This method displaces entirely the old system of filling the body with poisonous drugs in order to counteract the effects of the disease. Such a system may suppress the symptoms by benumbing the nerves and preventing pain, it may counteract the natural process of healing of which inflammation, fever and pain, are the outward manifestations;—but it can never cure.
The discovery of dysaemia, or impaired blood supply, as the governing cause of disease, has destroyed another idol of modern fetish worship in medicine.
Since the discovery of various species of bacilli, which accompany nearly every form of disease in some form or other, these have been commonly declared to be the causes of diseases, and the tendency is to find some poison that will kill the bacilli in order to cure the disease.
The bacillus, on the contrary, is only the consequence, or symptom, of a disease. The diseased and decomposing parts furnish fertile soil suitable to the propagating of bacilli because of the lack of the normal chemical elements in the blood and tissue. But to kill them, while the underlying conditions for their reproduction remain unchanged, can, obviously, never effect a cure. So the great hopes that have attached to sero-therapy are doomed to disappointment, and the application of anti-toxins prepared from the serum of animals, are fated shortly to vanish in the wake of others of those strange temporary crazes which periodically obsess mankind for a while and pass away.
The discovery that a dysaemic condition of the blood leads to certain destructive processes termed diseases, was soon followed by the apprehension that one of the principal factors in bringing about such disturbance is predisposition,—in many cases heredity.
The term "Hereditary disease" signifies that the improper chemical composition of the blood of one or both parents is transmitted to the offspring, and that it causes in them likewise a degeneration of certain tissues and of the organs composed of those tissues.
The hygienic-dietetic system of healing does not, however, regard heredity as an invincible enemy, especially since my discovery of the "Law of the Cross-Transmission of Characteristics."
It is in the solution of this problem of "hereditary disease" that my system will eventually come into its own and will ere long be recognized as the most rational and effectual therapy ever applied since the beginning of the art of healing. It may be years before it is accorded the proverbially tardy acknowledgment of the "orthodox" schools, but that it will, nay must be eventually adopted is virtually a foregone conclusion—that is, if it be indeed the function or policy of the physician of the future to adequately seek to succour the suffering and regenerate the races of mankind. Of the physician of the present it can at best be said in Goethe's incisive words:
"Er halt die Theile in seiner Hand,
Doch fehlt ihm leider das gelst' ge Band."
He holds the parts within his hand,
But lacks the mental grasp of all.