It is true that everyone of the four works mentioned strikes a superficial examiner as only compilation works where hundreds of authors are quoted more or less extensively. In reality, however, each of them is essentially individual, expressing the opinion of a researcher who has found the truth through his own efforts and in h is own way, only utilizing a small number of the many thousand volumes he has perused, as milestones on his road of research.
What was brought so forcibly to my mind when reading Ellis Barkers four first health books was not only his fabulous power of reading, analysing and compiling, but above all his remarkable synthetic gifts. I recognized a great physician in the making, and was looking forward to works to come in which he would quote- not from works on healing by others but from his own Case Book.
Miracles of Healing, undoubtedly the best popular book ever written on Homoeopathy, appeared as a prelude or introduction. When it was published Ellis Barkers portfolios were already filled to the brim with leaves containing cases of his own.
In New Lives for Old, with the sub-title How to Cure the Incurable, he opens for the first time his own case books.
I do not think I am exaggerating or making any overstatement when saying that since the days of Hahnemann no more important work on healing has ever been published.
Its greatest novelty lies in its absolute frankness and wealth of information which an ordinary doctor would feel naturally inclined to withhold from his colleagues and patients. Ellis Barker publishes accounts of his failures as well as his successes. Nothing is withheld. All the cards are laid on the table.
When a patient whom he has successfully cured of many years of illness asks him with beaming, grateful eyes: “Please, tell me now from which disease I have been suffering,” Ellis Barker answers: “I have not the slightest idea. I have only treated you according to the symptoms revealed.” How different from the orthodox way of treating disease, where the naming of the disease seems to be regarded as the essential thing and a great achievement-even if no cure is effected.
“One does not treat an abstraction, called a disease, but a human being according to his or her individual needs,” says Ellis Barker. And he adds: “I have not yet come across an incurable disease, but I have certainly met incurable patients.”.
“The fact that you told her some months ago that she could cure herself and that you would help her do so has made her look upon her own powers in a higher way,” writes the husband of a wife whom Ellis Barker cured of Disseminated sclerosis, “the latest fancy name of the doctors for creeping paralysis.”.
Ellis Barker wants and demands the collaboration of his patients. A cure is the result of a co-operation between the patient and his or her physician. Only in this sense are there no incurable diseases-but incurable patients. Where this co- operation fails, failure is the result as is shown by many instances in this interesting book, certainly one of the most revolutionary ever written in medicine.
It is as interesting as a novel, with th is great difference that every leaf of it is taken from the Book of Nature, conceived not by the imagination of a writer, but written by a physician who has truly followed the precepts of his great predecessor: a physician must “walk over its leaves.”.
Ellis Barker “walks over the leaves ” in Paracelsus sense. He discards the Latin of the Medical Profession, still prevalent to- day in their jealously guarded professional secrets and mystifying disease-names. His whole book is a single exposure from beginning to end of the practical ignorance and pomposity of his adversaries.
What he writes about is his own experience, his own views, and methods of curing. It is life itself with its many tragedies, joys and sorrows that passes review on those pages. Or what can be more charming than the account of a cure, effected in the country on a Sunday afternoon without any medicine but some garden herbs, by this physician of his own making.
“In 1932 I was staying at a village in Sussex. There was a smith, a Mr. T., whom I knew slightly, and I was struck by his looking very ill, deeply jaundiced and anxious. I asked: What is the matter with you?”.
Then follows a description of the trouble.
“It was Sunday. The chemists shop was closed. I had no medicines with me. I went to the garden, collected a large basket of parsley, told his wife to chop it up, fill a tea-pot almost to the brim, pour boiling water on it, let it draw for ten minutes or so, and that he was to drink it all day long. I then set out for an all-day walk. Ten hours after I called on Mr. T.” The trouble was over and the poor smith felt “much happier”.
“A true physician must walk over the leaves of the book of Nature!”.
Here another leaf:.
“Some years ago a naval officer bearing a historic name told me over the telephone: My wife is suffering from an inflamed mastoid and has terrible pain. She would like to avoid an operation. What do you advise? I replied: Bring her along in your car as quickly as you can.”.
“The telephone call came in the afternoon. I asked my secretary to get tea ready and put on the tea table Belladonna 3x, an excellent remedy for inflammation in general, and Capsicum 3x, which is a specific for mastoid inflammation. The pair arrived. The husband was nervy. The wifes face was distorted with pain. I asked them to sit down and take tea and gave the lady a dose of Belladonna.
Ten minute later I gave her a dose of Capsicum. After a further ten minutes she had another dose of Belladonna, followed ten minutes later by a second dose of Capsicum. Meanwhile half an hour had gone by and we had talked with animation about operations, and various other things.
I had observed that the expression of Mrs. C.S. had changed, and I asked: How is the pain? With wide open eyes the lady exclaimed: It has gone, completely gone! It is marvellous! The pair stayed a little longer and went back to their car with two bottles boxes of pilules, one containing Belladonna and the other Capsicum, with instructions to take doses alternatively at lengthening intervals. There was no further trouble.”.
Truly, upon Ellis Barker as a physician can be applied the same verdict as posterity has pronounced on Paracelsus:.
“the truth of his doctrines was apparently confirmed by his success in curing or mitigating diseases for which the regular physicians could do nothing”.
