HOW TO CURE THE SICK – SOME GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS


A gynaecological disorder may be due to unsatisfactory sex relations or to lack of harmony between husband and wife, or to the fact that the woman has a bad foot, throws her weight upon the other foot causing the spine to be dragged out of position, with resulting pressure on nerves which control the function of the sex organs. Then we must attend to the foot and the spine rather than give homoeopathic remedies.


AMONG men and women the desire to cure is universal. If a man complains about his health all his friends and acquaintances are anxious to offer advice or to render active help. If a clerk in an office has an atrocious headache one of his colleagues will immediately offer him aspirin or some other headache remedy, another will suggest that a hot foot bath might relieve him, a third will recommend a drastic purgative, a fourth will recommend a fast, a fifth may hand him a prescription which he has been given by a doctor.

If women meet one another at tea they frequently talk about their health, and each tries to be helpful, whatever ailments are complained of.

It is obviously a natural instinct among men to help their suffering brothers and sisters. Besides, men like to treat themselves. They try this remedy and that, experiment with diets, experiment with healthful exercises, etc., and the columns in the papers which contain health hints are particularly popular.

Those who wish to heal themselves and others should remember that the art and science of healing requires peculiar qualifications. It requires natural gifts such as sympathy, understanding, strength of character,etc., and it also needs a great deal of practical knowledge. There is no mystery about the art of healing. It can be learned by everyone, whether he has passed the orthodox course of study or not.

Those who wish to cure others and themselves should read books dealing with medical matters, but they should not read theoretical books written in an almost understandable language. Those writers who try to make a mystery of the art of healing do not wish to explain but to mystify. Very frequently writers on the art of healing know nothing about the subject on which they presume to write.

The first thing which should be studied by those who feel the strong urge to heal is the causation of disease. If they read certain textbooks on medicine it would appear that diseases are caused by disease organisms, by micro-organisms, and orthodox medicine endeavours to discover the microbic causation of disease and to deal with the guilty organism by the usual subcutaneous treatments.

The idea that most diseases, or all diseases, are due to various organisms, the existence of which can be ascertained with the help of the microscope and the test tube, is mistaken. Most diseases are caused by our own faults and mistakes.

When we read that thousands of people die in Central Africa of typhoid and other dirt diseases, of starvation, from foul water, exposure, from septic wounds, from ulcers and abscesses and so forth, we realize immediately that all these diseases are avoidable, that thousands of lives have been unnecessarily sacrificed because the primitive races do not know how to obtain wholesome water, do not know how to defend themselves against noxious insects, snakes, etc., and we say to ourselves that the mortality in those far away countries might be reduced to half, or less, if the people were provided with healthy water, drainage of swamps and of houses, if the breeding places of mosquitoes were dealt with, if the authorities took care that there should be sufficient wholesome food etc.

In the case of savages we realize that disease is not a mystery, but is due to lack of knowledge on the part of man. Savages will probably express among themselves similar opinions when they notice that the Europeans living among them have artificial teeth, take pills and liquid medicines to enable them to digest their food and to excrete it, that they have to prop up their bodies with steel arches to support their feet, with surgical belts and rupture pads to support their abdomens, and that nevertheless they are victims of countless health troubles.

They will say among themselves: “It is curious that these white men who employ an army of doctors, surgeons, dentists, chemists, etc. to keep them in health are permanently ailing, are frequently seriously ill, undergo countless operations and seem never to enjoy perfect health”.

We are far wiser in looking after animals than in looking after ourselves. We keep animals and birds of every kind. Very few people who keep animals and birds are unwise enough to feed and house them scientifically in accordance with the ideas of medical men. We give to our animals the simplest housing and the simplest food.

We give approximately the same bedding to a carthorse worth L5 and to a racehorse worth L5,000 or more, and we give them approximately the same stabling. Further, the carthorse worth L5 and the racehorse worth L5,000 are given the same oats, hay, grass, bran, green fodder, water, etc., and occasionally they are given by their keepers as a treat some carrots, apples, or a piece of sugar. Many horses are sensible enough to refuse white sugar.

Moreover, we give to our animals adequate exercise. The carthorse earns his food by hard work. If for some reason or other work is lacking, then the carthorse will be taken out for exercise, and his keeper will certainly reduce his rations, increasing them again when he gets a spell of work. Horse which are reared for riding, racing, and hunting are given regular exercise.

No one would dream of giving their horse tea, or refined foods such as white bread or white bread and butter, although horses will not refuse small quantities of refined food. In the South tired horses are often given wine in their water, and they drink it and it does them good. In Northern countries hard-worked horses are given, in summer, barley water and other sustaining drinks.

We never dream of giving horses flesh of fish, although horses employed on expeditions in the far north are given flesh and fish if no other food is available, and they will eat it under protest to keep body and soul together. Similarly we do not dream of giving cats a vegetarian diet although one can feed them indefinitely on a fleshless diet if they are given milky foods, wholemeal bread and butter, eggs, cheese etc.

Man is an omnivorous animal. Men were apparently intended to live on a vegetarian or on a lacto-vegetarian diet. Meat eaters have tearing teeth. They have fangs at the corners of the mouth with which they can kill and tear up their prey, and their chewing teeth consist of extremely sharp pointed arrangements, shaped like a pair of saws and devoid of flat surfaces. Chunks of meat are either swallowed whole by dogs and cats, or they are rapidly broken up into small pieces by the sharp edges of the back teeth, which can by no means be called grinders.

The vegetarian animals such as cows and horses, have no fangs, but have flat teeth with which they can crop grass, branches, etc., and cut through solid tubers, roots, potatoes and so forth. The cropped food is carefully masticated between grinders, flattish teeth between which grain can be ground and grass be chewed small.

Human teeth by no means resemble the teeth of dogs and cats. Not only are the fangs missing but the chewing teeth are flattish, like those of cows, horses, sheep, apes, etc. The arrangement of our mouths indicates clearly that we were not meant to be flesh eaters.

If we study the arrangements which nature made in the human abdomen we see once more that we were not meant to live on flesh and fish. Flesh eaters have a very short bowel. The food is not long maintained in the bowel, but is promptly excreted, preventing putrefaction.

The bowels of the vegetarian animals are very long, because there is no danger of putrefaction, and as absorption takes place from the bowel and not from the stomach, there is the advantage of a long bowel tract for those animals who do not eat flesh and fish.

The human alimentary canal resembles that of the non-flesh eaters. From the mouth to the anus is about thirty feet long. In the olden days people lived plainly and simply on natural food that grew round them. Some decades ago little food was imported from abroad. The food which men ate came from the soil on which they lived. The local soil, water and air produced the local food for the inhabitants. Gradually food habits changed. Food grown on foreign soil with the help of foreign water and foreign air was imported food is not fresh. Much of it has not been properly cooked by the sun, but has been gathered unripe and is not in a proper condition for human consumption.

Much of it has been totally altered in composition. Millers have learned to take from our grain the surrounding skin, the bran, which is extremely rich in health-giving elements, in mineral substances and vitamins, and they have also taken from it the all important germ which contains elements of the highest vitality and importance. Many people live largely on denatured, artificial foods. In ever increasing numbers people live on tinned food. Nobody enquires whether the process of tinning, which involves the use of great heat, is beneficial or harmful.

To make these artificial foods more attractive to the consumers they are dyed with chemical dyes, chemical flavours are added, and thus men are made to subsist on scientific abominations not fit for the consumption of animals. We eat these foods because they are attractive to the eye and to the palate, and are very convenient because they can easily be prepared for the table.

J. Ellis Barker
James Ellis Barker 1870 – 1948 was a Jewish German lay homeopath, born in Cologne in Germany. He settled in Britain to become the editor of The Homeopathic World in 1931 (which he later renamed as Heal Thyself) for sixteen years, and he wrote a great deal about homeopathy during this time.

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.