Nature Cure by Henry Lindlahr (best short books to read txt) 📕

These people invariably recalled that they had been infested with parasites at some previous time, and that strong antiseptics, mercurial salves, or other means of suppression had been applied.

We prescribe for the removal of lice only cold water and the comb. Even antiseptic soaps should be avoided.

The Results of Suppression of Children’s Diseases

Sycotic eruptions on the heads and bodies of infants, also called milk scurf, if suppressed by salves, cream, unsalted butter or merely by warm bathing, are often followed by chorea (St. Vitus’ dance), epilepsy, a scrofulous constitution and in later life by tuberculosis.

Measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, spinal meningitis and other febrile diseases of childhood, if properly treated by natural methods, are curative or at least corrective in their effects on the system, and represent well-defined, orderly natural processes for the elimination of inherited or acquired disease taints, drug poisons, etc. But if arrested or suppressed before they have run their natural course, before Nature has had time to reestablish normal conditions, then the abnormal condition becomes fixed and permanent (chronic).

In addition to this, the poisons and serums employed to arrest the disease process very often affect vital parts and organs permanently, causing the gradual deterioration of cells and tissues, and paving the way for tuberculosis, chronic affection of the kidneys, cancer, etc., in later years.

These self-evident facts, which can be verified by any unprejudiced observer, account for the “mysterious sequelae” of drug-and serum-treated acute diseases, which never occur where natural methods of healing have been correctly employed. Some of these chronic aftereffects are deafness, blindness, heart and kidney diseases, nervous affections, idiocy, infantile paralysis, etc.

These are merely a few ordinary examples of the results of suppression. They could be multiplied a hundred fold, yet medical science assures us that the causes of cancer and other malignant diseases are unknown.

Good Nature Cure Doctrine from an Allopathic Authority

The following utterances of the late Dr. Nicholas Senin strongly confirm our claims as to the nature and cure of disease. Coming from the lips of a celebrated surgeon and physician, these statements should carry some weight with those who, being unable to reason for themselves, worship at the feet of “authority.” The quotations referred to are taken from the report of an interview granted by the doctor to Chicago newspaper representatives on his return from his trip around the world.

[Chicago American, August 5th, 1906.]

GERMS PLANTED BY TIGHT LACING

Over-Feeding and Over-Dressing Given as Causes of Cancer

“Dr. Nicholas Senn brought back from Africa, from whence he returned to Chicago yesterday, confirmations of his belief that cancer is a ‘civilized’ disease.

“Dr. Senn spent from $2,000 to $3,000 worth of time—at the cash value per hour of his time on his first day at home for four months, telling a half dozen newspaper men more than all the world, except himself and a score of specialists like him, know about the fearful disease. He summed up his own learning in the statement that the disease is still incurable except by the knife in its incipient stages and that the best preventive is clean, plain living.

“His investigations of the natives of Africa served to strengthen his conviction that cancer is a product of civilization, ‘like apoplexy and scores of other exotic ailments,’ Dr. Senn said. He could not find or hear of a case of cancer among the ‘Hamites,’ as he termed them. And from the fact that he found the disease, to be an unknown one to the Esquimaux of Greenland, he is assured that climate has nothing whatever to do with it. Climate did not cause it, and climate will not cure it.”

Cancer Caused by Over-Living

“‘The nearer the human race approaches the animals in habits and particularly in the matter of diet and dress, the freer it is from cancer,’ he said. ‘Cancer comes from over-feeding and over-living.

“‘Drinking, gourmandizing, unnatural habits of women, like lacing, all those things help to plant the seeds of cancer in the child.

“‘And as we have not learned to cure it the best thing to do is to prevent it when we can. If children were brought up in simplicity by natural mothers; then, if care should be taken to prevent hypernutrition, there would be much less danger from cancer. Cancer itself is an over-fed thing—tissue that never matures, for if I could mature the cells I could cure the disease. The thing for people to do who fear they may have inherited it, is to live simply—there are many cases among people with a tendency to obesity to one among those of a scanty habit of living—and particularly to remove all sources of irritation, like bad teeth, tobacco, and clothes that chafe.’”

Studies African Race

“Besides his hobby, as he calls it, Dr. Senn studied the African generally in his voyage along the East Coast of that continent.

“‘It was a fine trip,’ he said, ‘with so many things to learn. Ethnologically I am certain Africans are of common stock. The negro is a negro wherever you find him. From Kaffir to Bushman and pygmy they are all Hamites.

“‘They are mostly a fine people physically, lean and tall, except the dwarfs. There is little tendency toward obesity; they have no apoplexy, no distended veins as we have in civilization. Hence their freedom from cancer. They live naturally, and are vegetarians mostly, while the Northern Esquimaux are meat-eaters, but both races eat naturally to sustain life, hence their immunity from that disease. It is where eating is made an art that cancer is most prevalent.

“‘They are free from many other diseases that pester us also. Tuberculosis is hardly known, and only along the coast, where it has been taken by the whites. The real curse of the coast country is malaria. It is bad all up and down the East shore. I kept away from it myself by taking five grains of quinine and the juice of a lemon once a day on an empty stomach. That is a good remedy for malaria, for in all my running around I have never had it.”

(Editor’s Note.—Dr. Senn died January 2, 1908. The papers stated after his death, that the doctor had never been well since the return from his long voyage, that his heart and nervous system had been seriously affected by the altitudes of the Andes and of other mountains. We wonder whether the “high altitudes” or the “five grains of quinine daily” were to blame for the celebrated physician’s heart disease and death.)

Suppression, the Cause of Chronic Diseases

Dr. Senn was right. If men and women lived more naturally, the majority of diseases would disappear.

The primary cause of disease is violation of Nature’s Laws. “Civilization” has largely stood for artificiality of life and for unnatural habits. A higher civilization, yet to come, will combine the most exquisite culture of heart and mind with true simplicity and naturalness of living. Excessive meat eating, strong spices and condiments, alcohol, coffee, tea, overwork, night work, fear, worry, sensuality, corsets, high heels, foul air, improper breathing, lack of exercise, loveless marriages, race suicide, all of these and many other evils of hypercivlization have contributed their share in creating the universal degeneracy of civilized nations commented upon by Dr. Senn.

When the unnatural habits of life alluded to have lowered the vitality and favored the accumulation of waste matter and poisons to such an extent that the sluggish bowels, kidneys, skin and the other organs of elimination are unable to keep a clean house, Nature has to resort to other, more radical means of purification or we should choke in our own impurities. These forcible housecleanings of Nature are colds, catarrh, skin eruptions, diarrheas, boils, ulcers, abnormal perspiration, hemorrhages and many other forms of inflammatory febrile diseases.

Sulphur and mercury may drive back the skin eruptions, antipyretics and antiseptics may suppress fever and catarrh. The patient and the doctor may congratulate themselves on a speedy cure; but what is the true state of affairs? Nature has been thwarted in her work of healing and cleansing. She had to give up the fight against disease matter in order to combat the more potent poisons of mercury, quinine, iodine, strychnine, etc. The disease matter is still in the system, plus the drug poison.

Proof positive of the retention of drug poisons in the organism is furnished by the Diagnosis from the Eye. This will be explained more fully in another chapter.

When vitality has been sufficiently restored, Nature may make another attempt at purification, this time, possibly, in another direction; but again her well-meant efforts are defeated. This process of suppression is repeated over and over again until blood and tissues become so loaded with waste material and poisons that the healing forces of the organism can no longer react against them by acute diseases. Then results the chronic condition, which in the vocabulary of the “Old School” of medicine is only another name for incurable disease.

The more skilled the allopathic school becomes in the suppression and prevention of acute diseases by drugs, knife, x-rays, serums, vaccination virus, etc., the greater will be the increase of chronic dyspepsia, nervous prostration, insanity, locomotor ataxy, paresis, cancer, secondary and tertiary syphilis, tuberculosis and many other so-called incurable diseases. Thus, the standard medical practice is self-supporting; the treatment of acute conditions assuring a lifelong supply of chronic conditions for the doctor to treat.

Suppression of acute diseases, by drugs and knife, is the all-important factor in the creation of malignant diseases which Dr. Senn had overlooked in his discourse on the causes of distructive ailments. If he had steudied his experiences in foreign lands in the light of these explanations he would have found that these scourges of mankind exist only in those parts of earth where the drug store flourishes.

These statements may seem exaggerated; but allow me to cite a few typical cases of suppression and their effects upon the system from our daily practice.

Paresis, locomotor ataxy and paralysis agitans are not, as is usually assumed, due to secondary and tertiary syphilis, but to the mercury administered for the cure of luetic and other diseases. In less than six months’ time we cure the so-called specific diseases by our natural methods, provided they are not suppressed and complicated by mercury, iodine or other poisonous drugs. We never interfere with the original lesion, but allow Nature to discharge the poisons through the channels established for this purpose.

Under this rational treatment, discharge and ulcer act as fontanels to the system. Not only the specific poison, but much of hereditary and acquired disease matter also are eliminated in the process; and after such a cure, blood and tissues of the patient are purer than they were before infection.

The foregoing statement has nothing to do with the moral aspects involved in acquiring venereal diseases. In this connection we are dealing solely with the rational or irrational treatment of the infection after it has been contracted. We do not wish to intimate that it is advisable to cure the body by killing the soul.

Nevertheless, we must deal with the facts in Nature as we find them. Furthermore, a great many persons, especially women and children, acquire these diseases innocently. Are we not justified in relieving their minds of needless fear and in showing them the way to prevent the dreadful sufferings of the secondary and tertiary stages brought on by suppressive drug treatment by means of mercury, the iodides, “606,” etc.?

These poisonous drugs suppress the initial lesion and diffuse the disease poison through the system. Nature takes up the work of elimination by means of skin eruptions and ulcers in various parts of the body, but these also are promptly suppressed with mercurial ointments and other alternatives. This process of suppression is continued for months and years, until the organism is so thoroughly saturated with alterative