It is the general knowledge of the existence of this sentiment which has called into being the present epidemic of curious cults and catholicons—due, it would appear, more to this insidious temptation to such commercial enterprise than to any other cause—and which form so prominent a feature throughout all sections of the community—and especially in the press—throughout the length and breadth of the land. To such, in an alarming degree, the public turns, in protest, as it were, against the tyranny and turpitude of this "learned profession," with its kindred corporations and its studied callous disregard of scientific advancement in any direction which might tend to jeopardize or reduce the profitable exercise of its own obsolete methods, its system of poisonous medicaments, and dangerous operations and anti-toxins.
There is no possible efficacy or help to be derived from other teachings, whatsoever they may be, except from those based absolutely upon the solid foundation of biological fact. Since Johannes Müller (1833) wrote the first book on physiology and its chemistry, more than a thousand so-called "Authorities" in that branch of science have tried to find some of the secrets of nature pertaining to physiology. A very few (about 10 or 12) may be named as great men who discovered certain laws and solved certain problems. But the majority added nothing to Müller's discoveries. Most of them became teachers or authors, one plagiarizing the work of the other, eulogy being very liberally distributed on all sides, but valuable deductions from the great masters, very few have been able to make, and even those were more or less suppressed by the "orthodox school." In less than half the time since 1833, i.e. 85 years, it was my good fortune to give more valuable deductions and practical applications to the student and the reader, than the mediocre talents of the "old school" were able to give.
I pretend to no miracles and expect none; nor do I arrogate to myself any so-called super-natural secrets or powers; I simply maintain that, aided by the erudition of the great scientists of the past and present, this system has finally been brought to a point which should rightly have been always the chief aim of Medical Science, namely, an exact knowledge of human nature and the human organism, as it is.
With this vital knowledge at command I have been able to successfully formulate a system for supplying the individual organism with any of the various constituents of which it may be deficient, in a manner in which it can best receive and assimilate the same, thereby maintaining a correct balance between the constituents of the blood wherein lies hidden the sole criterion of health and the fatal secret of disease.
Simple as this may sound, the way has been long and lonely until that elusive goal was reached; and, even now, in the heat of the controversy which ensues, we find ourselves sometimes in a somewhat parlous position, placed, as it were, between two fires; on the one side are those who, though not without sympathetic feeling for the well-intentioned, earnest-minded believers in the errors now being exposed, yet cast aside all scruples in the interest of humanity and truth. On the other side are those obsessed by care and compunction for these accredited practitioners who by reason of age or temperament are unable or unwilling to assimilate new ideas or to relinquish the theories of a life time in order to enter the field of competition with the men of a younger generation.
Such is the impasse before which we stand.