it is superstitious in its origin, unsatisfactory in theory and practice, and useless and dangerous in its character.” He testified before the British Royal Commission on Vaccination that in his opinion vaccination affords no protection whatever. He has written several books on the subject.
If germs are not the cause of disease, then what is? To this Dr. J. H. Tilden, of Denver, one of the most distinguished of those who do not accept the germ theory of disease as true, makes answer as follows. I quote excerpts taken here and there from his writings in A Stuffed Club Magazine on the subject of the causes and cure of disease, the germ theory, contagion and infection, and immunity.
“Disease is brought about by obstructions and inhibitions of vital processes…. The basis is chronic auto-intoxication from food poisoning. It is brought about by abusing the body in many ways … by living wrongly in whatever way…. Bad habits of living enervate—weaken—the body, and in consequence elimination is impaired…. The inability of the organism to rid itself of waste products brings on auto-toxemia. This systemic derangement is ready at all times to join with exciting causes to create anything from a pimple to a brain abscess and from a cold to consumption. Without this derangement, injuries and such contingent influences as are named exciting causes would fail to create disease. This is the constitutional derangement that is necessary before we can have such local manifestations as tonsillitis, pneumonia, and appendicitis…. Every disease is looked upon as an individuality; which is no more the truth than that words are made up of letters independent of the alphabet. As truly as that every word must go back to the alphabet for its letter elements, so must every disease go back to auto-toxemia for its initial elements…. There can be no independent organic action in health or disease.”
If drugs, serums, etc., do not cure disease, what does? Correcting whatever habits caused it; for instance, eating too much, bolting food, neglect of bathing, ventilation, and exercise, harboring worry, jealousy, or other destructive emotions, and living on a haphazard dietary of carelessly and ignorantly cooked foods. “Nature cures when there is any curing done, but nature
must have help by way of removal of obstructions to normal functioning.” There is nothing spectacular about a real cure. It means self-discipline.
“Germs are in all bodies in health and in disease…. I do not recognize them as a primary or real cause of disease any more than drafts or any such so-called causes; at most germs can be only exciting causes…. They are innocent until made noxious by their environment. They are victims and partakers of it. They act upon it and are reacted upon by it. As they must be amenable to environmental law, the same as everything else, they necessarily change when their environment changes. Because of a change in their habitat, the germs that are native change from a non-toxic state into one of toxicity…. They are not something extraneous to the human organism, but are the products of lowered vitality in the individual, of lost resistance…. Microbes are toxic when the fluids of their habitat have become toxic—when the resistance of the body has fallen below the point at which the fluids maintain their chemico-physiological equilibrium and decomposition sets in; it is at this stage that germs multiply rapidly; they absorb the poison that is generating, and it is not strange that their products are poisonous, for the changed bodily fluids on which they feed are toxic…. My theory is that the toxicity of germs is due to being saturated with poisonous gases. The germs of typhoid fever, for example, are not poisonous until the patient is sufficiently broken down to cause the generation of toxic gases, after which all the fluids and solids of the body take on a septic state, poisoned by the absorbed gas…. Bacteria are not the cause of disease; wrong living, which puts the system into such a condition that the bacteria can readily multiply, is the real cause; the bacteria are simply necessary results…. Germs are scavengers. When an environment becomes crowded with them, it means that there is a great accumulation of waste in a state of decay…. They are normal to a certain limit in our bodies. If they become more numerous, common sense and reason would say that they must be a necessary factor in the process of elimination, or, if not a necessary factor, lost resistance has permitted them to multiply
beyond the restrictions set to them by an ideal physical condition or normal resistance.”
To those who accept the germ theory, it seems that there must be specific germs to account for the different types of disease. The leaders among those who reject it are able to explain satisfactorily without it why all sick people do not have the same disease. They give as the reasons for variation geographical location, the domestic and local environment, the season of the year, atmospheric conditions (e. g., hot, humid weather favoring putrefaction both in the digestive tract and in animal and vegetable matter outside it), defective anatomism, congenital or acquired, injuries, age, occupation, temperament, food, habits, and mode of living.
“Immunization means that normal alkalinity of the fluids of the body exists…. Health is the only immunity against disease. If there is any state that man can be put into that will cause him to be less liable to come under disease-producing influences than full health, then law and order is not supreme and the world must be the victim of caprice, haphazard, and chance.”
“Epidemics and endemics feed upon the auto-toxemic and stop where there are none…. The belief of the medical profession that contagion and infection pass from one human being to another—from a sick man to a healthy man—is an old superstition unworthy of this age. Disease will not go from person to person, unless they are in a physical condition that renders them susceptible and unless environmental states favor decomposition—those of the household and the general atmosphere where the proper amount of oxygen is deficient. So-called contagious and infectious diseases are self-limited. If it were not for this self-limitation, the world would be depopulated every time an epidemic of a severe character succeeds in getting a start. But the medical profession believes that vaccination and antitoxin do what nature has been doing since the world began, namely, set a limit to the spread of disease.”