to live in when the hungry medical profession can do as it likes with the dear people, “I don’t think.” It may be well to tell the dear people-the people whom our doctors are bleeding and dying to save from themselves-why they are so solicitous about them. You may think it is because they want to save you from dying from the dread diseases. If it is, why do they arrange with the undertaker for a commission and the druggist for a rakeoff? If they are so solicitous about public health, why do they not spend a little time educating the people out of the bad habits that are at the bottom of ninety-five percent of all sickness? I speak advisedly when I say they do not. I have been in this city for eleven years, and I have yet the first person to call upon me who knows as much as a seven-year-old boy should know of how to take care of his health, yet he has been cared for and advised by these same eminently qualified guardian angels of health. I have patients coming to me from the very élite, and the more élite the doctor, the more profound is the mental lack of the patient. I have quite respectable people coming to me at times, and I am amazed to find that they do not know enough of health laws to pound sand in a rat hole, yet they have been under the advice of men who are just dying to force health upon the public. I know it is a quite common remark, with scientific physicians, that “it is not a physician’s place to educate the people”-”that life is too short to spend time in an attempt to enlighten the people”-”they should not know anything about the practice of medicine.” I admit that the people, and the physicians too, are as well off not to know much that is called medical science.

The truth is that the profession is overcrowded; there are ten times as many physicians as can make a decent living, and as the devil finds work for idle hands to do, the work in this case is agitation and a determined effort to coerce everything in sight and at the same time play the virtuous racket to the grandstand. I am high and dry out of the sectarian mud-puddle, and I take a view occasionally, as a diversion from work, into the great seething caldron where the microbe dieth not, and the thirst for power is not quenched. Where will it end? I don’t know. It is to be desired that the people will become well enough informed to take care of themselves; if they do not, they must expect to be coerced and driven like slaves. The common sense of the people is the only antidote to professional bigotry. The “regular” school of medicine, on account of its superior numbers, has succeeded in becoming the recognized authority, recognized by state and nation, not because of its potency for good, but because of its potency for numerical strength. It has failed utterly to establish any of its past claims for drug medication, and follows drugging now because of habit, and to make a show of doing something when called upon. Its medication has changed with the seasons, and druggists have been sorely tried in their endeavor to close out stock before the fashion changed. This is called science-this is a sample of science, the science that would control the going and coming of the dear people regarding their health, and the advocates of this chameleon therapeutics have the nerve to strut before the public and arrogate to themselves superiority and priority; ah! even exclusiveness. With all its changes, there is one thing it sticks to in season and out of season, and that is vaccination. The reason for this is that smallpox is gradually becoming extinct, a fate that comes to all exotic diseases, for it is a law of nature. In its decline in virulence lies the hope and success of the advocates of vaccination. Most of the smallpox this winter has been hard to differentiate from chicken pox, and I am satisfied that more harm has been sustained by the public from vaccination than from smallpox.

The people are not prepared to look upon this subject with a comprehensive and general view; their experiences are of a minor and circumscribed nature. One or two endemics furnish the layman with about all the knowledge he ever has, and shortsighted physicians often base all the knowledge they have upon such proof. Knowledge is worth nothing unless it is general and freed from selfish interest. Fifty or a hundred dollars earned vaccinating the dear people every winter is quite enough to earn the vote of an average plug doctor for compulsory vaccination. Consider the vaccine farms with their distributing depots all over the country; the druggists everywhere, who are always in favor of the doctor who writes the most prescriptions; the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the business, then add the professional ignorance, chicanery and selfishness to all these various interests, and there is no wonder at the fallacious idea that vaccine protects. Put enough money and selfishness in any fallacy, and it can live in spite of hell and high water. Take into consideration the opposition: What is it? Unselfishness. A man who will not vaccinate and refuses to take the fee, which must go to someone (for the law is behind the victim, who must be protected), is recognized by the world as a nincompoop. A man who will stand on conscience and oppose an established custom is not in good standing in medical societies, and a man who is not in good standing in medical societies, is not in good standing before the bar of justice, his opinion is not worth anything as a witness, his oath is either a lie or he is a fanatic and his evidence is worthless. Men who are engaged in fighting the vaccination fallacy are performing a thankless task. There is not a dollar in it, and the people whom they would protect join with the selfish professional mob in branding them as fools, ignoramuses, and crack-brains.

I started to say something about germs, or the germ theory, but as vaccination is in line with the germ fallacy, I am not far off the track. The “regular” school and some of the others advocate the germ theory. This science teaches that disease is caused by germs and the only treatment is to destroy the little mites.

The theory runs something like this: The germs gain a foothold in the body and generate a poison known as toxins; when the toxins are set free, the symptoms produced are those of loss of appetite, headache, fever, pains and aches, stupor, and unconsciousness. It is claimed that the white blood corpuscles resist the invasion of the germs, and not until they are overpowered by the germs and their toxins do they at last succumb to the enemy, and disease takes possession of the body. It is also declared that, in addition to the fight of defense given by the white blood cells, a tolerance has evolved on the part of the system, and lastly, there is a chemical change in the toxins that destroys their toxic effect. In other words, by a hocus pocus, presto change, now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t, the microbes lift themselves by their boot-straps and dump themselves out of the body after they have succeeded in taking possession of it. This is on the order that the more powerful an enemy becomes, the weaker it gets.

It is to be understood that these germs multiply rapidly. It is supposed that they divide every hour. One is capable under a favorable environment to evolve in three days an incalculable number, the weight of which is estimated at 75,000 tons. It’s a good thing that the human body is not favorable to such enormous propagation, for a corpse would be a more weighty matter on the hands of the health board than it now proves to be. We might have such results in some cases if the commissary of subsistence was not a little shy on stores, for the stuff- to-kill doctor is often heard to advise his patient: “Eat all you can; you must literally stuff yourself.”

The theory summed up is this: Create immunization against disease by feeding disease.

It is known that a person can begin by taking small doses of any poison and by gradually increasing the dose a time will come when tolerance has been created so that a dose that would have proven fatal at the start can be taken now with impunity.

We see this in the morphine fiend, the drunkard, and the grub stuffer.

A man can eat and eat and eat until he is not happy unless he is stuffing all the time. It is true that he does develop a tolerance. He can evolve such a stuffing habit that he can eat enough at one meal to kill him if he were in a normal condition. These cases do not die at once, but not one ever lives out half his life expectancy. The drunkard evolves such a toleration for whisky that he can stand up and do business after taking a quantity that would have killed him at first. The morphine fiend can take a quantity that would kill ten men innocent of the habit. All this granted, is it desirable to develop chronic invalidism to ward off sickness?

I will admit that a man can take germs or their toxin and develop a great toleration for them, but is it desirable to take a poison until the poison can’t kill per se, but leaves as a result a diseased body that can’t live out its time? Kings of old were known to develop a tolerance for all kinds of poisons so as to be immune to the dose liable to be administered by the would-be regicide. Kings, by the way, have not been noted for longevity.

Space will not permit a description of how antitoxins are prepared, but it is safe to believe that the most favorable thing about these remedies is that through the refining process in their preparation they are left without much potency for harm; in fact, I’m inclined to think that suggestion is about all the therapeutic virtue, if there is any, and the cures can be claimed by our suggestive therapeutic friends.

The germ theory advocates believe in producing immunization by inoculation and injecting antitoxins into the system. Every organism has a natural resisting power; anything that tears this resisting power down puts the system into a susceptible state for being influenced by external influences as well as internal ones. I contend that every man is sick before germs can gain a foothold. The sickness is brought on by breaking the laws of health. An attack of sickness is a reaction, an attempt to throw off an offending something. It may be food poisoning. Every reaction proceeds to a state of equilibrium with a definite reaction velocity. It is possible to imagine a reaction against such odds that an equilibrium for health cannot be hoped for, but in the ordinary attacks of disease, the life forces of the system are able to throw off and reinstate the equilibrium. If the disease has been induced by an overtaxed digestive organ, the result is decomposition, which is marked by a turning loose of germs, for what is decomposition but a hatching of an army of germs. The only reason an army of germs is not turned loose in the system at every meal is that the power to digest is sufficient to carry the food through the process known as digestion. If no food is taken, there can be no decomposition; if no more is taken than can be used up by the digestive power, no decomposition (germ hatching) takes place. The germ theory advocates declare that the antitoxin injected into a given case antidotes the disease, and they compile statistics to prove their claim, but who, with any experience, is willing to accept the statistics of a prejudiced observer? The advocates of the antitoxin fad will not accept Mrs. Eddy’s declaration that hundreds of thousands have been cured by Christian Science. I believe that Christian Science has cured some and antitoxin has cured some, in the sense that all cures are made. A red flannel shirt was once known to cure smallpox, an heir apparent to the throne of England, and the cure was made by the same school of medicine that now declares vaccine controls smallpox. In every age, this same dominant, authoritative, exclusive, only school of medicine has had its specific remedies, which proved not to be remedies, which it desired to force on the public by law.

These same advocates of the germ theory admit that germs are everywhere and that no one is free from them. They also know, if they know anything, that nothing can be free from them unless the air is excluded. To see the bug-spooked doctor wash his hands, and prepare his dressing, and scrub his patient, and go through hair-splitting details in preparing and carrying out an operation with the belief that his operation will be devoid of germ contamination, is too ridiculous to be true. The air in and out of the patient, the very tissues of the patient’s body, the air exhaled by the operator, and fluids and solids of his body are full of germs. There is but one way to have a germless operation, and that is to put the surgeon, his patient, and assistants into a vat and boil them, then have the vehicle hermetically sealed. If the operation can then take place, there is hope of a germless operation. This same germ-spooked surgeon will never learn that his patient must be prepared for operation by cutting the food supply down to where there will be no question regarding the power of the system to utilize all nourishment given, so that there will be none left to drop into a state of degeneration. If the patient is prepared in this way for a few weeks, if enough time be given to drive out the germs that are on hand-with which all diseased people are filled unless especially prepared-then an operation can be prepared with hope of success, not because of a germless operation, but because the patient’s system can take care of all that gain an entrance or are already in the system. Why do the most painstaking operators lose cases from septic infection? Of course, in their reports, there are no fatalities admitted, unless occasionally one is reported who dies from shock, too far gone to stand the operation. No first-class surgeon ever loses a case by operation except those cases that have gone too far to be saved. There are no cases of septic infection, oh, no! People die of shocks, heart failure, kidney failure, and all kinds of failures except aseptic failure, and an operation that is a failure. Before the days of germs and germicides, we are told that patients died of blood poisoning—septic infection, but now, what a difference! People die just the same; no grass can grow between our surgical wards and the boneyard, but the deaths are due to unavoidable causes. The surgeon can cut a patient teeming with decomposition from one end to the other, a condition of the body that can’t possibly get well because of the stuffing dyscrasia—yet the professional murder is justifiable because the operation is done according to the latest antiseptic methods. I have seen people taken to our hospitals who could have lived for fifty years before the disease that gave an excuse for operation would have killed them, and the result would be death in one to five days. What is the excuse for such murder? A good fee, sometimes a very small one (it’s surprising how cheap murder can be bought), a little glory. Patients are told they can’t live six months, or they are frightened in some way. A man who will lie about the number of cases he has operated upon and the number he has lost, will lie about anything else, and will not hesitate to lie to a patient, if in doing so he can force an operation.

Statistics of results in the use of vaccines and antitoxins are made to lie. A physician is called to see a sore throat, pronounces it diphtheria, and antitoxin is used on the patient and also on five or six other children. All are reported saved by the antitoxin. If this is not a lie, will the faddist tell us why just such results were seen before he and his antitoxin were ever heard of? The antitoxin was introduced into this city at the decline of a severe epidemic (endemic would possibly be a better term). The time will come when antitoxin and its advocates will have to juggle with the returns more than they do now to make a good showing.

Germs are everywhere, except in our sealed jars and cans, and sometimes in them, and when they are, they are liable to cause trouble. If the food happens to be canned meat, death may follow the eating of it. If a patient can be washed with antiseptic fluids and put into a sweet, germless condition without boiling and sealing up, why do we have to be so careful with our food products? Is there an old lady, male or female, who would undertake to can fruit or any kind of food and trust the process to a little washing with antiseptics? My dear people, it’s all the same. Your doctor will dispute what I say, but he is either ignorant or dishonest. Germicides, antiseptics, and surgeons with clean hands but rotten breaths will not save us. The way to overcome germs is to not come under them. After we have been indiscreet and are suffering from an oversupply, what is best to do? Kill them? If you are successful in killing germs, the patient will die. The best way is to stop feeding them. Stop feeding the sick man; if you do not, you will feed the germs. The sickness is a battle royal on the part of the sick body in an effort to expel germs. When the battle is on, nutrition (building up) and waste (throwing off) are suspended. The building up is positively suspended; the excretory organs are doing some work, but not full work. Every process is directed to the one supreme effort of getting rid of an enemy. The body is in a state of siege; all the food that the cells of the body need is in the stored-up tissues; the invading army of germs has cut loose from its base of supplies, and it cannot live on forage, for this source of supply is hotly contested by the besieged army of cells. The only hope for sufficient food for the invading army of germs is from without, and the stuff-to-kill doctors are their allies. These enemies to the sick man urge feeding, and in this way, and this only, can the germs maintain their siege. The advocates of the germ theory—the stuff-to-kill doctors—are forever making great pretensions with their antiseptics as germ killers, but the truth is they hatch 10,000,000 for every one they kill. Every particle of food taken into the system before it has had time to expel the germ invaders serves as food for germs, but never food for the sick man. A very sick man has but little show against his disease and a stuff-to-kill doctor. Nature can throw off all diseases if not handicapped by being filled with food that must decompose and turn loose a fresh supply of germs. If a man cannot get well without food, he surely can’t with it, for under such circumstances, disease is fed and not the sick man.

The germ theory of disease is a fallacy; the antitoxin treatment is a fad that will soon join Koch’s consumption cure, Elixir of Life, and thousands of other cures in the gulf of oblivion. While we are waiting for its passing, there will be thousands of its victims who will go before it. Every “great remedy” paves its way to oblivion by the bodies of its victims—such appears to be the fate of progress. Don’t feed germs, and they will die. I will not say don’t feed the sick, for they cannot be fed, the opinions of the stuff-to-kill doctors to the contrary notwithstanding.

Since writing the above article, my attention has been called to the imperious, dictatorial, arrogant manner in which some member of our health board has acted regarding vaccination. One young lady, a clerk at Daniels & Fisher’s, refused to be vaccinated. She was told by the health officer that she must resign her clerkship or be vaccinated. She signified her willingness to give up her position sooner than have his rot scratched into her arm. Nothing daunted, this usurper of individual rights informed her that he would then quarantine her boarding house. All this assumed authority was exercised upon a person who had not been exposed to the smallpox.

I gave two young ladies certificates stating that they were not in physical condition to be vaccinated (assuming that there is a proper physical condition). My certificates were ignored, and the girls were compelled to be vaccinated because they could not go back on their bread and butter.

I now have a patient in bed, prostrated from a sickness that was on her at the time of vaccination. She was forced to be vaccinated or quit her job. One of the two to whom I gave certificates told me that the health officer informed her that if Dr. Tilden had not had so much to say about vaccination, he would not have forced her to be vaccinated. That is the first time I knew that I had been talking overmuch. I had the impression that I was too busy to do much meddling in other people’s affairs. I usually speak my mind if asked. No credit due, by the way, either, to such public pap-suckers, for if they had their wish in the matter, every man with an opinion in opposition to theirs would be muzzled. If I had as much time as little two-by-four chasers of phantom epidemics have, and had their inclination, I could rally the anti-vaccination forces in this city and wipe out usurpation. The opposition is scattered; there is no unity. Many suffer the outrages of bullying officers rather than go to the trouble of asserting their rights. The people are long-suffering, but the time always comes when the dogs of oppression must be called off, and Denver has pretty nearly reached that time.

PERSISTENT SPASMS

“I was called in consultation with Dr. Lewis of Driggs, Arkansas, to see a child, then four days old, having spasms. Dr. L. had attended the mother at confinement and said ‘nothing happened out of the ordinary.’ Lt. oc. ant. position. Mother was young, hearty, and this was her third birth. During the early months of pregnancy was in a bad state of health; sharp pains in the upper part of the chest, a dry hacking cough, and was extremely nervous. Nothing in the line of medication seemed to do any good. As the husband was hearty and vigorous, the doctor suggested sexual abstinence; thereupon, improvement took place. Nervousness, cough, and pains all gone in a short time, and when confinement came, she was the picture of health.

I have given this little history as what it relates may have had some bearing upon the nervous system of the child, at least we think so. For two days after the birth of the child, nothing went wrong. Seemed in every respect like other children. Appetite good, bowels and kidneys acting normally, and sleep was neither wakeful nor nervous. The mother thought she had allowed the child to nurse too much on the third day. Abdomen puffed up, belched often but no vomiting; pulse only slightly increased in frequency, temperature 101, child restless. In a few hours, spasms came on. Dr. Lewis was called, and thinking the trouble was due to ingesta, gave

The foregoing case is a hummer for “specific medicines.” My good friends, just think of using all these drugs in a child less than a week old. I tell you when a fellow stops long enough to think of the pace struck by most of us fresh from college, in compounding drugs for the human stomach, or in giving single drugs but a half a dozen at a time, at stated intervals, we have no excuse to point the finger of scorn, or wrap the cloak of superiority about us when viewing the superstitions of the less fortunate world. The eclectic school puts great stress on “specific conditions”—in prescribing “specific” remedies for “specific” conditions. I know from personal experience that this specific hallucination is as good, if not a little better, than any other individualized system of practice. But if a man ever lives long enough to get over the craze, he will look back with a smile over his life under the spell of “specific” hallucination. In criticizing others with the same inane delusion, his criticism will be shorn of its bitterness by a commiseration born of a tenderness coming from a knowledge that the theory was once his own. That it is a craze and a fallacy there is no doubt, but how many of the 50,000, more or less, who cling to it, will believe it, is hard to say. It will not be hard to guess that the majority will set me down as an ass, a proposition I shall agree with them on, if I may define the reason. My reason will not be because I can and will think, but because I do not have enough sense to keep my thoughts to myself. The process of evolving out of a fallacy comes largely from within the individual, not from without. It is a thankless task to undertake to point a better road to the mental traveler after he has once got well on his way. The bulk of mankind keeps in the groove it falls into in youth; if one rolls out, it is more from accident than innate wisdom. I have long been convinced that one man is not smarter than another, with but few exceptions (and I am a little skeptical of late about the exceptions); it is a question of environment. The “specific drugs” of the eclectic school, as put up by the Lloyds of Cincinnati, Ohio, are the best drugs I have ever seen, and I was raised in a drugstore before I graduated as a physician. There are no drugs used by physicians that can be so thoroughly relied upon. When these remedies are put in the hands of a young man trained in the symptomatology and so-called “specific conditions,” as taught in the eclectic colleges of this country, he is formidable for the representative of any other system of drugs to meet. And as success is reckoned from a sectarian standpoint, the well-trained eclectic does not have to take his hat off to the representative of any other system on earth. With myself delivered of this truth, I want to get next to the tommy-rot of prescribing for so-called conditions. If there is anything on earth the eclectic physician really hates, it is to be accused of symptom-shooting. He likes the dignified term of shooting at conditions. In the little patient above referred to, what was the condition? I don’t know, but there was not a single prescription given for a condition—it was all symptom-shooting. The case was prescribed specifically, all will admit, for all the remedies were “specific.” Lovers of specific medication do not appear to realize that specific medication has as many specific failures as specific cures. Most specific medicationists are stone-blind to their failures; they cannot see, nor can they remember their failures. They see and remember their successes only. Doctors, generally, are color-blind to everything except the one idea and things that point favorably to it. If a case gets well after taking a favorite prescription, the result is applauded and dignified beyond reason, but when a failure follows, it fails to receive the critical consideration it should; consequently, there has grown a lopsidedness to such physicians’ logic that ruins them as close observers. The hundreds of times that a prescription is made with no results, and is followed by a change of remedies that meets the same failure, are passed without being given any special attention; but the instant there is a change for the better, there is an exaggerated idea that the last prescription did it. This we must expect from the ignoramus and the faith-curers who have no well-grounded idea of cause and effect, but for graduated physicians-men who are supposed to have the first principles of the science of medicine well drilled into them, it is inexcusable. Most sick people will get well whether prescribed for or not, but as it is customary to consult a physician or healer, or take some kind of a cure-all, few have an opportunity to get well before taking a prescription of some kind. Of course, after taking the remedy, they get well, which is all the proof they ask for that it was due to the remedy, and the truth is that the remedy had nothing to do with the recovery. Whole systems of practice are based on just this kind of foundation. Colossal fortunes have been built by patent medicine men because of this one idiotic spot in man’s power to reason. It is so silly that it looks as though it should belong to a country that boasts of fewer advancements than we do.

To make a fortune in this country today, all that is needed is water and salt as the remedy; then bottle it up, taking pains to have fine bottles and striking labels, then spend $10,000 in write-ups with our leading dailies; send a complimentary half-dozen bottles of the cure-all to the leading ministers, judges, and politicians, and even doctors. In one year, it will take the whole of one of our daily papers to print the certificates of cures that have been effected, all the way from the President of the United States down to the common, everyday police judges. Of course, our police judges ought to know a good medicine when they are called upon to pass judgment upon crime. This looks a little ridiculous on paper, but it is of yearly occurrence. The mind of man is exceedingly undulating; if your view of it only strikes the high places, it is imposing, but when you examine the low altitudes, it strikes a level that takes in the idiot. Indeed, the idiot is our brother, and we should treat him well, if for no other reason than that he has much in common with ourselves.

The number of cases requiring skillful judgment to be relieved or cured is excessively in the minority and does not count much in the sum total. If this were not true, the great army of ignoramuses, unskilled visionaries, mountebanks, and scientific know-nothings, who now succeed in maintaining a reputation and making a living from the profession, would break down and drift into other pursuits.

An experienced thinking physician cannot attach much faith to a remedy just because of a favorable change taking place soon after its administration, for, if he has had much experience, he can offset the favorable result by an unfavorable one under quite similar circumstances. I make this statement fearless of a successful refutation by any and all drug or mind-cure advocates. The reason for this uncertainty is the fact that the theory and remedies as applied belong to negative principles. Why should anyone expect favorable results from the prescriptions given in the above-reported case of “persistent spasms”? The doctor did not have the slightest idea as to the cause of the spasms. Will our specific medicationists say that he prescribed medication for conditions? What conditions? Spasms? Spasms were only symptoms. It is hard to guess what killed the child—probably the drugs helped. I have had similar cases. Paralysis and idiocy are liable to follow if such children do not die. It would be a good thing for children and parents if all such cases were to die, if spasms continue to cause disorganization of the nerve center. I will relate a case in mind. Several years ago, a gentleman called at my office and requested that I go at once to his house to see his baby, a child less than three weeks old. “When you get there,” said he, “you will be the seventh doctor who has been in attendance on the child in the past ten days, and none of them have been successful in checking the spasms it has been having day and night in all that time.” The time was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, just the beginning of my office hours. Not feeling greatly flattered at the idea of being seventh choice, I said to the man “Inasmuch as your child has withstood six doctors and ten days of convulsions, I think it will keep for at least two hours more; this is the beginning of my office hours; I shall not call until after they are over, which will be two hours from now.” He protested, but I was obdurate. I called and found a Klondike atmosphere awaiting me. I had to help myself to a chair; in fact, everything was tacitly done, that could be, to make me know that I was not welcome, but I am the embodiment of obtuseness when I want to be, and this was one of the times. I sat down about six feet from where the mother sat with the sick child on her lap; it was having a convulsion. As soon as the fit passed off, the woman I took to be the baby’s grandmother left the room; as she did so she beckoned a young man as she went out and he followed her. They were not gone long until the young man returned and squared himself in front of me and said, “Doctor, you did not come when we sent for you, so we employed another physician. We can dispense with your services.” I answered, “All right. I shall watch the child for a while if it does not cost too much.” My indifference to his bouncing manner caused all to subside, and I was left without further molestation to please myself about how long I stayed or how soon I went. I watched the child through three convulsions. They were short but decisive and quite regular in their recurrence, about six in each hour. I noted the mother’s appearance and fancied I could see evidence of a slight septic infection. When I made ready to go, I remarked to the mother, “If you will quit nursing the child from your breasts, the convulsions will stop within six hours, never to return.” The mother did not have much love for me—for I do not do much wooing. People need a stuffed club oftener, and the family had been enjoying the luxury of a professional skill built upon the Chesterfieldian plan, and I love to break monotony as well as idols, so I had not used my skill, if I have any, in flattering or currying favor. She answered quite pertly, “I shall never do that.” I responded, “As you please; I shan’t charge you anything for it.” The next day at the same hour, just as the day before, the father of the child called and requested me to go again to see the baby, “for,” said he, “the last doctor has done no good and says the child will die.” I told him I would go after my office hours, provided he would promise not to run another doctor in ahead of me. After finding that he could not induce me to go sooner, he left, promising to wait for me. I called and found the case much as it was the day before. I began my examination by asking the mother some questions about herself. She quickly informed me that I had been sent for to see the baby and not her. I thanked her for disabusing my mind of a wrong impression, but added that it would be necessary to examine into the baby’s food supply, and I should not do justice to the child unless I investigated her a little. She gratuitously informed me that there was nothing the matter with her, that her health was perfect; to prove which she pointed to two children, two and four years of age, that I readily saw and acknowledged were pictures of health. “But,” I said, “they were born under other conditions; you were healthier with these two than you are with this one.” I suggested that she had received a laceration at the birth of this child, and that she had, and was now suffering a sub-acute blood poisoning, and the poison was being nursed by the child, which was the cause of the convulsions. This she hotly and ignorantly disputed and refused to allow me to verify my opinion by an examination. She did, however, reluctantly permit an examination after I positively declined to prescribe for the case unless she did. I found quite a tear and a sensitive condition, along with the slight odor common to such cases. I then proscribed all feeding for eighteen hours, and prescribed artificial feeding after that time. The mother quickly informed me that she would not take the child from her breast. I had been annoyed to exasperation by the ignorant stupidity of the woman, and my escape valve flew off, and I said, “Madam, I was called here as a physician to see this child. I intend to have my say. Please do not annoy me any further. I shall tell you the best treatment for your baby, after which you can follow my instructions or not, just as you please. When I am gone, you can knock it in the head with a hatchet so far as I am concerned.” It has been said, by people who were there, that I interlarded a few choice expletives. Possibly—I never deny anything. I’d rather be proven a sinner than to fasten a lie on the teller of a good story. The father held the mother pretty level, and my instructions were carried out. The convulsions ceased within six hours, and everything ran along nicely for seventy-two hours. When the convulsions returned, I was again sent for. I accused the mother of nursing the babe; she declared that she had not, but I have long since ceased to believe anything, unless I know it, that a mother tells me about the care of her own child. The convulsions stopped, and there was no more trouble with the baby. The fact that the child had no more fits proved to me that the mother satisfied herself that her milk was the cause, and from the return of the fits, she allowed her milk to dry up without further experiment.

I had a similar case where the mother could not be convinced until she brought the convulsions back three times.

I have had quite a number of similar cases within the range of my observation that ended in idiocy. The convulsions were not controlled soon enough, or the effect of the septic poison was so great as to produce some disorganization of the nerve centers.

One very interesting case comes to mind—that of a healthy child, nothing extraordinary about the birth, the mother had a good getting-up, and the child was normal in every way. The nurse used carbolized vaseline to dress the cord; it produced excoriation around the navel; on this excoriation, the decomposing stump of a cord was bound, and the child was thrown into severe convulsions. When I had the nurse strip the child for examination, she took everything off except the abdominal binder; this I insisted on being removed; when it was, the excoriation was seen, and the odor from the rotting cord told the story. This poor child was ruined for life, for it has not grown mentally.

Young children are often thrown into convulsions by indigestion, and if it is not corrected, the fits may continue; if the fits do not continue, the irritation may and disturb the nutrition of the brain or spinal cord, retarding the mental and physical development. These cases can be cured by the proper food in the proper amounts, if fatal disorganization has not occurred.

It does not matter what produces the fits—poison from septic absorption in the mother’s milk, or food in improper amounts, quality, or frequency—all can be corrected by removing the cause and keeping all food, of any kind, out of the system until the nervous system adjusts itself; then feed right. I would like to know what drugs have to do with such a case. Talk about specific medication—it is a superstition. In children’s diseases, drugging is inexcusable ignorance. I mean just what I say and do not except the so-called contagious diseases.

DR. SULLIVAN FOR VACCINATION.

Dr. J. H. Tilden: Dear Sir—I enclose 20 cents for the February and March issues of A Stuffed Club. If the editor’s paranoia remains stationary, I may then become a permanent subscriber. In the January issue, he has reached a very interesting stage, where all the people (especially college-made doctors) are fools, i. e., not heterogeneous, and “me und Gott” are all the people that are onto our jobs, with the partial exception of Spencer and Agassiz.

Truly, ‘tis a pity for Dr. Tilden that he is such a clear and cogent reasoner on some lines and such a “dam phool” on other lines, e. g., his farewell to the old century is fine prose—thought akin to genius, and on the other hand his self-satisfied superciliousness toward Dr. Hausmann’s incontrovertible logic is on the plane of more than ordinary mediocrity. The vaccination argument between them is peculiarly applicable to my own town at present. We are having an epidemic of smallpox. The great majority of vaccinated persons are exempt, and the few who have it are only sick for a few hours and suffer little from the eruption, a few aborted vesiculae only. On the other hand, the unvaccinated are suffering severely, with fifteen days of intense pain and offensive scars on fair babies. Such facts are “heterogeneous enough to cause hesitancy amongst even such hetero-homogeneous philosophers as Dr. Tilden. Fraternally, —T. J. SULLIVAN.

I remember an endemic of smallpox that I was forced to look after—I say forced, for I was caught in it and the city authorities appointed me to take charge of all cases. For three months, I was in the midst of confluent smallpox two hours each day. Myself and a little girl thirteen years old were the only ones who escaped from all who were entrapped. Vaccination had never taken on her and did not at that time. I had a scar that I had carried for at least fifteen years, and that was all the protection I had, except light eating at the time, which I required the girl to do. Nurse after nurse was taken down in spite of “splendid” scars and re-vaccination. There were several deaths, and there were as many deaths from those who had been vaccinated and re-vaccinated as from those who were not “protected.” (!) On account of very cold weather and crowding of patients, four patients in a space where there should not have been more than one caused a much greater mortality than should have been. In this experience, I saw the evil effect of authority, with no adequate room to ensure safety, yet people who were suspected or had a light attack were forced to go into a pest house, which was almost equivalent to death.

There is altogether too much partisan spirit exhibited on the part of the profession regarding vaccination to ensure good results. Prejudice inhibits impartial investigation. There are those for, and those against, and there springs up the devil, controversy, which is notoriously unfair, illogical, and which does not hesitate to lie, juggle with statistics, and paint any kind of a false picture to help its side win.

There is an old law of cure which may throw some light upon this vaccination theory. It is known as contrari contrarius curantur—oppose one disease or pain by another, and as two processes cannot exist at the same time, the lesser must give way. Vaccination is a disease, and if the vaccine disease is at work in the system, it has the priority of claim through the law of possession, and while it holds the fort, there is no room for any other guest. It is a notorious fact that all chronic diseases are immune to all diseases except the one in possession. A chronic rheumatic will not have anything but rheumatism.

The question to decide is: Are we justified in grafting a certain type of disease, in making a man sick for fear he will get sick?-like the fellow who suicides for fear he will get killed. Who can tell how many will take the smallpox after being exposed? I say that if it were not for the natural immunity that most people possess, no epidemic, once started, would stop until all the people were dead or had suffered the disease. If, then, there is innate in the body a social natural immunization, who is wise enough to say where this natural immunization leaves off, and an artificial so-called immunization begins? Is there not a very large possibility that a bogus prevention may live a very long time in the minds of the people, the same as all superstitions, usurping and parading a virtue wholly stolen from the stable and natural variety that is always present? I do not believe I am unjust when I say that the science of medicine today is built upon the supernatural, while in every particular, the natural is ignored and is counted out in all the reckoning.

For the sake of argument, we will say that the vaccine will prevent smallpox. If it does, it must be in operation at the time of exposure to the disease.

Then the question comes up, would the patient have taken smallpox? Not one tenth of the people do who are exposed, perhaps not one in twenty. Then if vaccine must be in active operation, and I think from the number of re-re-vaccinations, and the number of people who take the disease after being vaccinated, it must be in active operation at the time of exposure to be effective, are we justified in exposing all kinds of people, in all kinds of physical conditions, to an artificial disease, the extent of whose baneful influences we cannot reckon in advance? So long as there is a natural immunization and a possibility of securing this natural immunity by simple common sense, wholesome treatment, is there any sense or reason in producing an artificial disease to take the place of nature? When we do, we must acknowledge, if we are honest, that possibly the patient would not have taken the disease; besides, it is positively known that a system of diet will cut the force of the smallpox short. In the eighteenth century, before vaccination was known, and before the importance of correct nursing was known, the mortality rate was only eighteen percent. The question resolves itself into simply this: Are we justified in producing an artificial disease, which is doubtful in its prevention, or limited in its prevention, and doubtful in its necessity, to ward off a disease that under favorable conditions is not as fatal as typhoid fever or measles? There is much more damage done to people by vaccination than its advocates are willing to admit. It is impossible for a death certificate to pass the health board and get on file as coming from vaccination, yet the advocates of vaccination are not bigoted and unfair. Oh, no! Only the anti-vaccinationists are cranks, fools, and ignoramuses. Dr. Sullivan likes my logic except when it runs counter to some of his prejudices. I insist that the great difference between Dr. Sullivan, Dr. Hausmann, and me is that I use one standard of measurement, while they measure one subject with one rule, and use quite another rule for another subject. I insist that the natural resisting power of the system is the only barrier to the invasion of all diseases, while they have exceptions and causations galore. I admit that if you give a man smallpox he can’t take any other disease while he is entertaining it, and if you give a man typhoid fever he will be so wholly occupied by that guest he will have no room for a new one; and if a patient is suffering from blood-poisoning from vaccination he will be too busy to entertain other devilish guests at the same time, but who wants to be perpetually sick to keep from getting sick?

DR. WILDER THINKS FOR HIMSELF.

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HEALTH AND CLIMATE.

BLOSSOMS FROM MENTAL KNIGHTHOOD.

MEDICAL CULT.

BONE MANIPULATORS OF MASSACHUSETTS.

DR. HAUSMANN.

MEDICAL ETHICS.

A LIBERAL PHYSICIAN.

DR. FOOTE’S CYCLOPEDIA.

DR. LEE IS ALL RIGHT.

NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE SUCCESS.

EACH INDIVIDUAL IS A LAW UNTO HIMSELF.

ALMOST every person is inclined to use someone else as a standard by which to measure and guide his conduct in life. This is, or should be, a limited social necessity, for every man is a law unto himself. To a limited extent, we learn of our relationship to nature by studying the experiences of others, but if great care and judgment are not used, and the experiences of great numbers are not taken into consideration, we are just as liable to make shipwrecks of faith as we are to be saved. That every person is a law unto himself is an exceptional fact. It is a fact that when observation is limited to isolated cases, but when the individual is measured by the common standard of the multitude, the differences disappear.

It is the rule of everyday life to form opinions from isolated examples. This is known from a scientific understanding as jumping to conclusions, snap-shot conclusions, and is too unreliable to arrest the attention, for one moment, of men who know the necessity of accumulated evidence.

Because one man lives to be one hundred years old and uses tobacco for ninety of these years is no evidence to thinking people that tobacco is either beneficial or detrimental. There would have to be many such cases, in truth, to establish the fact that tobacco is a factor in prolonging life; it would be necessary to establish beyond doubt that the majority of people who use tobacco live longer than a like number who do not use it. And this demonstration will have to be taken with a grain of salt, for the rule is pretty universal that men who do not use tobacco have some indiscretions that make up for their gain in the non-use of the weed. Some eat too much, some are given to eating between meals, candy eating, and the munching of fruits, nuts, or something else at unseemly times of day. Many expend much nerve force in gratifying the grand passion, the appetite for which is abnormally stimulated by a glutton’s habit. Meat, eggs, and oysters, to excess—three times a day, even twice a day, is excess—urge the passions, and people who boast of temperance in alcohol and tobacco are often given over to a worse state.

There is more sickness among women than among men, and I have thought that one of the causes is that women more universally overeat than men. Many men find satisfaction in drink and the pipe.

It is no uncommon thing to have some centenarian pointed out as a man who used more or less whisky, tobacco, coffee, and meat all his life, giving such an isolated witness proof that such stimulants do not militate against long life, and the half- cocked thinker will declare that the old man lived to that age because of his stimulants. Such slip-shod opinions have to be contended with every day. The early inhabitants of this country lived on hog and hominy, and because of the hardy condition of those old post-revolution settlers, and their children, it has filtered down through the decades that hog and hominy are good fodder to build hardy men out of. The advocates of bacon, coffee and hog forget the log fires that roasted the face while the back froze; the friendly winter winds that old clothes, rags, coon and possum skins failed, utterly, to keep out of the chinks in the log houses, and the mantle of snow that the hardy old pioneers had to shake off their beds of a morning before they could crawl out of them, and, neither last nor least, but the greatest of all else, the sound sleep and peaceful minds that accompany a complete absence of worry. Ambition and mammon had not taken possession of those old hardy forefathers in that day. Those were the days when poor neighbors did not have to borrow, nor steal; if they were lacking the wherewithal to sustain life, their more fortunate neighbors divided with them, and if they lacked the comforts of the rude house, the neighbors for miles around co-operated and in a short time, the poorest family would be as well provided for as anyone else. That was before the days of tramps, poor houses, and selfishness; before men became beasts of high and low degree so high that they could look with complacency upon a human being in need of the necessities of life; and on the other hand so low that they could look with exultation upon the discomfiture, ah! even the death of those whom they recognized as usurpers of their birthrights. Both are ignorant of themselves; they are brothers still, but are estranged by an environment that has made them what they are without the knowledge or consent of either, and over which neither can have any control, until they both understand and are willing to concede to each other the manhood that circumstances have bereft them of. When men learn to know that the art of getting money is a physiological specialization with the greatest potency for good, and that its highest function is the conservation of every other specialization; and that poverty is the handicap placed upon knowledge, science, art—in a word, morality, by the money power, in its mistaken idea that its brother with art proclivities can and should get on—make money—the same as it does. It is as reasonable to say that all should be able to sing because there are a few who can. Suppose that singing stood for the medium of exchange instead of money; how many would be poor? Suppose oratory stood for the medium of exchange instead of money, how many would be rich? Suppose only high-grade mechanical skill stood for the medium of exchange, how many who now control the wealth of the world would be rich? How many would be beggars? The getting of money is an innate power, born with the man. Has he no duty to any except self? Is it not a fact that advances in all lines of development are held back by selfishness on the part of the few who hold all the power? If wealth helps an artist, a thinker, or a mechanic to a higher development by relieving them of the bread-and-butter worry, it helps to elevate the standard of civilization.

Fresh air and contentment, and the absence of the social cancers better known by the name of selfishness, envy, and avarice had more to do with the hardiness of their constitutions than their food. These people also had the best of fresh meat. The hog that they did eat was not born in a hothouse and pampered into a state of degeneration similar to the Strasburg Stöl, which is made from the liver of a goose killed just in time to prevent it dying from fatty degeneration, and served to connoisseurs of pate de foie gras. The hog was allowed its freedom to fresh air and pure water until, by its own hustling of acorns, nuts, and roots, with a little corn, it was in condition to be cured into food. Such a hog represented more life force to the pound than our fancy, degenerate, over-fed hogs represent in ten pounds. Much of their meat was wild game and represented all the life force that nature could impart.

The modern domesticating of animals and poultry tends to lessen life force, hence our meat has less of it to impart to us as food. Again, in those early pioneer days, the people ate when hungry, and there was nothing in the style of living to force the appetite. Modern food is lacking in its life-imparting force, evidenced by a lack of satisfaction after eating. It is common to see people hungry with a system satisfied with food—hungry yet full. This is impossible except when the food is lacking in life-imparting qualities. Modern food tends to make people more rotund, and this is often pointed out as evidence of a better quality of food than our more angular and bony ancestors had to eat. Fatness and rotundity mean degeneration, just the opposite condition found in the rough, rugged pioneers.

These are vital truths that the world will come upon in time. Today, the vegetarian is the better off for he lives nearer nature and gets more of life force, but, at the same time, there is lacking in the hothouse vegetables the same life-imparting force that lacks in the degenerated animal. Civilization tends to degenerate because of a lack of life force in the food, then add to this the worry and struggle for the unattainable, and we have physical degeneration manifested in such diseases as consumption, Bright’s disease, cancer, and nervous diseases.

The universal disposition to stuff comes partly from a subconscious longing for food with life in it.

The white flour of today is deprived of the germ of life that each wheat grain contains. Children starve on white bread and milk from stall-kept, slop-fed cows, animals that are fed on the cheapest possible food, any old thing so it will keep the animal alive and force her to give as much milk as possible. The cow is not allowed exercise, fresh air, and sunshine, and she is expected to lactate until she dies of consumption. All that any child needs, by way of food, is good milk from a healthy cow and bread made of whole wheat.

The refining process carried on in our food supply, both in the vegetable and animal kingdom, tends to devitalize the food products. This must show itself in a devitalized state of human life. Add to the degenerating food the systematic adulteration that is going on, and where are the people to get life force?

These are problems, the effect of which must be worked out by the statistician. The non-observing individual cannot see or even suspect them. The individual sees enough in isolated exceptions to these general propositions to dispute their veracity. The physician has this ignorance to contend with daily. He can find on any corner a man who can point out an example with which he can sum up all the accumulated experiences of all the observers of all time. Such people will say: “You talk of this stuffing habit killing people off, look at Smith; he is a gourmand and yet he is the picture of health.”

It does not count, with such an intellectual caliber as that, to cite a thousand Smiths who have gone down the road before half their legitimate lives are lived because of just such a life. If that Smith dies of apoplexy while the dispute is on, the man of infantile intellect will immediately turn to Jones and hold him up as an example.

People cannot understand that there are hundreds of conditions that go to make up the life of an individual, and that all these conditions must be taken into account when comparing results. Two men may be equally successful in business; one is cheerful and happy, while the other is morose and discontented. The happy man, everything else equal, will live longer, but if he does not, it will not prove, except to the stupid, that cheerfulness and happiness are conducive to short life, and that if one wants to live, he must be morose and discontented.

If the happy fellow’s case is looked into, it may be found that he squandered too much of his life force in entertaining friends and losing sleep. He may have had personal habits that pulled him down; he may have been wholly unselfish and, in his desire to please, allowed his friends to impose upon him. In spite of his general appearance, he may have been carrying a great load of responsibility.

The other man was selfish, and instead of carrying others, he may have had the faculty of making others carry him. Then there is the question of vital force, which no man can measure. The man who is selfish and lazy, everything else equal, will live longer than the unselfish man. The man who works hard and is contented, everything else equal, will live longer than the man who works hard and worries.

The hard worker and the hard thinker will not live as long as the lazy fellow if both eat an equal amount.

The popular opinion is that if a man works hard, he must eat a great deal. Look at the farmers; they are not a long-lived race. I explained why in the June Club. Men and animals digest little while at work. The truth of this has been demonstrated. It has been shown that two dogs fed alike breakfasts and one put in the kennel and the other taken on a six or seven hours’ run, and at the end of that time both being killed, on examination the dog that has been quiet has digested all his food, while the other has his breakfast just as he had eaten it, proving that to digest well one must have quiet.

Who has ever heard of a racehorse being taken on the track fat and full? A hunter would not think of feeding his hounds before a chase; in fact, if he would have his dogs do good work and his horse spirited and alert­­--ready to make a long run without water and with staying qualities--he will start them without food. Food is conducive to sluggishness and a desire for water; the more of both (food and water) given, the less capable either animal will be of doing its best work.

In this, the hunter often builds better than he knows; his reason for the dog doing better work is that the dog is hungry, and he becomes savage for blood. This is far from the truth. The dog is light and free and at his best without food. If a man would do a few hours’ thinking, he will have to do it, wittingly or unwittingly, with an empty stomach. People who are fat and full are fat-witted. All great feats requiring skill and endurance are won by the moderate. The gluttonous are pennantless except in discomfort and early death. They are never found in the arena of achievements; occasionally, they are in the stock animal shows where fat reigns supreme.

Work, worry, or anything else that uses up nerve force takes that power away from the system, leaving none for digestion. Everyone knows that a telegram of unfavorable news at the end of a meal stops digestion. Anything that disturbs the equilibrium of composure impedes or stops digestion; then it is that food rots and poisons the system. The secretions of the body are put in an abnormal condition by excitement. Children have been killed by nursing a mother soon after she had been in a state of great anger. The same is true of animals. Hard work ruins the mother’s milk. When I used to do a country practice, I found that Mondays were wash days, Tuesdays were ironing days, and Wednesdays were sick baby days. The wash tub has killed many babies; a hot kitchen has sent many of them to their long homes.

Stock raisers know that to work a brood mare is almost sure to end in giving birth to a colt that will die of bowel trouble known as the scours; in the baby, it is known as cholera infantum.

People should know that to eat when tired invites indigestion. If a large breakfast is eaten and then hard work is indulged in, the food will remain in the stomach largely undigested; if a midday meal is eaten and then a supper, they are lapping over each other, none of which is well digested. If such a regime is kept up for any great length of time, invalidism and early death may be looked for. Everyone should rest, if possible, before eating; if impossible, a very light meal should be eaten. If farmers were always working hard, as they do in some parts of the year, they would not live as long as they do. The farmers could avoid sickness during the work season, the time of year when they are most given to sickness, if they would start the day without food and then break the day’s fast at noon by a light meal, bread and butter, with milk, then rest for one hour in the evening and eat a full dinner. Of course, this will be given a knowing squint, as much as to say that I may know some things, but mighty little about farmers and their work. One excuse will be given that in the busy season, there are no hours to be given to rest, the grain is ripe, and every hour must be utilized. However, every hour is not utilized. Count the hours lost in sickness and its expense, and then add to this ten to thirty years of life lost by early death, and see how much you save. Go with me back to my first field of practice, and if you would visit more than one-third of those then hale, happy, hard-working friends, you must be content to read with me their names on memorial stones marking the place where they are taking the rest they did not have time to take in the days when they had a good capital stock of health, and which, by conserving, they could have lived on and enjoyed what they were working so hard to earn and save.

A young farmer was in my office not long ago, consulting me about his wife; he is a large man with a fine physique, a man with a splendid life expectancy. He incidentally remarked that he was not as well as he looked. I gave him a few suggestions, which, if he put into practice, his ill feelings would vanish, and good health would return to him to remain to old age. Little does he realize that I gave him the secret of good health and long life; it was a case of pearls before swine. He is a hog and doesn’t know it, and is now breaking ground by his incorrigible snout to bury himself in.

Hard-working people are more prone to pneumonia than others. The reason is neglect of skin, and heavy, stinking flannel underwear, hoggishness in eating, and fear of starving to death, so that when the fatal cold is taken, the eating is kept up until there is turned loose in the system so much decomposition that the life forces are overwhelmed and death results. The boozers are another class who die of pneumonia. They hit the free lunches at any and all hours of the day, “catch a cold” and go on with their interminable stuffing, go to bed, and are dead in seventy-two hours. There is another class that pneumonia finds and “don’t do a thing” to those who create the necessity for midnight eating salons. They can’t go home after an entertainment without loading their omnium-gatherum. Shellfish, confectionery, popcorn, hot tamales, and alcoholics, strong and light, are indulged in. When the system is a little out of order, and the power to digest is a little off, oysters and fish of any kind, and brains, are very liable to explode and turn loose a ptomaine that spends its force on the lungs by starting pneumonia. I think the phosphatic oils in a state of decomposition are more prone to set up lung trouble than other forms of food. I would not recommend oysters or brains, except for their use in them, as a diet for those who are suffering an attack of so-called cold. As the text runs: Each individual is a law unto himself, and because one eats oysters when suffering a cold and does not die or have pneumonia, it does not prove that the tendency is to end in this way. A man may have a little more stock of force on at one indiscretion than he will have at another, and come out all right, but if he will persist in tempting the gods that grind the mill of fate he will get caught and then it is too late to be saved, but never, in all my experience, too late to beg for relief or to be saved.

It is not expected to see one complacent while dying, yet it is cowardly in those who beg to be saved after they have willfully and knowingly dared the grim monster until he has picked up their challenge.

HEALTH AND CLIMATE.

HEALTH is not an exclusive prerogative of any climate or place. A man in good health can make his home anywhere. The salubriousness of the climate indeed varies as much as man’s power to maintain health. There are some countries good and some bad as places of residence. There is no country to which the stranger must become acclimated. This change that must take place in man to fit him for inhabiting a new country, or a country new to him, is a physiological change. There must be a physiological adaptation. It is one of the important things to consider in a broken constitution. A sound man, at almost any age, need not give the question much thought, but the broken-down man cannot give it too much consideration; but as the layman is not supposed to know much about it, it is a question that should be known and thoroughly considered by the physician. The man who assumes the office of adviser should know something more than the altitude, the degree of dryness or moisture, mildness or severity of the changes. He should know the effect of climate on the well and sick who have resided in it long enough to establish the physiological changes peculiar to it, and he should know of the effect on the well and sick who have entered it for the first time. These are questions of vital importance and should be thoroughly known before a wise opinion can be given. Is it a fact that the average physician knows anything about climatic influences? Is it a fact that the average physician knows anything about the peculiar physiological influence of the country he lives in on the natives of the country, as compared with the specific influence of other countries on their inhabitants? I shall be frank to say that with the majority, they know no more about these questions than they do about how their pet drugs bring about the changes they imagine take place after their administration. Recommending a change of climate to the sick is fraught with as much guesswork and as much ignorant, professional sang-froid and selfish commercialism as the average prescription is made. If a patient has money, the recommendation of a change will come at the end of the doctor’s influence in the case, when the patient has been sapped for all the filthy lucre possible. If the patient does not have much money, the recommendation may come early. It may be that the case can be handled better at the farther end of the route, by recommending him into the hands of a professional pal who will charge enough for both. These things are worked to the queen’s taste where there is a possibility. But there is a host of people herded to climates for health by professional men who have learned in school or in textbooks that certain sections of the country are good for consumption. It matters not if the patient is unable to live the best in his own country, he will be urged by these professional automatons to change climate, if he has to mortgage a little home for enough to buy a ticket and have enough besides to pay board in some tenth-rate, ratty, smoky, God-forsaken boarding house for a few weeks.

It positively appears to be a belief among some so-called physicians that health is to be had for the mere asking, a thing that infects the sage brush, gopher, and ant hills in this country, in fact, that the zephyrs are laden with it and all one needs to do is to roll up, tumble up, any way to get into it. I see people in this country who have had the greatness and healthfulness of this climate pumped into them by a verdant, Elysium spooked doctor to the extent of believing that all they need is to get here and they will be taken hold of by the health forces and magically transformed into Herculean health and strength, after which they can earn enough money panning gold out of the sand of our streets to make them bonanza kings. Young men and women are urged to come here and take positions and earn a living, if not money, while the climate forces good health upon them. For those with such ideas, permit a crank—a man who would tear his own country down, rob his mother, and turn his own children out to beg—to say that I have patients now who are earning the princely salary of four and five dollars a week and glad to get that much. There are young men in this city working for forty to fifty dollars a month who could get twice to three times that amount at their old homes. They are here, positively waiting for our climate to force health upon them. There are people in this country earning money enough to pay for about one-half the comforts they could have at their own homes. I would like some of the wise physicians who send patients here to tell me how they could expect a patient, requiring ten to fifteen dollars’ worth of accommodations a week, to get along on half that amount?

A well man may roustabout, but a sick man must have something like decent accommodations. In warm weather, a sick man, who can get about, can get along roughing it, and I believe in roughing it, but this is no country to rough it in in the winter. We have changes here that equal any of the feats of the most adept at legerdemain. Eli Perkins used to advertise sixty laughs in sixty minutes; doctors do not advertise changes in the temperature in Colorado of sixty degrees in sixty minutes, but I have seen the mercury drop fifty degrees in fifty minutes, and I do not believe it is an uncommon thing to have a change of sixty degrees in less than half that many hours.

Will any self-respecting physician step to the front and dispute this statement? If this is not a lie, will any self-respecting physician come to the front and say such changes make an ideal climate for lung diseases?

Colorado has a glorious climate most of the year, but we have a little variation at times that will sorely test the delicate man. It should be known that it requires more lung capacity at this altitude than is required in low altitudes. A sound, healthy man must go through the physiological change of enlargement of the lung capacity before he can say he is acclimated. If this is true, how about the hundreds sent here, branded one-lungers by their physicians? Colorado is not the place to send patients with weak hearts. A patient with a constantly increasing pulse rate should be kept away from this altitude. A pulse rate of ninety to one hundred at St. Louis or Cincinnati will range in Denver from over one hundred to one hundred and twenty. The world should understand that we realize hundreds of thousands of dollars every year from people on the hunt for health, who would not know what it looks like if they met it on the street.

Some think it looks like a bottle of dope, others think it looks like capsules with an odor that the infinite could not chain, and still others think it is a mysterious quintessence compounded by the magic hand of science out of invisible bugs to be shot into them through a gold-tipped needle. Along with these ideals, the health chaser has some vague idea that our climate has something mysterious about it, and when it is brought to bear upon him, he will be lifted bodily and transformed into health. No great effort is being made by the profession to disabuse the people of this idea, for that would mean a pecuniary loss to the state.

Thousands come here every year, many realize benefit, but I do not hesitate to go on record as saying that it is a very small percent of the seriously ill of consumption who derive any benefit; a very much greater percent of such cases are hurried into their graves. Statistics of weather and cures are usually made by someone who is interested or prejudiced in some way, and do not read with any more accuracy than most commercial statistics. I am compelled to say that health has become a commodity of commerce, and when the almighty dollar is involved in a question, it is not wrong to lie; it’s business, and business is business, right or wrong. Climate cannot cure a man of bad habits any better than drugs, faith, or prayer. A sick man must learn to know the laws that govern his life, and when he does and begins to respect them, he will then begin to evolve health, and if he has not started on the road to evolve out of ill health too late, he can rest assured he will be rewarded by a full return. If a man has any common sense and will be guided by it, he can live in any climate, but the fool and incorrigible find an early grave anywhere. Milton says that the devil and his cohorts were kicked out of heaven. It’s my opinion that they found the altitude too high, and they have been hunting for a healthy climate ever since.

BLOSSOMS FROM MENTAL KNIGHTHOOD.

A GENTLEMAN called upon me a few days ago, suffering from a stomach disease that had caused him to come from the Mississippi valley to Denver for relief. He has been here for eighteen months, taking the climate in large chunks and following the instructions of some of our medical men. He declares that he is no better in Colorado than he was in Missouri. In telling me his tale of woe, he informed me that his physician advised him to “Eat—eat like a hog—stuff yourself all you can, for you need strength and you can’t get it unless you eat.” I asked him, “About how old is the physician who gave you such advice?” “I should guess about fifty,” the patient answered. Just think of it, fifty years old and benighted. There is no hope for such a physician; if he were twenty-five, there might be some hope that he would yet learn something, but when a man gets to be fifty and knows no more of the laws of life and growth than to advise a man, sick from overeating, to stuff like a hog, he is beyond hope.

I was called the past week to see a man in a high state of fever and so nervous he could not lie, sit, or stand—in motion all the time. He is here from one of the northern states to be cured of consumption. He was faithfully following the instructions of his physicians. He was drinking whisky, eggnog, and drugs galore. It was impossible for him to be sober and consume the amount of whisky prescribed for him. The eating was in keeping with his drinking. If mental knighthood is not in flower in this day and age of our world, and if the medical profession has not a corner on it, I lose my guess. Reader, take one of the healthiest men you know of and put him on the above regimen, and tell me what would become of him. I can’t believe the Club has a reader so stupid as not to expect sickness to follow. A treatment that will make a well man sick will make a sick man worse.

I was once called to see a patient dying; the doctor called the disease typhoid fever. The truth was, the patient was dying from champagne poisoning. The doctor had prescribed two bottles of the wine for every twenty-four hours, and when the patient got so she could not swallow, the doctor ordered it by enema. It took eleven days and twenty-two bottles of champagne to kill, but they did the work well.

What would become of a well man should he undertake to down twenty-two bottles of such wine in eleven days? Answer that you fellows acquainted with the champagne headache and the song of the ice in the pitcher. Oh, no, reader, don’t say these patients were in the hands of inferior physicians—most so-called inferior physicians know better. They may not make great social pretensions, but they know better than to kill in this fashion. No, sir; if you should shake up the whole profession, the fellows who treated these three patients would be bobbing up serenely for first honors, socially, and why not? They are entitled to them, for social honors are what they study most—that is their specialty, their vocation—the practice of medicine is their avocation—a sort of by-product. Dear reader, you can’t find fault with the doctors; they are what the people make them. If there are more honors and money in being a social doctor, most ambitious fellows will undertake to please the people and fill the demand. Don’t kick if the time they give to brushing off the iodoform and substituting violet or cologne and taking lessons in physical, vocal, and esthetic culture robs them of the time needed in solving problems connected with nature’s laws.

To get rid of shop smell, shop talk, and the must that naturally clings to the mind and clothes of the student requires time. How to collect the dollars standing out and put them where they will earn other dollars requires time; besides these same dollars are needed to keep up appearances, and if a young physician starts out and gives all these little details the necessary attention to earn for him an entree into “good society” he can’t have much time to get anything but a parrot-like medical education. If he is taught stuffing in college, he will die fifty years, more or less, afterwards, stuffing his patients because “it is according to authority.” A man who never moves an inch after he leaves college is a great stickler for authority. Often, the professional man who is an authority on proprieties is a great stickler for authority in his profession, and will adopt a theory because of its authoritative point of promulgation rather than because of its agreeing with his opinion; in fact, he has no serious opinions, he has had no time for any, he has been too busy pleasing the dear people.

MEDICAL CULT.

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