Even in the domestic preparation of foods, similar errors prevail to a considerable extent. Throwing away the water in which vegetables have been boiled, thus wasting the valuable extractives it contains, is an example. The water should be preserved and used for soup stock, vegetables sauces or beverages, or mixed with the vegetables themselves.
All the resources of modern chemistry, mechanics and advertising are used to make inferior foods more palatable, more attractive to vitiated and perverted tastes, and more profitable to their makers and vendors. Milk, for example, instead of being averaged and delivered whole, raw and clean, as it should be, is graded, separated, pasteurized, sterilized, modified, evaporated, condensed, sweetened, fermented or otherwise processed until no self-respecting cow would recognize it.
If we would have pure, raw, whole milk (“certified”) we must pay three prices for it and take it when we can get it. Cereals, at the mercy of commercial bandits and holdup men, are bleached, polished, separated, mixed, adulterated, robbed of their mineral elements and gluten, steamed, boiled, baked, exploded and shot out of guns, and subjected to all possible forms of assault and battery, breaking and entering and mayhem, until they are battered out of all resemblance to the good brown wheat and golden corn that God gave to man.
If we would have good, whole wheat flour, ground between “the upper and nether mill stones,” we must order it specially, and perhaps wait weeks for it while the grocer orders it of the jobber, the jobber of the wholesaler and the wholesaler of the miller in some far-distant part of the country, where men are still striving to be true to nature and hold on to the good old ways.
The problem of “the simple life” is very complex. The food barons seem to have conspired together to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to get simple, natural foods, and to force the public to use their own unwholesome products. Scientific food men and conscientious manufacturers have a hard row to hoe in their efforts to popularize their ideas and products. The trend of the times is against them. The public, falsely educated or ignorant of the principles of normal dietetics, demand the “denatured” foods, and thus a vicious circle is created which is hard to break.
However, there is no need to be discouraged. Progress is being made. The advocates of a simpler and more natural diet, in and out of the medical profession, are making themselves heard.
V.
The discovery and verification of the relation of food and diet to cancer by modern scientific research is of vast and far- reaching importance. It not only makes possible an effective prophylaxis, but it immensely increases and strengthens our therapeutic resources.
The impressive series of active, far-advanced and even inoperable cases of cancer successfully treated and in many instances cured, by regulation of diet alone, reported by Dr. L. Duncan Bulkley in his book, “Cancer and Its Non-Surgical Treatment,” and by other workers in the same line, should convince even the most sceptical that a great, practical truth has been brought to light.
Homoeotherapeutists, acting under the theory of the constitutional nature of cancer and treating patients individually, with medicines selected upon the principle of symptom-similarity, have reported many cases as relieved, modified or cured, without resort to the knife.
It can hardly be considered that if they had known how to regulate the diet as well as they knew how to select the indicated medicine, and had combined the dietetic with the medicinal treatment, their success would have been proportionately greater.
It is pleasant to recall, in this connection, that some of our homoeopathic brethren, notably Dr. Horace Packard, of Boston, who published a paper on the subject, were among the first who believed cancer to be a perverted metabolic process, due to deprivation of mineral salts– especially of potassium.
There is one other probable factor in the causation of cancer which should be made the subject of scientific investigation. There are many who believe that vaccination (for smallpox) and the wide employment of animal sera and vaccines, play a large part in the production and increases of cancer. The arguments and evidence presented by those who thus believe, to say the least, are impressive.
Highly suggestive, and consistent with this belief, are two paragraphs in an article on “The Immunity of Certain Groups of Individuals to Cancer in General and in Certain Localities,” by Edward Preble, M. D., in the first issue of Cancer (October, 1923), as follows (Italics by the Editor):
“Cancer does not develop in subjects with certain other diseases, on the principle of antibiosis, or develops less readily; recently it has been pointed out that in the tuberculous, cancer, which is infrequently seen at best, runs a comparatively mild course. This principle of antibiosis may some day come to be used in immunizing the race against cancer.
“There remains the singular fact that those who are practically immune to zymotic affections and germ diseases in general, seem more predisposed to cancer than the average man who suffers form the contagious diseases of childhood and the same group of affections in adult life. We know little about this immunity, for as far as we recall, it has only been tested by statistics in a few cases. We do not know to what extent its origin is hereditary and familial. We do not know that it is transmissible to posterity.
The evidence shows that it is mostly individual, personal. If this immunity connotes an increased liability to cancer, then the acquired or artificial immunization of the people to zymotic diseases will possibly lay them more open to cancer. It is even possible, if we speculate along these lines, that the alleged increase of cancer is the result of sanitation and preventive medicine.
This is known to be the case in one sense, because preventive medicine prolongs the average life into the cancer age. But there is reason to suppose, as we have frequently stated, that the antagonism between zymotic disease and cancer is not only negative but that it goes deeper, is actually positive. Whatever it is that enables us to resist zymotic diseases may weaken our resistance to cancer”.
It is hardly necessary to point out to any one familiar with the doctrines of Hahnemann that the principles of antibiosis and the antagonism between zymotic diseases and cancer, rest upon the Law of Reciprocal Action, otherwise known as the “Law of Similars”; which is the governing principle of homoeotherapeutics, and the key to homoeopathic philosophy. Nor is it necessary to point out that smallpox is a “zymotic disease,” from which vaccination is supposed to confer immunity.
Dr. Close was born November 24, 1860 and came to study homeopathy after the death of his father in 1879. His mother remarried a homoeopathic physician who turned Close's interests from law to medicine.
His stepfather helped him study the Organon and he attended medical school in California for two years. Finishing his studies at New York Homeopathic College he graduated in 1885. Completing his homeopathic education. Close preceptored with B. Fincke and P. P. Wells.
Setting up practice in Brooklyn, Dr. Close went on to found the Brooklyn Homoeopathic Union in 1897. This group devoted itself to the study of pure Hahnemannian homeopathy.
In 1905 Dr. Close was elected president of the International Hahnemannian Association. He was also the editor of the Department of Homeopathic Philosophy for the Homeopathic Recorder. Dr. Close taught homeopathic philosophy at New York Homeopathic Medical College from 1909-1913.
Dr. Close's lectures at New York Homeopathic were first published in the Homeopathic Recorder and later formed the basis for his masterpiece on homeopathic philosophy, The Genius of Homeopathy.
Dr. Close passed away on June 26, 1929 after a full and productive career in homeopathy.