Principles of Hygienic Medication.
By Russell Trall
ALL healing power is inherent in the living system. There is no curative "virtue" in medicines, nor in anything outside the vital organism. Nature has not provided remedies for diseases. There is no "law of cure" in the universe; and the only condition of cure is, obedience to physiological law. Remedial agents do not act on the living system, as taught in medical books and schools, but are acted on by the vital powers. Disease is not, as is commonly supposed, an enemy at war with the vital powers, but a remedial effort—a process of purification and reparation. It is not a thing to be destroyed, subdued, or suppressed, but an action to be regulated and directed. Truly remedial agents are materials and influences which have normal relations to the vital organs, and not drugs, or poisons, whose relations are abnormal and anti-vital. Nature's materia medica consists of Air, Light, Temperature, Electricity, Magnetism, Exercise, Rest, Food, Drink, Bathing, Sleep, Clothing, Passional Influences, and Mechanical or Surgical Appliances. The True Healing Art consists in supplying the living system with whatever of the above it can use under the circumstances, and not in the administration of poisons which it must resist and expel. Drug remedies are themselves causes of disease. If they cure one disease, it is only by producing a drug disease. Every dose diminishes the vitality of the patient. Drugopathy endeavors to restore health by administering the poisons which produce disease. Hygieo-Therapy (erroneously called "Hydropathy," or "Water-Cure"), on the contrary, restores the sick to health by the means which preserve health in well persons. Diseases are caused by obstructions, the obstructing materials being poisons or impurities of some kind. The Hygienic system removes these obstructions, and leaves the body sound. Drug medicines add to the causes of obstructions, and change acute into chronic diseases. To attempt to cure diseases by adding to the causes of disease, is irrational and absurd. Hygienic medication (Hygeio-Therapy) is not a one-idealism which professes to cure all diseases with "water alone." Nor is it a "Cold Water-Cure," as is erroneously believed by many. It adopts all the remedial appliances in existence, with the single exception of poisons.—Dr. Trall.