Within the limits of this abstract I do not propose to deal with the
disturbances in the system caused by traumatic influences, such as
wounds, etc. We are treating only of _constitutional_ diseases which,
whether of acute or of chronic character, are all caused by the lack of
such chemical elements as described.
It has been shown that the blood supplies all the chemical substances to
the different tissues, and that, consequently, it is the lack of these
elements in the blood, which causes the tissues to degenerate, or, in
other words, _the lack of certain chemical elements in the blood is
disease_.
It is, therefore, merely a question as to _which of the elements are
missing or which do not exist in correct proportion_, that determines
the different forms of disease.
When once this fact is established, the method of healing consists
mainly in supplying in the regular way, that is, _by certain additions
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.