Valere Aude: Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration. Louis Dechmann
Müller's discoveries. Most of them became teachers or authors, one plagiarizing the work of the other, eulogy being very liberally distributed on all sides, but valuable deductions from the great masters, very few have been able to make, and even those were more or less suppressed by the "orthodox school." In less than half the time since 1833, i.e. 85 years, it was my good fortune to give more valuable deductions and practical applications to the student and the reader, than the mediocre talents of the "old school" were able to give.
I pretend to no miracles and expect none; nor do I arrogate to myself any so-called super-natural secrets or powers; I simply maintain that, aided by the erudition of the great scientists of the past and present, this system has finally been brought to a point which should rightly have been always the chief aim of Medical Science, namely, an exact knowledge of human nature and the human organism, as it is.
With this vital knowledge at command I have been able to successfully formulate a system for supplying the individual organism with any of the various constituents of which it may be deficient, in a manner in which it can best receive and assimilate the same, thereby maintaining a correct balance between the constituents of the blood wherein lies hidden the sole criterion of health and the fatal secret of disease.
Simple as this may sound, the way has been long and lonely until that elusive goal was reached; and, even now, in the heat of the controversy which ensues, we find ourselves sometimes in a somewhat parlous position, placed, as it were, between two fires; on the one side are those who, though not without sympathetic feeling for the well-intentioned, earnest-minded believers in the errors now being exposed, yet cast aside all scruples in the interest of humanity and truth. On the other side are those obsessed by care and compunction for these accredited practitioners who by reason of age or temperament are unable or unwilling to assimilate new ideas or to relinquish the theories of a life time in order to enter the field of competition with the men of a younger generation.
Such is the impasse before which we stand.
REGENERATION OF THE RACE
BY THE LIGHT OF BIOLOGY AIDED BY PHYSIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY.
"For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: … whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it."
(St. Paul, I Corinthians, XII. 12 & 26.)
"DYSAEMIA, or Impure Blood is the cause and source of disorder in all constitutional diseases. So spoke the Master. Believe it who will, that, in a nutshell, is 'the burden of my song'—the Alpha and Omega of my teaching."
(From Chapter X. "Dare to be Healthy.")
The Process of Natural Healing is the art of curing diseases by natural methods.
As natural remedies, only those may be included which stand as vital conditions in constant relation to the organism, assimilable thereby.
Among these are no poisons or chemical preparations, such as were promulgated by Paracelsus and the medicasters; for these are elements abnormal to the body, and call forth its reactionary powers, and so, being useless, they are eliminated; or, after having served an improper purpose, to suppress some symptom of disease, they become embedded in the tissues, there causing various forms of medicinal complication or morbid condition.
Do we not produce blood poisons enough by our irrational diet and modes of living? The human body is a microcosm—a world in minature—and as such, exists in constant interchange with universal nature.
A definite relationship exists between it and the solid, fluid and gaseous elements.
Solid food, water and air, elements of the universe, must become elements of our bodies, if relations of universal unity are to be maintained.
There must be a constant interchange of organic matter, and this inter-transmission is the cause of life, of health, and of disease; therefore, we must first of all see that the conditions of this process are uninterrupted.
Food, air, water, light, exercise, must be so provided that they condition the process of nutrition and metamorphosis.
Skin, lungs, kidneys, intestines, must always be in condition to eliminate the abnormal products of decomposition.
If then disease be a derangement of the life process, it is self-evident that disease is not confined to one organ alone, but that the whole body is diseased.
The body, thus, being in fact an indivisible unity, the treatment we employ in disease must, logically, act upon it as a united whole.
The modern school of medicine in its present, bacteria ridden frame of mind or mania, looks upon the bacillus, or microbe, as the sole cause of disease.
The cause, however, is not the bacillus, but rather the impure blood which prepares a fertile soil for the development of those destructive germs.
He who lives strictly in accordance with the rules of hygiene need not fear the bacillus, for man is not born to sickness; he creates sickness for himself by his irrational mode of living.
What does the world profit by bacteriological institutions if the people continue to live in the old sins against health and hygiene?
Man may be born with a predisposition to disease, but not with disease itself.
Our health depends entirely upon the conditions of our life.
In cases of predisposition to disease, therefore, as well as in disease itself, according to the principles of hygiene, we must employ only the hygienic and dietetic methods of treatment.
Is the medical science of the day, then, totally incompetent? You may well ask.—Have the patient studies and researches of nearly two thousand four hundred years, since the days of Hippocrates, been all in vain?
The reply lies ready to your hand, from the lips of one of the brightest scientific spirits that ever illumined this dull earth of ours with knowledge and sincerity.
In Goethe's Faust the following lines are found—lines which sad memory brings back to the minds of many an unfortunate who, according to the dictates of the medical science of today, is pronounced incurable—a sufferer from one or other of the so-called chronic diseases—and in dire need of both physical and spiritual support.
"I have, alas, philosophy,
Medicine, jurisprudence too,
And, to my cost, theology
With ardent labour studied through,
And here I stand with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before"
Like Faust, such sufferers study day and night the opinions of learned doctors and follow their prescriptions with ardent zeal. The more they study, the more doctors they consult, the more rapidly does strength fail them, until at length they realize that, in spite of all their lore, they are but "poor fools, no wiser than before."
For more than two thousand years it has been, in fact, as it is to a great extent today; the physician prescribes to the best of his knowledge, medicines compounded according to certain rules dogmatically laid down in the schools.
Here we have at once the fatal mistake at a glance.
Instead of studying nature and the laws of nature, instead of using natural means to heal disease, they administer deadly poisons to allay suffering, poisons, which doubtless may be able to repress pain or to temporarily suppress the symptoms of disease; but can never remove the cause, which alone may rightly be called healing.
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