Valere Aude: Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration

by Louis Dechmann

"Infantile Paralysis cannot be cured by means of medicines. The physician must of necessity limit his ministrations to easing the pain, providing for easy movement of the bowels and so forth, but otherwise he must let nature take its course."

Medical reference books vaguely define the disease with diverse and indefinite theories, showing that science on the subject is practically mute.

But the medically "unprofessional," random remark of the New York press-man has exactly hit the mark: "Let nature take its course."

The fact is that nothing very clear or absolute can be said about Infantile Paralysis; for observation shows that it is apparently a matter of racial conditions and environment and that only from the general application of the Laws of Nature, as taught by biology can we reasonably hope to solve the problem or cure the disease.

As the result of careful study of many cases I simply confirmed the fact that Infantile Paralysis belongs strictly to the class in which in the foregoing chapter I have placed it, and is subject to the same rules, influences and treatment. In most of the cases treated I have not failed to discover the existence of spinal trouble in one or other of the parents. This, engendering predisposition to similar complaints in the children of the opposite sex, which, acted upon by the irritants bred of poor or irrational nutriment and unhygienic environment in greater or lesser degree, results in attacks of this disease, in plain or epidemic form as the case may be, to which all children so predisposed are liable. Thus, incidentally, is my recently discovered "Law of the Cross-Transmission of Characteristics" amply verified.

As to the cause which leads to the development of this predisposition in the children, the answer, of course, is improper nourishment; and amongst the contributory causes I would specially indicate, "Pasteurized" and "sterilized" milk which has been absolutely banned by science on the basis of Physical Chemistry, according to which it was definitely proved in a report laid before the Paris Academy of Sciences, that valuable bone-forming ingredients in the milk, (a combination of carbonic and phosphoric lime,) are lost in course of Pasteurization, since at the temperature necessary for the process they are transmuted by heat into insoluble elements, (phosphate and carbonate of lime) which, precipitated by chemical action, either drop to the bottom in sediment or cling to the surface coating and, in either case, are eliminated and lost to the child to an extent which constitutes a serious deterioration in its food and one likely in any case to promote rickets. Milk also contains important constituents which change into necessary food elements in the course of natural fermentation—gelatine for instance—which being, as has been shown, so vital a factor in the building up of tissue, it needs no argument to prove the disastrous consequences its depletion must engender in the child and it may be likewise safely left to the intelligence of the reader to grasp the obvious fact that for the prevention or healing of Infantile Paralysis the one and only safeguard is Regeneration through the course already indicated of Hygienic-Dietetic treatment which will, if applied beforehand, eliminate the tendency to disease or, in the event of its occurrence, will conduct it along safe and natural lines to a quick recovery.

This brief sketch of the subject must suffice for the present purpose but a special article[C] with full and interesting details has been devoted to the subject, which will appear in my greater work, "Regeneration or Dare to be Healthy."

"FACIAL DIAGNOSIS" AND "THE CLINICAL EYE."

It is an incident common to the experience of all Natural Hygienic Physicians for the patient to exclaim in quasi protest: "But Doctor! How can you tell?"

Accustomed to the pompous pantomime of the orthodox physician—the gold watch and chain trick, while pulse and tongue reveal their hidden records—and then the well known questions which call forth the personal predilection in the fashion of disease and diet, (prescriptions which are often not untinged by the physician's own proclivities), at first the patient misses the old familiar presence. If ill he must be, he expects that the process should proceed from the outset on the old accustomed, "strictly respectable" lines, and something like resentment stirs him when, in place of questioning, a physician presumes to tell him at a glance the substance of his malady unasked.