GERMOPHOBIA
Helen S. Gray
Several years ago Dr. Charles B. Reed of Chicago obtained considerable notoriety by the invention of a cat-trap or gibbet to be baited with catnip and operated in back yards. The accounts in the newspapers related that he had found four dangerous kinds of germs on a cat’s whiskers and was therefore urging the extermination of cats as a menace to health; that Dr. William McClure, of Wesley Hospital, was examining microscopically hairs from cats’ fur to ascertain how many different kinds of germs there were on it; and that the secretary of the Chicago Board of Health had issued a statement that cats are “extremely dangerous to humanity.” From Topeka came the report that six different kinds of deadly germs had been found on a cat’s fur and that the Board of Health had in consequence issued a mandate that Topeka cats must be sheared or killed! But why stop with shearing them? There are germs on their skins. And now public penholders in banks and post-offices are under suspicion; an investigation is being made by the Kansas Board of Health, The St. Louis Republic states, and individual penholders may have to be supplied. From time to time a health board official or some other doctor gives out a statement for publication condemning handshaking as a dangerous and reprehensible practice.
The hair of horses, cows, and dogs is full of germs, which they disseminate. Germs are everywhere. Why should cats’ whiskers be an exception to the rule? If Thomas and Tabby could retaliate and examine doctors’ whiskers, doubtless numerous virulent varieties of germs would be found there. Doctors are a menace to public health, for they disseminate germs. Therefore, exterminate the doctors! But perhaps, being doctors, they don’t carry germs. Their persons are sacred. Germs are afraid of them and keep at a respectful distance.
All the leading works on bacteriology admit that a person may have germs of diphtheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or any other disease within his body without having any of
those diseases. Since that is the case, it is obvious that germs of themselves cannot cause disease. They do no harm in a body that is in a healthy condition. But so prejudiced is the medical profession on the subject of germs that the true causes of disease are overlooked and disregarded.
Among the four kinds of germs found on a cat’s whiskers, Dr. Reed mentions a germ “which causes a variety of infectious diseases, including kidney disease.” As if any one ever got kidney disease because he unwittingly swallowed some germs of the kind found in diseased kidneys, if he had not abused those organs by gross eating or gross drinking! But it relieves the individual of all responsibility for his condition to put the blame on germs and the cat. There is no personal stigma attached to such a cause; for it is commonly supposed that anybody is liable to be attacked by germs, that, like rain that falleth upon both the just and the unjust, germs attack both healthy persons as well as those whose bodies are saturated with auto-toxemia.
An inspection of the family dietary usually reveals the cause of a man’s untimely demise. But his death is piously attributed to an inscrutable visitation of Providence. His wife drapes herself in crêpe, observes all the conventions of grief, and overworks her lachrymose glands for a season. His friends pass resolutions of condolence, lamenting that their dear brother has been “called to his eternal rest,” a flattering implication that he had so overworked himself during his brief span of life that he needed an eternity of rest in which to recuperate, and was entitled to it as a reward. Whereas the only thing overworked was his digestive organs in disposing of his wife’s cooking.
If deadly germs are found on cats’ whiskers, what of it? It is as valuable a contribution to science to know how many and what kind of germs are to be found on cats’ whiskers as to know how many devils can be balanced on the point of a needle. Verily, a fool and his time are soon parted.
That a cat has germs on her fur and whiskers does not prove that she is a menace to health; but doctors are often a menace to life and health. Much of the surgery performed is unnecessary and frequently results in death. Vaccination and the administering of serums and antitoxins are frequently followed by
death or impaired health. One of the gravest charges against the prescribing of medicines is that they suppress or mask the symptoms and do not remove the cause of the disease, but leave the patient to continue in the error of his ways until overtaken again by the same trouble or an equivalent that has cropped out in some other place; and by that time the malady has perhaps reached a fatal stage.
In some respects doctors are like cats. They caterwaul, and occasionally they purr. When a woman patient calls at a doctor’s office and he does not know just what is the matter with her or what to do to cure her, if he belongs to a certain type in the profession, he holds her hand and purrs and is so sympathetic that she leaves his office in a transport, walks on air, and goes home convinced that no one understands her case as well as he does. Or else he tells her how beautiful she looked on the operating table. After such a subtle appeal to her vanity she pays without demur his bill of $300 or $400.
He takes great care not to offend his patients by telling them unpleasant truths, but instead resorts to delicate flattery. If a woman comes to his office suffering from some ailment brought on chiefly by eating devitalized foods, he purrs softly while he determines the latitude and longitude of her pain and gently inquires if she has had a shock recently. She thinks hard for a moment and recalls that she has had, that the news of the death of a child of an intimate friend was broken to her abruptly. Yes, that must have been what caused her condition.
Lacking the ability to direct patients headed for perdition by reason of wrong living how to live so that they can regain their health while continuing their work where they are, he sometimes recommends a change of climate or that they take a rest. Change of scene or occupation usually affords some slight temporary alleviation that the patients regard as a cure.
When patients have a cold or the grippe, instead of making plain to them what laws of health they have violated and that their illness is a direct result, the doctor, it not infrequently happens, tells them that it is “going around.” Colds and grippe are consequently in the popular mind of mysterious origin, and
the victims complacently regard themselves as blameless but unfortunate.
It is because the medical profession teaches people to look outside of themselves for the causes of their maladies that we see such spectacles as Caruso, obliged to break professional engagements that would have yielded him $100,000, ascribing his case of grippe to external influences. “I like everything in New York except its colds and grippe,” he is quoted as saying in an interview. “I think I can boast that I have had the most expensive case of grippe on record. It has cost me $100,000. The public says I am a great singer. I should be a greater man if I were a scientist who could drive grippe out of the country. See if you can’t drive it out of New York before I come back.”
Note the boast. As if ill-health and operations were something to be proud of! Instead of telling our acquaintances of our ailments in the expectation of getting their sympathy, we ought to be ashamed to be sick. They may understand what internal conditions colds, grippe, and other ailments presuppose, and have a feeling of repulsion toward us, not of sympathy.
The germ theory of disease is in great vogue at present with the regular—or allopathic, as it is sometimes called—school of medicine. Some of the leading physicians of other schools, however, predict that the day is not far distant when the contagiousness and infectiousness of disease through germs, vaccination, the injection of serums as preventives or cures, and the resorting to the use of medicines by deluded people as a substitute for correcting their habits of living, will be generally regarded as superstitions. When that day comes, we shall cease this Pharisaical self-righteous attitude, this dread and suspicion of others as germ-laden, and face the truth that we build our own diseases.
Even some of the regulars do not hold orthodox views; for instance, Dr. Charles Creighton, an eminent English physician. He has made a special study of epidemics and was engaged to write an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica on vaccination. At that time he was a believer in it, but changed his views when he investigated the subject. What he wrote was omitted from the American editions. “As a medical man,” he once declared, “I assert that vaccination is an insult to common sense; that
it is superstitious in its origin, unsatisfactory in theory and practice, and useless and dangerous in its character.” He testified before the British Royal Commission on Vaccination that in his opinion vaccination affords no protection whatever. He has written several books on the subject.
If germs are not the cause of disease, then what is? To this Dr. J. H. Tilden, of Denver, one of the most distinguished of those who do not accept the germ theory of disease as true, makes answer as follows. I quote excerpts taken here and there from his writings in A Stuffed Club Magazine on the subject of the causes and cure of disease, the germ theory, contagion and infection, and immunity.
“Disease is brought about by obstructions and inhibitions of vital processes…. The basis is chronic auto-intoxication from food poisoning. It is brought about by abusing the body in many ways … by living wrongly in whatever way…. Bad habits of living enervate—weaken—the body, and in consequence elimination is impaired…. The inability of the organism to rid itself of waste products brings on auto-toxemia. This systemic derangement is ready at all times to join with exciting causes to create anything from a pimple to a brain abscess and from a cold to consumption. Without this derangement, injuries and such contingent influences as are named exciting causes would fail to create disease. This is the constitutional derangement that is necessary before we can have such local manifestations as tonsillitis, pneumonia, and appendicitis…. Every disease is looked upon as an individuality; which is no more the truth than that words are made up of letters independent of the alphabet. As truly as that every word must go back to the alphabet for its letter elements, so must every disease go back to auto-toxemia for its initial elements…. There can be no independent organic action in health or disease.”
If drugs, serums, etc., do not cure disease, what does? Correcting whatever habits caused it; for instance, eating too much, bolting food, neglect of bathing, ventilation, and exercise, harboring worry, jealousy, or other destructive emotions, and living on a haphazard dietary of carelessly and ignorantly cooked foods. “Nature cures when there is any curing done, but nature
must have help by way of removal of obstructions to normal functioning.” There is nothing spectacular about a real cure. It means self-discipline.
“Germs are in all bodies in health and in disease…. I do not recognize them as a primary or real cause of disease any more than drafts or any such so-called causes; at most germs can be only exciting causes…. They are innocent until made noxious by their environment. They are victims and partakers of it. They act upon it and are reacted upon by it. As they must be amenable to environmental law, the same as everything else, they necessarily change when their environment changes. Because of a change in their habitat, the germs that are native change from a non-toxic state into one of toxicity…. They are not something extraneous to the human organism, but are the products of lowered vitality in the individual, of lost resistance…. Microbes are toxic when the fluids of their habitat have become toxic—when the resistance of the body has fallen below the point at which the fluids maintain their chemico-physiological equilibrium and decomposition sets in; it is at this stage that germs multiply rapidly; they absorb the poison that is generating, and it is not strange that their products are poisonous, for the changed bodily fluids on which they feed are toxic…. My theory is that the toxicity of germs is due to being saturated with poisonous gases. The germs of typhoid fever, for example, are not poisonous until the patient is sufficiently broken down to cause the generation of toxic gases, after which all the fluids and solids of the body take on a septic state, poisoned by the absorbed gas…. Bacteria are not the cause of disease; wrong living, which puts the system into such a condition that the bacteria can readily multiply, is the real cause; the bacteria are simply necessary results…. Germs are scavengers. When an environment becomes crowded with them, it means that there is a great accumulation of waste in a state of decay…. They are normal to a certain limit in our bodies. If they become more numerous, common sense and reason would say that they must be a necessary factor in the process of elimination, or, if not a necessary factor, lost resistance has permitted them to multiply
beyond the restrictions set to them by an ideal physical condition or normal resistance.”
To those who accept the germ theory, it seems that there must be specific germs to account for the different types of disease. The leaders among those who reject it are able to explain satisfactorily without it why all sick people do not have the same disease. They give as the reasons for variation geographical location, the domestic and local environment, the season of the year, atmospheric conditions (e. g., hot, humid weather favoring putrefaction both in the digestive tract and in animal and vegetable matter outside it), defective anatomism, congenital or acquired, injuries, age, occupation, temperament, food, habits, and mode of living.
“Immunization means that normal alkalinity of the fluids of the body exists…. Health is the only immunity against disease. If there is any state that man can be put into that will cause him to be less liable to come under disease-producing influences than full health, then law and order is not supreme and the world must be the victim of caprice, haphazard, and chance.”
“Epidemics and endemics feed upon the auto-toxemic and stop where there are none…. The belief of the medical profession that contagion and infection pass from one human being to another—from a sick man to a healthy man—is an old superstition unworthy of this age. Disease will not go from person to person, unless they are in a physical condition that renders them susceptible and unless environmental states favor decomposition—those of the household and the general atmosphere where the proper amount of oxygen is deficient. So-called contagious and infectious diseases are self-limited. If it were not for this self-limitation, the world would be depopulated every time an epidemic of a severe character succeeds in getting a start. But the medical profession believes that vaccination and antitoxin do what nature has been doing since the world began, namely, set a limit to the spread of disease.”
“Tuberculosis is a seed disease. The seed must come from a previous case,” Dr. J. N. McCormack, official itinerant lecturer of the American Medical Association and “mouthpiece of 80,000
doctors,” as he terms himself, is wont to declare in the plea that he is sent out to make all over the country for the establishment of a “national department of health and education to bring the benefactions of modern medical science to every household.” But if one contracts tuberculosis from the germs of another case and he in turn from some one else, how did the first case that ever happened originate? ask the leaders among those who reject the germ theory. Did the causes that produced the first case of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, measles, diphtheria, or other diseases commonly regarded as contagious or infectious, quit the business after producing one case, disappear, and go out of existence, or do they still operate and cause all the cases that occur? That troublesome first case is the missing link in the chain of the theory; but it happened so long ago that it has been lost sight of, and doctors are seldom embarrassed by being asked to account for it.
I know a druggist’s family in which all of the six children had adenoids. Adenoids are not regarded as contagious, so far as I have ever heard. So contagion cannot be made the scapegoat in this instance. The children had adenoids because the mode of living was the same for all. In like manner, when several members of a family contract tuberculosis, diphtheria, or measles, do they not get the disease because they all lived in the same manner and were exposed to like influences, instead of through contagion or infection with germs? Disease is sometimes spread, however, through the contagion of fear and suggestion.
The opponents of vaccination and serum therapy deny that the use of vaccines and serums has served to check the spread of disease. They hold that epidemics are less prevalent and less virulent now than formerly because of improved sanitary conditions, such as drainage of the soil, municipal disposal of garbage, street cleaning, water and sewer systems, the consequent increased facilities for bathing and household cleanliness, etc.
A false theory of cause not only leads to a false theory of cure, but diverts attention from the real issue. For example, in the Middle Ages and later, in England people used to empty garbage and other refuse in the yards and streets, and in consequence
a plague broke out from time to time. Instead of attributing it to the accumulated filth, they accused the Jews of poisoning the wells. So, too, in the case of a girl on whose neck a gland enlarged to the size of an egg; there was at once talk as to whether it was tuberculous in nature. Her mother wondered, if it was tuberculosis, if Minnie got it from the cat! She had always played with the cat a great deal. In this she reflected current medical talk in the papers. She could not understand how it could happen. There was no tuberculosis on either side of the family, and Minnie had always been so strong and healthy. Before she was twenty-five there was nothing left of Minnie’s front teeth but a few black snags—evidence of her having lived largely on sweets, starches, and meat, and that she had not been healthy. But her mother never thought of looking in that direction for the cause.
So long as people are led to believe that vaccines and serums are a safeguard, they do not seek others, but continue to live in filthy surroundings and to have injurious habits of living. In the mad chase after imaginary protection, real immunity is overlooked and lost sight of.