Untiringly and without intermission—except during a few of the worst blizzards—he inculcates the doctrines of flies, in their relation to fingers and filth, and hurls Phillipics against mosquitoes, ticks, and the insect world generally—not forgetting bed-bugs, lice, and other disease-breeding vermin.
He extols the benefits of bathing, the rich rewards of fresh air, exercise, and the relief of constipation.
In fact, he takes pride in doing all that within him lies, in order to teach the world to do without him.
Thanks to doctors, we are learning about plumbing and posture, mastication and measles, outdoors, deep breathing, poisons and poise. We are finding out what bad teeth do to good health, how to work, play and sleep so as to get the greatest physical good from each.
We are warned against overweight, alcohol, common colds and tobacco, and the evil possibilities in marrying one’s cousin—or some one else’s cousin who has, or has had, syphilis, feeble-mindedness, a drunken ancestry, epilepsy, or some tendency to “hark back” and “revert to type”—as did Mendel’s beans, or the black Andalusian pullets.
The subject of life and health conservation is “in the air.” Only recently a president of the American Medical Association made this theme the subject of his inaugural address. Hardly a medical journal but has one or more articles devoted to it in each issue. We are being specifically instructed in how to avoid disease.
Now, however, we are to learn how, in many instances, diseases, many of them most grave and life-shortening, may be cured. This, by measures which conflict with no other form of treatment, and so simple as almost to appear ridiculous. For Dr. William H. FitzGerald, the discoverer of zone therapy, is to tell us how he instructs his patients, under his guidance and direction, to cure themselves.
Dr. FitzGerald’s position is one that commands respect. He is a graduate of the University of Vermont, and spent two and a half years in the Boston City Hospital. He served two years in the Central London Nose and Throat Hospital. For a like period he was in Vienna, where he was assistant to Professor Politzer and Professor Otto Chiari, who are known wherever medical text-books are read.
For several years Dr. FitzGerald has been the senior nose and throat surgeon of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, and is an active member of most of the American medical societies.
I have known Dr. FitzGerald for many years. He is able and honest, a skillful and competent surgeon, and a student. No matter how foolish, how ridiculous his methods may seem, they are most decidedly not the vaporings of a dreamer or a charlatan. They are the calmly digested findings of a trained scientific mind.