I put him under a further course of treatment, and then lost sight of him.
Quite lately his father came to me on his own account for a cough, when I enquired about Jack: “Oh, he’s quite well, and I don’t think he remembers anything about it; I can’t understand a child at that age, etc”
I had very great difficulty in convincing this gentleman that poor little Jack’s “dirty trick” was physical disease merely and only, and in no sense moral obliquity; indeed, I did not quite succeed, for he shook his head and said, “I hope it is so, for I would have killed him if he had not left off”
This subject is of vast importance to mankind, and I trust most sincerely that the time is dawning for us to thoroughly grip the true nature of things, and not imagine that we can whip away this habit when due-as it mostly is at the start-to physical disease. For it were quite as rational to whip or otherwise chastise our children because they get diarrhoea or the measles.
A little girl of 3 1/2 years of age was brought to me some time since for this same thing.-the wee mite would “work with crossed legs” in a manner I will stop short of describing. Notwithstanding her tender age, the habit had become inveterate, and she would continue at it almost by the hour. Eminent medical men had declared the case to be one of disease of the spinal marrow that was incurable, and would end in paralysis. The aspect of the child was peculiar, inasmuch as there was, for her age, notable enlargement of the breasts. There were no indurated glands anywhere to be found, and the child was fat and well formed, excepting, that the mammary enlargement gave her the aspect almost of a wee pigmy woman. Not finding anything whatever in her physical state to account for the said naughty habit, I enquired closely into her history, and found that she had been vaccinated on the leg in lieu of the arm, and that not long after the vaccination-done when the child was about a year old- she began to work about with her legs, and gradually formed the habit in question.
Those who care to learn my views in regard to the effects of vaccination will find them expressed in my small work entitled “Vaccinosis and its Cure by Thuja”
I used in this case not only Thuja, but almost all our great antisycotics before a cure was permanently effected; in the end I did, however, succeed. *Since this was written there has been a slight relapse, for which patient is again under treatment. Vaccinosis is in the very deed a very real disease.
I have here, in regard to moral obliquities, purposely chosen very youthful cases, in order the more certainly to convey my opinion of the true nature of the greater part of cases of self-pollution in either sex, and at the various ages. These cases are very common in the fully developed as well as in the quite young; and my matured opinion is that they are PHYSICAL DISEASE, and not sin in the sense of morality and religion. That this physical disease slowly infects the moral nature is unfortunately but too true, but even here the physical cure must precede the moral cure, i.e. from the standpoint of the merely earthly physician.
It is not possible for any merely human beings to cure physical disease by faith or other spiritual means; in the natural world we know only natural laws, and natural law in the spiritual world is, to my mind, rank nonsense.
I never could understand why almost everything connected with generation seems to suggest sin to almost all of us. Surely we are not entirely right here; however, I am not dealing with dogma, but with problems in practical medicine, and I regard the task I had set myself as finished.
Burnett was one of the first to speak about vaccination triggering illness. This was discussed in his book, Vaccinosis, published in 1884. He introduced the remedy Bacillinum. He authored twenty books, including the much loved "Fifty Reason for Being a Homeopath." He was the editor of The Homoeopathic World.