One of my first cases came from Swansea. A lady wrote to me that her husband had been taken to the local hospital, where he was retained four days for an examination, which was made under an anaesthetic. The husband was sent back with the diagnosis “inoperable cancer of bowel and bladder, only a week to live.” The lady rushed to the nearest bookshop and asked for a book on cancer.
My own book on cancer was the only one in stock. She read it during the night, and implored me to help her. I turned to my secretary: “OF course nothing can be done for the poor fellow.” Still, I sent a diet sheet, the man became quite well, and died some years after, apparently of kidney disease. Anyone interested can see the original correspondence at my rooms. The case is described in my book, New Lives for Old – How to Cure the Incurable.
This is not the only cancer case which has become well. However, ladies and gentlemen, I was not responsible for the diagnosis of cancer in any of these cases. It is fair to argue that the diagnosis was mistaken, that nature produced a spontaneous cure, etc. Still, there can be no mistake about the diagnosis of cancer sufferers, and I have handled hundreds of cases, which may be questioned, as of those cases where death from cancer occurred under my treatment without suffering, without pain and without the use of morphia.
I have discovered that at least ninety per cent. of cancer sufferers, and I have handled hundreds of cases, can be vastly benefited by a non- heating vegetarian diet and by carefully chosen homoeopathic remedies.
Having made this discovery, I wished to communicate it to the medical profession. Several years ago I sent letters to the editors of The British Medical Journal and The LAncet, asking them whether they would allow me to describe my methods is fullest detail in a letter to the Editor. Both journals refused. Possibly their editors were not acquainted with the advice of Hippocrates: “Do not disdain to listen to a layman if he has anything to say which will advance the healing art”.
In course of time one success led to another. Cured patients sent their friends, and I ventured to undertake case after case which had been described by orthodox doctors and specialists as incurable, and I had a large number of successes. I discovered that many of the disorders and diseases which are supposed to be incurable except by operation can be quite easily cured without operation. For instance, for enlarged prostates medicine knows no treatment except surgery, and the operation is dangerous, disappointing and often unsuccessful. I have had a large number of prostate cases.
Improvement occurs as a rule within a week, and it is followed sooner or later by a cure. The womb of the female corresponds to the prostate of the male. Both are subject to degeneration after middle life. Fibroid tumours of the womb are treated surgically. I have found both bleeding and non- bleeding fibroids extremely amenable to dietetics, and particularly to homoeopathic treatment, but a cure requires as a rule much time, from six months to two years.
I experienced the benefits of unorthodox treatment some time ago. Four years ago, I noticed that my eye sight was rapidly failing. My optician told me that I had cataract on both eyes. My mother was operated upon for cataract on both eyes, and so were my grandfather and my great-grandmother. Five leading specialists told me to my horror that I had cataract on both eyes. My mother was operated upon for cataract on both eyes, and so were my grandfather and my great-grandmother.
Five leading specialists told me to my horror that I had cataract on both eyes, that there was no treatment for it except operation and that I must wear distance or reading glasses all the time. I discovered a lay practitioner, was given eye exercises and other common sense treatments, my sight wonderfully improved, I have discarded my distance glasses, use reading glasses only part of time, and can read the newspaper without glasses. Laymen occasionally know things which leading orthodox practitioners do not know but unfortunately the latter refuse to learn from the former.
I am of opinion that the lay cult of health is not injurious, but is necessary and beneficial to the people at large and to the medical profession itself.
The people at large are very dissatisfied with the treatment which they receive. Medicine is, and always has been, guided by fashion. A century ago, practically all patients were bled profusely, were leeched, salivated, etc. Many kings, emperors and popes were bled to death. The lancet ruled the profession. Hence a medical journal created a century ago was called The Lancet.
Bleeding and leeching have been completely abandoned, although there is much to be said for this treatment in cases of plethora and high blood pressure. Methods of treatment which have stood the test of thousands of years cannot be valueless. Bleeding, cupping and emesis are beginning to come back again.
There was a time when it was the fashion to dose most patients with large quantities of wines, spirits and beer owing to the theory of asthenia. Then alcohol was abandoned. Now the medical profession is ruled by the fashion of subcutaneous treatment, which is based on the theory that most diseases are due to a micro-organism which has to be killed. I have no doubt that this theory is mistaken, that diseases are not caused by disease organisms. I believe, on the contrary, that the foul body creates the disease organisms.
Every laboratory worker is familiar with methods whereby virulent organisms can be made relatively harmless and relatively harmless organisms be made virulent. These changes depend on nutrition. The healthiest men, if placed on an island free from disease microbes, will probably produce all kinds of microbic diseases if they live unhealthily.
Modern medicine, guided, or misguided, by the microbic theory of disease, works with the subcutaneous syringe, of which the masses rightly have a horror.
We have been told that medicine is most scientific and most highly developed in Germany. In Germany the masses of the people are supposed to be the best educated. They are certainly the most educated. Furthermore, you have in Germany not only the panel system of treatment, as known in England, but gratuitous treatment for the great middle class under various insurance schemes. Nevertheless, according to high authorities, such as Professor Much and Dr. Erwin Liek, about half the German people, although able to obtain gratuitous orthodox treatment, go to laymen. In Germany, more than 20,000 practising laymen are known to the authorities.
In considering the mass of the people, we must divide them into the poor and the rich. The treatment under the panel system is unsatisfactory, and must be highly unsatisfactory to conscientious practitioners themselves. One cannot diagnose a case in a few minutes. I personally need half an hour merely to find out what a patient eats and drinks, how the cooking is done, whether he uses much or little condiment, how he occupies himself, etc. In many panel cases prescriptions are written without examination. High medical authorities whom I can quote have stated that most of the medicines prescribed under the panel system are poured down the sink, a waste of many millions a year.
The treatment of the rich and well-to-do is also highly unsatisfactory. I speak with considerable experience, because I have a large and very distinguished clientele, and at the same time I treated a very large number of panel patients. With regrettable haste patients are told to go to the dentist, to have all their teeth pulled out, are sent to the surgeons for operations which are often avoidable. I know a number of distinguished surgeons. Their I know a number of distinguished surgeons. Their estimates of unnecessary operations vary from fifty to ninety per cent. Among the unnecessary operations, tonsillectomy occupies an important place.
A well-known specialist told me a little while ago that he had cut out forty thousand tonsils, and that it took him fifteen seconds to do such an operation. Even specialists of the throat are protesting against this unnecessary holocaust which has become a craze and a fashion like the operation of stitching up floating kidneys. Some decades ago, every woman had a floating kidney which had to be stitched up. Now that operation has been abandoned, and it has been replaced by mass excisions of healthy but slightly swollen tonsils and the unnecessary correction of diverted nasal septums.
Medicine has fallen under the domination of the laboratory, on the one hand, and of the great houses on the other. To some extent, the two work hand in hand for the great drug houses have laboratories of their own. These turn out in rapid succession new drugs, serums, etc., which are highly praised in articles written by their scientific retainers and in advertisements. The busy doctor, when opening his medical journal, finds staring him in in the face assertions that such and such a drug with a weird name will heal such and such a disease, and he may feel inclined to try the drug. Besides, the great drug houses send their travellers to the doctors, and bombard them with circulars and samples.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.