Valere Aude: Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration. Louis Dechmann
to the regular food, the missing chemical elements in organic form; and medical science has but to determine which elements are wanting, and consequently, must be supplied.
It goes without saying that in this system the old, pernicious drug method of filling the body with various poisons to counteract the effects or symptoms of disease, has no place whatever. Certain poisonous drugs may prove effective to suppress certain symptoms by benumbing the nerves and preventing pain; they may, and do counteract the natural process by which nature exercises her power in various ways in the spontaneous effort to throw off disease, in the form of inflammations, fevers or pains; but they can never heal, or eradicate disease.
With the discovery of dysaemia as the governing cause of disease, another idol of regular medicine has been cast down.
Since the discovery of the bacillus or microbe, which in varied form accompanies nearly every variety of disease, it has become a dogma of the at present dominant school of medicine that the various bacilli are the actual causes of the different varieties of disease, and the tendency has been to find some poison that would kill the bacilli in order to heal the disease.
The truth is that the bacillus is not the cause, but the effect of disease; in fact is nothing but another consequence or symptom of a specific form of disease. Bacilli grow spontaneously in the ready soil which the diseased and decomposing tissues provide, through lack of the necessary chemical elements; but to attempt to exterminate them, while the underlying conditions for their reproduction remain unchanged, can, of course, never bring about healing.
And thus the high hopes and claims attached to the sero-therapy inocculation process, the injection into the blood of anti-toxins prepared with the serum of animals, have positively vanished.
Hundreds of thousands of human beings have perished in the course of this delusion; but countless numbers will have cause, yet in our day, to rejoice at the exposure of the stupid and unnatural theory, so long legally enforced, that the introduction into the human system of such poisonous substances could remove or overcome the natural consequences of constitutional disease.
HEREDITY.
The discovery that a diseased condition of the blood leads to certain bodily disturbances which we call disease, was soon followed by the realization of the fact that one of the main conditions which bring about such disturbances is predisposition, which in many cases is hereditary.
"Hereditary disease" simply means that the improper chemical composition of the blood of one or both parents has become duplicated in the offspring, and that it has similar consequences in causing the degeneration of certain tissues, and consequently of the organs composed thereof, as may have been the case in the parents.
It is at least reassuring to know, however, that to the modern hygienic-dietetic system of healing, heredity, though perhaps more tenacious, is by no means an invincible enemy.
With a predisposition to disease the child acquires also the hereditary tendency to self-protection, and thus rational hygienic-dietetic treatment may be able to eliminate, in a comparatively short time, the chain of diseases which in former years, generations have carried hopelessly to the grave.
HEALING.
It has been already stated that healing, under the modern hygienic-dietetic system, means supplying to the blood such chemical elements as will replace what are missing in defective tissues of the body.
I will now outline the methods of carrying it into effect.
In a general way there are three means of doing this:
No. 1. Diet: The first and most natural way is by proper diet.
As the normal chemical elements are introduced into the body as constituents of the regular daily food, the task which, in the first place, confronts the hygienic-dietetic physician is that of regulating the quantity, quality and description of food.
Too little importance has heretofore been given to this question and, beyond prohibiting certain dishes and obviously detrimental viands, little attention was paid by the average physician to the matter of the every-day nourishment of the patient.
The hygienic-dietetic physician on the other hand, employs the utmost care in giving to the patient everything that will help to regenerate his blood, laying particular stress on such foods as contain the largest proportion of the chemical elements that are missing in the affected tissues.
No. 2. Nutritive compositions: The process of destruction, however, which has to be met, in more or less advanced stages, in nearly every case requires supply, in quantity of the pure material to compensate the deficiency of the missing elements, beyond that which could be derived in the ordinary way of digestion from every-day food.
To meet this difficulty, certain condensed preparations have been devised.
These nutritive compositions contain only such chemical elements in like chemical proportions as exist in the human body. They are of the purest material and contain no injurious elements whatsoever, while they foster that general regeneration of the blood which will finally bring about a complete cure.
No. 3. Physical treatments: It is the object of these treatments to assist the proper circulation of the blood; to automatically open the pores of the skin for the external treatment of certain diseases; to withdraw elements of disease from the body, and to introduce certain material influences, through the pores.
Massage, gymnastics, ablutions, various kinds of baths and "packs," constitute the chief features of the healing methods in this department.
Following this general explanation of the system, I may now go a little deeper into the question of the constituent elements, the tissues formed therefrom, the degeneration of these tissues, and the species of degeneration which constitutes the various forms of disease commonly known to us.
After this I will give a concise and simple general idea as to how my methods should be applied.
THE UNITY OF NATURE.
To fully understand the method of healing which I apply, it is necessary to understand one of the great natural laws, the discovery of which by the great chemists, Justus von Liebig and Julius Hensel, has shown us the path along which to proceed.
This law demonstrates that, in the last analysis, nature is a unit, a composition of a number of elements, each one possessing distinct qualities, the combination of which produces the various manifestations of life.
These are classified, for convenience, according to their main qualities, as minerals, plants or animals.
All of them are closely interrelated and one transmits the basic elements to the other. It is the plant which draws the mineral elements from the soil, and after certain processes of composition conveys them as food to the animal, including the human being, while such animal substances as are used for human food, contribute the balance of the elements for the upbuilding of the human body.
It is a matter of comparatively new discovery that minerals are thus just as important as a component part of the body and of its food as are other basic chemical elements.
The discovery as to the mineral constituents of the body, their nature, proportion and in which composition and in which quantity as necessary ingredients of the different body tissues, in order that they may become a part of the organism, has made it possible to administer them to the diseased body in the purest condensed and most effective way in nutritive compositions, while their proportionate existence in food is also a criterion of diet, not only for the sick, but also as a preventative of disease.
THE CHEMICAL PROCESS OF DISEASE.
In this, my scrutiny of nature's deep designs, I did not rest content when only the composition of all the tissues of the body had been laid bare; but I delved deeper and discovered that certain electric currents and reactions of these