I know medicine is called a science. It is nothing like a science. It is a great humbug! Doctors are mere empirics when they are not charlatans. We are as ignorant as men can be. Who knows anything in the world about medicine? Gentlemen, you have done me the honour to come here to attend my lectures, and I must tell you now, frankly, in the beginning, that I know nothing about medicine, nor do I know anyone who does know anything about it. Nature does a great deal, imagination does a great deal, doctors do devilish little when they do not do harm. Sick people always feel they are neglected, unless they are well drugged, les imbéciles!
Professor Magendie (before the students of his class in “The Allopathic College of Paris”).
In the year 1871, the writer was sent from Paris to Schwalbach, by Dr. Beylard, and recommended to the care of Dr. Adolph Genth. She said to the physician, “I wish for your opinion and your advice, if you can give it to me without giving me any medicine.” He replied, “With all my heart, madam; and I wish to God there were more women like you, but we should soon lose most of our patients if we did not dose them.”
This is a terrible excuse for the use of those agencies which Dr. John Good says have sent more human beings to their graves than war, pestilence and famine combined. Keely holds the opinion that Nature works under the one law of Compensation and Equilibrium—the law of Harmony; and that when disease indicates the disturbance of this law Nature at once seeks to banish the disease by restoring equilibrium, He seeks to render assistance on the same plan; replacing grossly material agencies by the finer forces of nature; as has been so successfully done by Dr. Pancoast and Dr. Babbitt in America.
“Nature,” says Dr. Pancoast, author of The True Science of Light, “works by antagonism in all her operations: when one of her forces overdoes its work, disease, or at least a local disorder, is the immediate consequence; now, if we attack this force, and overcome it, the opposite force has a clear field and may re-assert its rights—thus equilibrium is restored, and Equilibrium is health. The Sympathetic System, instead of attacking the stronger force, sends recruits to the weaker one, and enables it to recover its powers; or, if the disorder be the result of excessive tension of Nerves or Ganglia, a negative remedy may be employed to reduce the tension. Thus, too, equilibrium is restored.”
Dr. Hartmann writes:—
Mr. Keely is perfectly right in saying that ‘all disease is a disturbance of the equilibrium between positive and negative forces.’ In my opinion, no doctor ever cured any disease. All he can possibly do is to establish conditions under which the patient (or nature) may cure himself.
If you enter the field of therapeutics and medicine, we find a decided fermentation of new ideas; not among the fossil specimens of antediluvian quackery, but among those who are called “irregulars,” because they have the courage to depart from the tracks trodden out by their predecessors. The more intelligent classes of physicians have long ago realized the fact that drugs and medicines are perfectly useless, excepting in cases where diseases can be traced to some mechanical obstruction, in some organ that may be reached by mechanical action. In all other cases our best physicians have become agnostics, leaving nature to have her own way, and observing the expectative method, which, in fact, is no method of cure at all, but merely consists in doing no harm to the patient. Recently, however, light, electricity, and magnetism have been employed; so that even in the medical guild the finer forces of nature are taking the place of grossly material, and therefore injurious substances. The time is probably near when these finer forces will be employed universally. Everybody knows that a note struck upon an instrument will produce sound in a correspondingly attuned instrument in its vicinity. If connected with a tuning fork, it will produce a corresponding sound in the latter; and if connected with a thousand such tuning forks, it will make all the thousand sound, and produce a noise far greater than the original sound, without the latter becoming any weaker for it. Here, then, is an augmentation or multiplication of power. If we had any means to transform sound again into mechanical motion, we would have a thousand-fold multiplication of mechanical motion. It would be presumptuous to say that it will not be as easy for the scientists of the future to transform sound into mechanical motion, as it is for the scientist of the present to transform heat into electricity. Perhaps Mr. Keely has already solved the problem. There is a fair prospect that in the very near future, we shall have, in his ethereal force, a power far surpassing that of steam or electricity. Nor does the idea seem to be Utopian if we remember that modern science heretofore only knew the law of the conservation of energy; while to the scientist of the future the law of the augmentation of energy will be unveiled …. As the age which has passed away has been the age of steam, the coming era will be the age of induction. There will be a universal rising up of lower vibrations into higher ones, in the realm of motion. Mr. Keely will, perhaps, transform sound into mechanical motion by applying the law of augmentation and multiplication of force.”…
Keely, writing on brain disturbance, says, In considering the mental forces as associated with the physical, I find, by my past researches, that the convolutions which exist in the cerebral field are entirely governed by the sympathetic conditions that surround them.