No surer road to personal happiness can be found than endeavoring to make others happy. If you find it difficult to be cheerful, there is more need to look to your surroundings. Read none but cheerful books; cultivate cheerful acquaintances. You will be amply repaid for your endeavors to cultivate the habit of happiness. From the standpoint of health, it is a profitable proceeding, for joy quickens the circulation. You can get the happiness habit if you wish to, and it is your duty to yourself and those around you to do so. If the clouds are lowering, do not give way to depression. Rouse yourself. Look for the rift in the clouds, disclosing the little patch of blue, and hope for the triumph of fair weather over foul. Even if you do not attain the degree of happiness you anticipated, you will find yourself improved, mentally, morally and physically. Get the habit, remembering that “a happy and contented mind is a continual feast.”
And now, in conclusion, I would ask the reader to carefully consider the facts herein set forth relating to disease and its treatment, to weigh the testimony AGAINST the old system, and FOR the new, and let sober reason decide which of the two is the more rational. Bring the same dispassionate judgment to bear on this question that you would on a matter involving your financial welfare. It will amply repay you to do so, for the matter at stake is a weighty one. The preservation of health is a DUTY that each member of the human family owes to self and friends.
Without health, existence is as torpid and lifeless as vegetation without the sun. And yet it is frequently thrown away in thoughtless negligence, or in foolish experiments on our own strength. We let it perish without remembering its value, or waste it to show how much we have to spare. It is sometimes given up to levity and chance, and sometimes sold for the applause of jollity and looseness. Some there are, who inherit weak constitutions, and fall an easy prey to sickness; while others, who are neither thoughtless or naturally weak, invite disease through simple ignorance of the laws that govern their being. Owing to these manifold causes sickness is rife, and the medical profession has come to be regarded as an exceedingly lucrative one.
This would not be a matter so much to be deplored, if so-called “medical science” had kept pace with the other sciences; but the lamentable truth is that the practice of medicine (so far as healing value is concerned) has not advanced one jot since the days of Esculapius. Surgery has made wonderful strides, but medicine has stood still. True, they have increased the number of remedies, aye, a hundredfold, but the only result has been to complicate the system, without improving it.
What people need is fewer doctors, and more instruction in the art of preserving health.
Hygiene should form a part of our school curriculum. Children should be taught the mysteries of their own bodies, then the future generation would have little need of medical men-they would know what to do to regain their health, when assailed by sickness, instead of feeing a professional man to order them what to take.
My purpose in this work has been to show the people that they can, if they will, be their own physicians, and that in doing so, their chances of recovery are immeasurably greater—that the preservation of their health is in their own hands. The administering of drugs in sickness is illogical in its reasoning, unsound in its theory, and pernicious in its practice. Thoroughly cleansing the system by flushing the colon is a simple, common sense method of treatment, easy of application, thoroughly hygienic in theory, and, beyond all question, immensely beneficial in practice.
Thousands of grateful people can testify to its efficiency, frequently in cases where the “faculty” had abandoned all hope, and why? Because it assists Nature instead of thwarting it. The principal drawback under which the system has labored hitherto, has been the lack of perfect apparatus for the introduction of the cleansing stream, but I now have the satisfaction of introducing to the public a means for that purpose that leaves nothing to be desired. The J. B. L. Cascade is the most satisfactory and effective appliance for flushing the intestinal canal that has yet been invented.