Our health depends entirely upon the conditions of our life.
In cases of predisposition to disease, therefore, as well as in disease itself, according to the principles of hygiene, we must employ only the hygienic and dietetic methods of treatment.
Is the medical science of the day, then, totally incompetent? You may well ask.—Have the patient studies and researches of nearly two thousand four hundred years, since the days of Hippocrates, been all in vain?
The reply lies ready to your hand, from the lips of one of the brightest scientific spirits that ever illumined this dull earth of ours with knowledge and sincerity.
In Goethe's Faust the following lines are found,—lines which sad memory brings back to the minds of many an unfortunate who, according to the dictates of the medical science of today, is pronounced incurable—a sufferer from one or other of the so-called chronic diseases—and in dire need of both physical and spiritual support.
"I have, alas, philosophy,
Medicine, jurisprudence too,
And, to my cost, theology
With ardent labour studied through,
And here I stand with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before"
Like Faust, such sufferers study day and night the opinions of learned doctors and follow their prescriptions with ardent zeal. The more they study, the more doctors they consult, the more rapidly does strength fail them, until at length they realize that, in spite of all their lore, they are but "poor fools, no wiser than before."
For more than two thousand years it has been, in fact, as it is to a great extent today; the physician prescribes to the best of his knowledge, medicines compounded according to certain rules dogmatically laid down in the schools.
Here we have at once the fatal mistake at a glance.
Instead of studying nature and the laws of nature, instead of using natural means to heal disease, they administer deadly poisons to allay suffering, poisons, which doubtless may be able to repress pain or to temporarily suppress the symptoms of disease; but can never remove the cause, which alone may rightly be called healing.