Valere Aude: Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration. Louis Dechmann
of Health and Safety is the object of the projected course of study of which the following is the business proposition.
THE DARE TO BE HEALTHY CLUB
BUSINESS PROPOSITION
The course of study in connection with the above consists of
A SERIES OF ONE HUNDRED LESSONS
to be issued in weekly instalments, the whole course to extend over a period of two years.
Each lesson will consist, approximately, of some twenty-two to twenty-five full-sized pages (i.e. 25/28 lines of 8/12 words each) which will be mailed to every subscriber weekly prepaid.
It is necessary, in view of contingent expenses that a membership of One thousand subscribers should be obtained, as only when such an amount of support is guaranteed would the printing of the hundred lectures under the easy and advantageous terms offered be at all justified.
If, however, it should be represented to me by those most immediately interested, that it is their desire to Confine the Club to narrower limits, I might, though with some reluctance, consider the advisability of reducing the minimum membership to One hundred students provided that these should agree to contribute the sum total of the fees for the two years course in advance.
With every twentieth lesson will be forwarded to the subscriber, gratis, one of five well bound volumes of superior literary attraction and interest.
These five volumes are as follows:
ATLAS OF HUMAN ANATOMY (profusely illustrated with coloured plates and containing folding manikin) especially compiled for the student.
MANUAL OF PHYSIOLOGY, especially compiled for the student.
MANUAL OF PHYSIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, especially compiled for the student.
MANUAL OF BIOLOGICAL THERAPY, Dechmann's system, (500 pages).
MEDICAL DICTIONARY (pocket edition in flexible leather with gilt edges, giving 30,000 definitions.)
At the end of the course each student in good standing, will receive free of cost a Membership Diploma in the form of a beautifully artistic colour plate, the facsimile of which will appear herewith.
"Within the Bud; the Procreation of a Healthy, Happy, and Beautiful Child of the Desired Sex, by L. Dechmann, Biologist." This is a book of 302 pages, the paper bound edition retailing at $3.00, the edition de luxe at $5.00, can be obtained at any book store or direct from the author.
The above literature cannot be otherwise procured, and its cost actually amounts to nearly one-half the subscription for the entire course of lessons.
At the close of the course a beautiful engraved cover design for binding the 100 lessons may be obtained at the price of $1.00.
Separate file binders and perforators for the lessons, each cover holding some 300 pages, may be obtained at the nominal cost of about 50 cents each; one of these will be delivered free with the first lesson.
CELL-FOODS.
In addition to these advantages, all members of the Club will be entitled to procure any supplies they may need of the Dech-Manna Cell-Foods at special (wholesale) prices.
LOUIS DECHMANN.
Biologist and Physiological Chemist. 127 North 59th Street, Seattle, Wash., U.S.A.
THE BASIS OF PROCEEDINGS
of
THE DARE TO BE HEALTHY CLUB
In the ensuing pages I shall endeavour to give the reader a necessarily brief and cursory, glance into the subjects which will form the underlying motif of the vast and manifold deliberations which will constitute the fundamental basis of the projected course of study which will be brought under the consideration of the members of the proposed association and will constitute the schedule, as it were, of the periodical dissertations of these matters of world-wide and vital individual significance to be comprised in the Series of One Hundred Lessons.
I have been at some pains to avoid as far as possible the use of technical and professional phrases and terminology, for the express purpose of bringing within the scope of every faculty of understanding these subjects which are equally a matter of life and death importance to every man, woman and child, in all the wide and varied range of nationalities and languages which constitute so large a part of our great Republic and upon whose health and efficiency so much of our national life depends.
The great and ominous unrest, so much in evidence of late, is ample proof of a latent popular dissatisfaction with the conditions of life and it is equally significant of the prevailing nervous tension—the obvious result of malnutrition of the system—which is one of the most prominent popular features of the worry-worn denizen of today.
Life, Health, Happiness—that vital interdependent triad—are surely a preoccupation strong enough and precious enough to startle the minds of the most complacent; and it is with the object of awakening all to their possibilities—in health or in disease—of protection of the one, and hope and regeneration under the other, that the course of study has been inaugurated of which the following is but a bare outline.
MAN AS A UNIT.[A]
The human body is an accumulation of millions of separate cells, which are the bearers of life, and which in various groups form the different organs, the combined action of which constitutes our individual existence.
This existence itself is the natural issue of the existence of our predecessors, who generated the new life which will be transmitted by us and reappear in our offspring.
In like manner all the functions of the body form an endless chain in which not a single link must be faulty or missing, if healthy organic life is to continue.
This accumulation of cells, however, is by no means inactive. On the contrary, organic life is nothing but the constant dying of the old and the reconstruction of new cells; it means that we are in a perpetual condition of composition and consequently of decomposition throughout our entire being, its different parts and organs.
As soon as we are able to recognize this accumulation of cells as one individual whole and thus arrive at the idea of their absolute interdependence, we shall get rid of the prevalent idea, that the mere structural differences between the respective organs of the body make them separate and independent things which may be treated irrespective of one another in case of disease, or dealt with by different specialists.
We arrive then at the one great question: What is the cause of disease? Not of one or other form of disease or class of diseases, but of disease as a whole.
There is, in fact, only one disease.
What appear to us as different disturbances of the normal condition of our body, are only variations, in quantity or in quality, of the one thing. It is the variation of the controlling element which performs the necessary work of keeping the existing cells in proper condition and replacing those which in the course of nature are destroyed. In a word, the work of perpetual