“I have no faith whatever in medicine.”
Dr. BAILIE, of London.
“The medical practice of our day is, at the best, a most uncertain and unsatisfactory system; it has neither philosophy nor common sense to commend it to confidence.”
Professor EVANS, Fellow of the Royal College, London.
“Gentlemen, ninety-nine out of every hundred medical facts are medical lies; and medical doctrines are, for the most part, stark, staring nonsense.”
Professor GREGORY, of Edinburgh, Scotland.
“I am incessantly led to make an apology for the instability of the theories and practice of physic. Those physicians generally become the most eminent who have most thoroughly emancipated themselves from the tyranny of the schools of medicine. Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of disease, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. What mischiefs have we not done under the belief of false facts and false theories! We have assisted in multiplying diseases; we have done more: we have increased their fatality.” BENJAMIN RUSH, M. D., Formerly Professor in the first Medical College in Philadelphia.
“It cannot be denied that the present system of medicine is a burning shame to its professors, if indeed a series of vague and uncertain incongruities deserves to be called by that name. How rarely do our medicines do good! How often do they make our37patients really worse! I fearlessly assert that in most cases the sufferer would be safer without a physician than with one. I have seen enough of the mal-practice of my professional brethren to warrant the strong language I employ.” Dr. RAMAGE, Fellow of the Royal College, London.
“Assuredly the uncertain and most unsatisfactory art that we call medical science, is no science at all, but a jumble of inconsistent opinions; of conclusions hastily and often incorrectly drawn; of facts misunderstood or perverted; of comparisons without analogy; of hypotheses without reason, and theories not only useless, but dangerous.”
Dublin Medical Journal.
“Some patients get well with the aid of medicine; more without it; and still more in spite of it.”
Sir JOHN FORBES, M. D., F. R. S., Physician to Queen Victoria.
“Thousands are annually slaughtered in the quiet sick room. Governments should at once either banish medical men, and proscribe their blundering art, or they should adopt some better means to protect the lives of the people than at present prevail, when they look far less after the practice of this dangerous profession, and the murders committed in it, than after the lowest trades.”
Dr. FRANK, an eminent European Author and Practitioner.
“Let us no longer wonder at the lamentable want of success which marks our practice, when there is scarcely a sound physiological principle among us. I hesitate not to declare, no matter how sorely I shall wound our vanity, that so gross is our ignorance of the real nature of the physiological disorder called disease, that it would, perhaps, be better to do nothing, and resign the complaint into the hands of nature, than to act as we are frequently compelled to do, without knowing the why and the wherefore of our conduct, at the obvious risk of hastening the end of our patient.”
M. Magendie, the eminent French physiologist and pathologist.
“I may observe that, of the whole number of fatal cases in infancy, a great proportion occur from the inappropriate or undue application of *exhausting remedies.”
Dr. MARSHALL HALL, the distinguished English Physiologist.
“Our actual information or knowledge of disease does not increase in proportion to our experimental practice. Every dose of medicine given is a blind experiment upon the vitality of the patient.”
Dr. Bostock, author of the “History of Medicine.”
“I wish not to detract from the exalted profession to which I have the honor to belong, and which includes many of my warmest and most valued friends; yet it can not answer to my conscience to withhold the acknowledgment of my firm belief, that the medical profession (with its prevailing mode of practice) is productive of vastly more evil than good; and were it absolutely abolished, mankind would be infinitely the gainer.”
FRANCIS COGGSWELL, M. D., of Boston.
“The science of medicine is a barbarous jargon, and the effects of our medicines on the human system in the highest degree uncertain, except, indeed, that they have destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and famine combined.”
JOHN MASON GOOD, M. D., F. R. S., Author of “Book of Nature,” “A System of Nosology,” “Study of Medicine,” etc.
“I declare, as my conscientious conviction, founded on long experience and reflection, that if there was not a single physician, surgeon, man-midwife, chemist, apothecary, druggist, nor drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality than now prevail.” — JAMES JOHNSON, M. D., F. R. S., Editor of the Medico-Chirurgical Review.
These extracts, which might very easily be extended so as to fill a large volume, shall conclude with the following confession and declaration deliberately adopted and recorded by the members of the National39Medical Convention, representing the elite of the profession of the United States, held in St. Louis, Mo., a few years ago: “It is wholly incontestable that there exists a widespread dissatisfaction with what is called the regular or old allopathic system of medical practice. Multitudes of people in this country and in Europe express an utter want of confidence in physicians and their physic. The cause is evident: erroneous theory, and, springing from it, injurious, often—very often—FATAL PRACTICE! Nothing will now subserve the absolute requisitions of an intelligent community but a medical doctrine grounded upon right reason, in harmony with, and avouched by the unerring laws of nature and of the vital organism, and authenticated and confirmed by successful results.”
And now, since the assembled wisdom of the medical profession of this country has condemned its own system “as erroneous in theory” and “fatal in practice,” let us turn to the processes and appliances of the Hygeio-Therapeutic system.—Water-Cure for the Million, pp. 3–12.
Poisons.
“It does not take a man with a divining rod to tell that the same general law which wards off disease, is that by which disease is cured, and that any knowledge which one has, by means of which he can cure the sick is of no avail unless it also includes a knowledge of means by which when a person is cured, he may ‘stay cured.’ For it is palpably absurd to be shut up to the necessity of curing people constantly. Such a process is only a sham. In reality there is no cure. It is merely a labor quite unfruitful of benefits.—Without health no man can be as great as Nature designs him to be. Philosophically speaking, as well as practically, Health is wealth.—Without it the highest mental culture can never be attained, for in its absence the closest application of one’s intellectual powers cannot be exercised. Without health there40cannot be a thorough moral discipline or religious growth, for to the degree that one is sick does he lack power of control over his passions, as well as over the emotions of his higher nature. There is no curse on this earth this day so heavy upon the people as the loss of health. It makes those who suffer it so dependent, so miserable, placing them on a charity list, where if they are not dependent for bread, they are for other little things, which, good in themselves, sicken and sadden when daily had under circumstances inevitably calculated to press home to those to whom they are tendered the conviction of their own nothingness.”
“Many of the ablest medical writers admit the impossibility of curing chronic diseases by medicine. Many more admit it in their daily practice, who have patients to whom they give no medicine, recommending instead, means entirely hygienic. In acute diseases, drug doctors speculate and experiment more extensively, but in this department men occasionally arise who have the magnanimity to admit that they can calculate with no certainty on their medicines, these utterly failing under the most favorable combination of symptoms to exhibit those effects, for the production of which it is supposed they are specifically adapted.
Thus calomel, opium, quinine, lobelia, belladonna, aconite, toxicodendron, arsenic, iodine, podophyllin and the other poisons whose name is legion, and in whose tails there are a thousand stings, are daily given, and specific effects are looked for and calculated upon, but exactly opposite effects are produced. Am I not right? If not, how then is opium given to induce sleep, and the patient made all the more wakeful for it? Is it not a common fact that calomel when administered with a view to excite the liver to increased action, produces as a result greater inactivity of that organ? Do not physicians daily give cathartics to relieve costiveness, and thereby make it a permanent condition of the bowels? Do they not give brandy to tone up the stomachs of dyspeptics, and thereby, oftener than otherwise produce complete loss of41tone of that organ? Do they not give cantharides to cure dropsy, and then have to commence the process of tapping, and keep it up till the patient dies? Do they not give iodine to reduce enlarged lymphatics, and have suppuration of the glands follow its administration? Do they, or do they not get results such as the books tell about, in half the cases they treat? I do not ask if their patients live through the attacks of their diseases and the administrative attendance of their physicians. That is not just now the question, but do these medicine-givers with their so called specifics get specific effects?
In a monograph on Typhus Fever published in 1831, Prof. Nathan Smith, of Yale College says: ‘I am clearly of opinion, that we had better leave Typhus Fever to cure itself, as medicines, especially powerful ones, are more likely to do harm than good.’ The Prof. was right. Drugs kill, or if they do not kill, they tend to kill, and so do more harm than good. —Think of the curative properties of poisons.—What makes arsenic everywhere labelled a poison? Why, by universal consent is prussic acid stamped, labelled, and considered a poison?—Why do legislators pass enactments forbidding druggists to sell arsenic or other drugs without labelling them so plainly when done up as to leave no possible ground for mistake that they are poisons? Is it not because the legitimate effects of them on the human body is to destroy its vitality and kill it? Then by what cunning, or skill, or power of transmutation, is it that a man with a piece of parchment in his office, hung on the wall, written all over in Latin characters, can take these substances and introduce them into the body, set them going into the circulation and have them tend to cure, and not to kill. Is it that by their introduction they are chemically altered? This is not the fact. Persons who are killed by arsenic show its presence in their stomachs on post mortem examination. Persons who have taken mercury, have had it pass from the body through the skin in a natural state. Persons who have had iodine administered for scrofula, have had its smell unmistakably exhibited in their puss.—Those42who have taken oil of turpentine, have months, yes, years after taking it, sent forth its odor in their urine. Sick persons have taken the wine of colchicum, and have tasted it plainly a year after its administration. Persons after taking lobelia have had its presence exhibited, and usual effects shown, years after it was given. Opium eaters are liable to attacks of lethargy for years after giving up its use. Men have gone from the East to the West, traveled through it, and returned to have the Western fever, eighteen months after their return and die from it. Men go into a room where typhus fever is, and come out without injury; others go in, come out, are taken sick and die. Men settle down on the edge of a stagnant mill-pond, and in a little while have intermittent fever.—Men take some little pills of strychnine from the hands of a physician, and are smitten with paralysis for life. Boys chew and smoke tobacco, and are palsied, smitten in their early budding. What in the name of Heaven do these facts prove, but that poison is poison everywhere, always is poison, that its effects are modified by the vitality of the person taking it, and not by any change undergone, and that the worst possible use you can put a sick man to, is to give him medicine, that if you want to kill him you have only to drug him, and if you do not kill him, you will waste away all the greenness and freshness of his existence, so that life looks to him as desolate as a burned prairie.”
—DR. JACKSON, Laws of Life, for Aug., 1862.
The Doctor.
“The following ‘Composition’ was recently read before a College in Wisconsin, by one of the young lady students.
“He came to our house,—the doctor. Happy the homes which he never enters; yet how many have watched for his coming, and have felt the moments were ages while they waited. Their thoughts turn from the dear one prostrated by disease, to the doctor. The sick one sighs, and his pain increases as he thinks43of the hours that must intervene before the doctor comes; and when he feels his pulse throbbing beneath the touch of that one, and knows that his ear is listening to his complaint, how confidingly he speaks. How carefully the attendant notes the doctor’s directions. How unquestioning the faith of the patient, as he swallows the nauseous mixture. Very poisonous it may be, but he expects it will cure, because the doctor gives it, though if he had been well, and had swallowed as much poison by accident, he would have feared death. Oh! who will tell us where the magic lies, by which the doctor can so change the action of the vilest drugs. Are these death-dealing potions aimed only at the disease, and will they dislodge the enemy and leave the citadel in which he had entrenched himself unharmed? Bombs and cannon may drive out the foe, but heaps of mouldering ruins will greet the conqueror as he enters the city.
“And is this all the virtue the healing art possesses? Nay; degrade it not thus. The instincts of man concerning its mission are true. It would alleviate pain and banish disease, and it would do this by eliminating its causes, and that, in such a harmless yet effectual manner, that the body would be like a well cultivated garden, where the extraction of the weeds leaves each plant room for development, and beauteous growth.
“Hygeia’s form is not marred by disease, invited by abnormal gratification; a stomach with endless craving has not stolen the roses from her cheeks and left sallowness instead. She has not the lack-lustre eye of the dyspeptic; neither is her step that of the invalid. She leads her followers in pleasant paths, and from her lips they are taught lessons of self-knowledge. But the multitude, listening to siren voices promising greater pleasure in self-gratification, wander in ignorance, despising her counsel; and the doctor either enveloped in the same ignorance which surrounds them, seeks a panacea for their woes, by divining deep in poison’s Stygian waters, loving himself to wallow in the same mire, or else he fears the cry of public opinion will be against him, should he follow out his own convictions.
“In thus rendering tangible thoughts that would come, we vent no spleen against the Medical Profession. It is a noble one. Would that its practitioners were all worthy exponents of its elevated character. But when we saw the doctor come to our house, we saw him take an ignited roll of poisonous weed from his mouth which he left lying on the gate post. But not there could he lay aside the defilement caused by his cigar. Saturated within with the juice of the weed, scented without by its vapor, with his mind under its influence, he approaches his patient. Shall we say to point out the road to health? Can he talk of habits at variance with physiological law to whom the maxim ‘physician heal thyself’ is so applicable? It must indeed be far easier to compound powders, and departing leave ‘something to take.’ And see! as he goes, he is not forgetful as he passes the gate post. Oh, shade of Esculapius, may such ignoble disciples of thine be few!—A. M., Laws of Life for April, 1863.
Infants.
Their Improper Nursing and Medication.
BY MRS. ELIZA DE LA VERGNE, M. D.
The improper treatment of infants, is one of the greatest evils of the present age, literally a “crying evil,” and one which requires immediate reform. It is a subject in which every female should feel a deep and active interest, and every woman in the land should respond to the call for reformation. In the cause of infantile humanity, woman may use her noblest powers without being told by the sterner sex that she is out of her sphere. And can she exert herself, either mentally or physically, in a cause which will repay her better?
I look upon infants as a class of beings who are45obliged to suffer from the prevailing principle that “might is right.” It is a matter of surprise to many, that hundreds and thousands of young children yearly become victims to disease and death; but it is much more surprising that so many survive the outrageous nursing and medication to which they are subjected. From the hour of their birth the poor little creatures are treated as though their stomachs were lined with gutta percha instead of a delicate mucous membrane. In this enlightened age, nature’s laws are considered superfluous, and science and physicians must take their place. Nature, in the olden time, did her own work without assistance, but is now supposed to be superannuated and unfit for duty. Art now comes along with her saddle-bags and instruments of torture—more numerous than those of the Inquisition—and informs the astonished world that she has just graduated, and is prepared to treat all fleshly ills scientifically. In accordance with this principle, infants are born and nurtured in direct antagonism to every physiological law. From the hour of its birth, the little creature is tortured in various ways; first, it is tightly dressed, then fed with molasses and water to “move its bowels,” which organs have previously been so tightly compressed by an irritating flannel bandage, that it is a mystery how they ever move at all.
It would seem if the Creator intended such bracing he would have supplied a bony frame-work similar to that which protects the lungs. The infant is now placed in bed with its head closely covered, lest the fresh air should get access to the lungs and give it cold. After a short time, serious fears are entertained that the babe will starve before the mother is able to supply it with its natural food, therefore some unnatural fluid is poured into its stomach, which soon produces pain and other difficulties; these must be relieved by catnip tea, peppermint, or gin. All these things are prepared with sugar, which cannot digest properly, thus increasing the suffering it was intended to relieve. Very frequently, after this course, the poor babe is unable to sleep; then comes Godfrey’s cordial, paregoric, or laudanum, until the poor little46creature falls into a stupid slumber, much to the delight of the officious attendant. If the anxious young mother suggests the danger of these preparations, she is assured by some good old aunt or nurse, that all babies take these things, and no harm can possibly arise if there is not too much given, but what quantity is “too much” is not definitely stated. In many cases, where an infant’s system has been thus outraged, and the little one refuses all consolation, some ingenious mind is suddenly seized with the idea that the babe “wants something” it has not had, therefore all known articles of diet are brought in requisition. I knew a case where clams, oysters, brandy, wine and ice-cream were fed to an infant not three weeks old, but after trying each of these articles it cried more piteously than before, and the discovery was finally made that the child inherited dyspepsia, which was aggravated by the mistaken kindness of its friends.
Many infants are fed with fat meat, vegetables and pastry, before they are six months old, attended by extra courses or medicine to remove the obstructions which these articles of food produce. I called on a lady of my acquaintance a short time since, and found her babe of thirteen months, making an entire meal of fat ham, because it wanted it, the mother said, and would eat everything its parents did. On trying to convince her of the injurious effects of such diet, she replied that her mother had given all of her children such food, and never lost one yet. Very true; they are all living, but a more unhealthy, scrofulous family it would be difficult to find. The babe of whom I speak, has had a number of painful boils and eruptions on the head, and if it lives to womanhood, must be afflicted by this inherited evil till life becomes a burden. It is too true that improper diet for the child is one of the most prolific causes of debility, disease, and even deformity in the adult. A large number of cases have come under my own observation where the feeding, dosing, and drugging with all kinds of abominations, have laid the foundation of misery and suffering through childhood, and finally, on arriving at adult age, have become parents and transmitted their diseases47to another generation, thus perpetuating the curse. Were I to enter into the details of drug-medication, it would fill a large volume, therefore I shall not attempt it, but will merely give a few simple suggestions as they present themselves to my mind. It is true, very few children of the present time inherit a healthy constitution; but admitting this, I insist that much depends on their treatment after birth and through childhood. A delicate and sickly child may become comparatively strong and healthy by strictly hygienic treatment, while a naturally healthy one may sink into an early grave by unhealthy food and medication. A short time ago I saw an infant of two months who had been troubled with a bad diarrhea from its birth. Its mother said she fed it with the most concentrated food, such as fine flour boiled in milk, crackers, arrowroot, &c., but it continued to grow worse,—she had carefully kept it from the fresh air, fearing it might take cold, and almost smothered it with flannels. This mother was actually killing her babe with kindness, and thousands are daily doing the same thing; they are so anxious to do right, that they do all wrong. The question now is, how is this great evil to be obviated? Is it by employing a skillful physician? Is it by allopathy, or homeopathy, or any other system of medication? These have all been tried and found wanting. I appeal now to mothers! If you had a rare exotic sent you from some far-off land by some dear friend, would you consign it to the care of one who did not know how to rear the plants of his own garden? Would you not rather study its nature, its wants and its habits yourself, watch it with jealous care lest some rude blast should mar its beauty and nip its tender buds ere they had unfolded their delicate petals to your admiring eye? But you would bring into existence a being of far more importance than all the exotics of the eastern clime, and place it in the care of those who—for aught you know—are ignorant and unprincipled, who understand not the nature of this God-given treasure, and have no natural tie to bind them to it. If your darling babe becomes ill, you send for a physician,48who perhaps prescribes some nauseating dose, and departs without one word of advice with regard to its daily habits. It frequently happens that the physician is a young man, and what does he know about babies or their management? I believe it to be woman's exclusive privilege to be not only a mother to her child, but its physician also. Let mothers be educated in all that concerns their life and health, let them study their own nature well, and learn that knowledge gives the highest order of power, and they will have no need to call in a physician for their children! If mothers would seriously reflect on the importance of a physiological education, I know they would begin earnestly and faithfully to prepare not only themselves, but their daughters, for the high and holy mission which is theirs to fulfill; then when these little sunbeams were given to light their earthly pathway, they would feel that they were responsible for the future health and happiness of such priceless treasures. No stranger’s hand would be permitted to perform those services for the loved ones which a mother’s deep affection alone could prompt, and understanding the mechanism and needs of the human system, she could do more for the suffering invalid, than all the doctors in the universe. Truly shall her “children rise up and call her blessed.” I cannot do justice to this subject in these few pages, but will say to my sisters, “be up and doing,” and may Heaven’s blessing descend on this reform.—Water-Cure Journal for October, 1855.
Says Dio Lewis:—“It is not an uncommon remark among physicians, in speaking of consumption, as of other diseases,—‘she has been so much poisoned, or exhausted, by drugs, that I fear nothing can be done for her.’ Or this,—‘the disease is conquered, and he will recover, if he can rally from the effects of the medicine.’ There is a certain cachectic condition, which the discriminating medical man at once recognizes as the result of drugs. That mercury has produced a vast amount of consumptive disease, it would be easy to prove by numberless authorities.”