Every stock-keeper realizes that the health of his animals depends on the food which they eat. The wisest stock-keepers will give to their cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, etc., their natural food on which they have been fed for generations. There are others who go to the professors for advice, and who feed their cows and their hens scientifically, often with very unsatisfactory results.
Our food is largely spoiled long before it is gathered. The old-fashioned farmer raises his crops with the help of stable manure, or rotted vegetation, etc. The scientific and the pseudo-scientific farmer is taught that he can raise much larger crops by adding such and such chemicals to the soil.
He may indeed produce larger crops and make more money, but then the food raised with chemical fertilisers is extremely inferior to the natural product. Elderly people often complain that vegetables, potatoes, fruit, bread, etc., have a very inferior taste and are much less satisfying then they were in their youth. That complaint is fully justified.
Those who wish to heal the sick and to heal themselves must realize before all that the cause of disease is not to be found in the laboratories which are peopled buy short-sighted scientists who look at the world through a microscope. The cause of health and disease is open to all. It is due to faulty living. Savages die like flies from dirt, foul water, violence, insufficient food, neglect, etc., from causes which have been eliminated among the civilized. The civilized die, not from microbic diseases but from faulty living which very frequently favours the development of microbic diseases.
Micro-organisms may be found in mouths full of decayed teeth or streaming with pus produced by pyorrhoea. But the germs found in septic mouths are not responsible for their septicity. Few, if any septic mouths are found among naturally living primitive races and naturally living animals. There is, of course, plenty of dental decay and pyorrhoea in domestic pet dogs and cats which are fed on the disease producing diet of civilization offered to them by their short- sighted masters and mistresses.
I do not think that milk puddings made with de-vitaminized and de- mineralized rice, dog biscuits and such-like artificialities are the natural food for cats and dogs. Unfortunately our pets depend on their masters for their food.
The learned doctor, who knows little if anything about the realities of life and health, explains in scientific terms that Tommys disease is due to a germ, and that Tommy can be cured only by having an injection which will kill that germ. We live in a world of bogies. We are told every day that we are being attacked by disease germs, and that the best way to combat them consists in undergoing vaccination, inoculation, microbic tests, injections and so forth and so on.
The human body was meant to resist disease germs. We need not defend ourselves against their attacks by noxious antiseptics and by injecting more or less foul and dangerous disease matter into our wholesome bodies. The Creator made us resistant to disease. The body fluids are natural disinfectants. The tears in the eye, the saliva of the mouth, the gastric juice and all the other body fluids are germicidal. Internal wounds heal with surprising rapidity without any disinfectant being used.
The air which we breathe is most wonderfully warmed and cleansed by an extraordinary arrangement of the nose. The blood is germicidal. A wound is most efficiently cleaned when the blood gushes out, which washes out of the body harmful organisms, while outer applications may wash those organisms into our bodies.
If we wish to cure the sick we must, before all, have some confidence in the forces of nature and in the power of our body to resist disease. As soon as disease germs enter the body, the body fights the invader. If a wound caused by a thorn or a cut becomes septic, there is at the critical point of swelling with heat, throbbing, and possibly some pus appears.
Nature endeavours to destroy the disease germs about the wound by boiling them to death by producing a high temperature. In addition, white corpuscles which destroy disease germs stream from all parts of the body to the point where invasion by disease germs has taken place. In due course the fight is settled, as a rule in favour of the body.
If there is a more generalized infection, then the body produces a general fever, again with the object of killing the disease germs, and in addition the body produces the indicated antidote with which to fight measles, scarlatina, or whatever the name of the disease may be. Hence we use materials drawn from a body which has been attacked by disease to fight the same disease in others. People who recover from an attack of an infectious disease can supply valuable material to those who have been freshly attacked by the same disease.
Those who wish to cure the sick must realize in the first place that our bodies offer a powerful resistance to disease, and that the majority of disease germs are not very dangerous. If one takes a swab from a healthy average mouth, one may find that the mouth is inhabited by millions of disease germs such as the germs of tuberculosis, pneumonia, etc. These disease germs are used as food by the healthy body, and it is of advantage that the body learns how to deal with disease germs.
Children and animals brought up in surroundings where the most scrupulous sanitation prevails, where disease germs rarely enter, become delicate and they readily go down after a comparatively trivial infection. The able prescriber must think in the first place, not of disease germs which may interest the laboratory men, but of ordinary commonplace matters which very likely have caused disease. He must very carefully enquire into the habits of the patient, and if he wishes to treat himself he must enquire into his own habits. If a patient takes unduly large quantities of spices and condiments, tea, coffee, alcohol., tobacco, they must be reduced.
This is quite obvious. If, as is likely, the patient lives chiefly on white bread, white sugar and other demineralized foods which are likely to produce ill-health, then the prescriber must kindly but firmly explain that the patient is suffering from an injudicious diet and he must alter it immediately and radically. If the prescriber finds that the patient takes too little exercise, or too much, or that he takes exercise at the wrong time, let us say that he takes vigorous exercise with a full stomach, then he must insist upon a change of habits.
He must see to it that the patients body is clean but must warn him against prolonged and over heating baths as well as against heroically cold baths for those who are delicate and cannot bear chilling. In other words, the prescriber must have a good idea of what constitutes good health habits. It is a mistake to believe that sun-bathing is good for all. Over-great heat of the sun is not beneficial but is dangerous. Nevertheless hundreds and thousands lie scantily dressed or naked in the scorching sun while experiencing great discomfort, but they go on because they have read in some silly book or article that sum bathing is good for them.
I have practised as a lay healer for a great many years and with considerable success, and I have specialized in the treatment of those diseases which are considered incurable by the medical profession. I have never refused a case, however desperate, and many of he most desperate cases have miraculously recovered. I have therefore come to the conclusion that there are no incurable diseases. At least I have never met any. The name of the disease does not matter at all. The only thing which matters is the causation of the disease. I would give an example or two.
A woman came to me and told me that she suffered from cancer in the oesophagus, the swallowing tube, and that she had been treated with radium which had recurred. Whether she actually suffered from cancer or not was a matter of complete indifference to me. I only wished to know the cause of her trouble. I have learned through my studies and observations that cancer in the oesophagus and stomach is frequently caused by over-hot food, and especially drink. So I asked her whether she took tea and other liquids boiling hot.
She told me she did. The boiling hot liquid caused cancer of the oesophagus. The doctor and surgeon who treated her did not enquire into the cause of the disease, but treated the result of the disease and allowed the cause to continue to the poor womans injury.
Another woman came to me and told me that a year previously she had been operated upon for cancer of the breast. She had discovered a tiny lump while washing, had shown it to the doctor, the doctor had sent her to the surgeon and the surgeon had made an operation. After the operation the lady enquired whether the little lump was cancerous or not. The surgeon informed her it was cancerous but she need not worry because the trouble was purely local, very very small, and as a very extensive operation had been performed there was not the slightest chance of a recurrence. A year after the woman came to me, and she was a festering mass of cancer from head to foot.
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.