1443 Cuyler Ave., Chicago, Ill.
This letter proves that my claims and assertions regarding the curability of diphtheria by natural methods are not extravagant or untrue. In this case, as in many others, I gave directions for treatment verbally and over the telephone without having seen the patient personally.
I am convinced, furthermore, that this patient would have made just as good a recovery without the osteopathic treatment. I recommended the attendance of an osteopathic physician in order to ease the burden of responsibility on the part of the parents. If the child had died, they would have been blamed by friends and relatives for their seeming foolhardiness.
The experience of Mr. White's neighbor is another proof of the fatal effect of the antitoxin treatment. The antitoxin "cured" the diphtheria, but-the child died!
Once more I repeat: The hydropathic treatment will give equally good results in appendicitis, meningitis, scarlet fever, and all other forms of acute diseases. If this be a fact, why should not my colleagues of the Regular School of Medicine give the hydropathic method a fair trial, the more so since in Germany, even among the physicians of the Regular School, hydropathy as a remedy is fast superseding antitoxin! Is it not worth while when the "mysterious sequelae" referred to by Dr. Osler, and the many cases of chronic invalidism which he does not connect with the disease or its treatment, might thus be avoided?
Chapter XVII
Vaccination
The pernicious aftereffects of vaccination upon the system are similar to those of the various serum and antitoxin treatments.
Jenner, an English barber and chiropodist, is usually credited with the discovery of vaccination. The doubtful honor, however, belongs in reality to an old Circassian woman who, according to the historian Le Duc, in the year 1672 startled Constantinople with the announcement that the Virgin Mary had revealed to her an unfailing preventive against the smallpox.
Her specific was inoculation with the genuine smallpox virus. But even with her the idea was not an original one, because the principle of isopathy (curing a disease with its own disease products) was explicitly taught a hundred years before that by Paracelsus, the great genius of the Renaissance of learning of the Middle Ages. But even he was only voicing the secret teachings of ancient folklore, sympathy healing and magic dating back to the Druids and Seers of ancient Britain and Germany.