Health, Happiness, and Longevity

Experience is honored.This book is the result of experience.Man is interested in what pertains to health.We are positive that the ideas herein set forth are healthful.

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Excerpt:

Our profession is not that of a doctor of chemical medicines.

We have no hobby to ride or patent panacea to advertise, but desire to express, in plain, forcible, truthful language, the methods by which mankind can practically achieve health, happiness and longevity. These go together. Why should they not? Related, dependent upon each other, the great objects of human life, the culmination of all physical and worldly pleasure are contained in them. Whether you are the perfect embodiment of a business man or the ideal disciple of a certain profession, you cannot possibly reach the highest or even most lucrative grades of your calling without health, happiness, and their logical consequence, longevity. They will prove trusty lieutenants. Without them the battle of life will draw to a close in retreat and end in defeat.

To assert that the average man can enjoy health without medicine, happiness without even money, and longevity too, is a broad and sweeping declaration. In fact, we expect to have opposition from those who have not tried the formula laid down in the following pages.

To keep yourself in health without medicine is what we intend to convey; and we assert that but little or no medicine is necessary to reach that condition. To have happiness without any money (in the present condition of society) is not what we claim, but that more happiness can be extracted from a competency than by more or less.

To live to good old age means with us 80 to 120 years, to increase with future generations, when order, regularity, sobriety, cleanliness, and love for the whole human family, shall be paramount in the political, moral, and intellectual world.

The author is living on thirty years of made land. In other words, according to medical diagnosis, he should have died thirty years ago! Hence he desires to put before the unhealthy, unhappy, and short-lived human race the result of his experience of half a century. Having battled with a score of diseases, a number of which were claimed to be absolutely incurable-having freed himself entirely of them all-having been completely restored to health and happiness, he honestly believes that he has a convincing right to be heard.

You can now prove for yourself.

Excerpt:

The possession of health, happiness, and longevity requires not so much a general literary and scientific education, as a practical knowledge of one's own self. The latter will far outweigh the other. In many ways, however, will these qualities be improved by the former. A person must know what is regularity, cleanliness, and temperance, or moderation. By the use of these effective auxiliaries, I have freed myself of so many maladies within the last thirty years that the average medical devotee will laugh in derision and question my trustworthiness. For the first eleven years of my life I had seven years of wasting sickness.

Of these, five were spent in bed. At the age of 22 I left a clerkship in New York City to come to California, via Cape Horn. Consumption was strongly seated on my lungs. In addition to this dangerous affliction I had bronchitis, catarrh, constipation, piles, periodical rheumatism, cataracts on my eyes, corns on my feet, and fever and ague from one to three months every year. Surely I was in a position to sympathize with Job, but impatient, rather than patient like the Biblical hero. I set myself towards absolute health. Before I had been in this State two years, I gained the mastery of the lung and throat troubles; but while assisting in putting in a flume in Feather River, below Oroville, in 1859, I ruptured myself so that for twenty-five years I wore a truss. Now I am entirely rid of the aforementioned list of ailments, including hernia.

The detail of how I treated each of the maladies might not interest the reader, and is too long a story to relate in this work. The principal things done in each case, however, will be chronicled under their proper heads in the second part of this work. See index. I do not now smoke, chew, nor drink intoxicants; the latter I did to a limited degree, and the former to excess, for a number of years, up to the close of 1869. On the 31st day of December of that year-the day I smoked my last cigar-I bought twenty-five cigars and smoked twenty-three of them.

My cigar bill that year averaged $2.50 per day, and ran as high as $4.00. Having dissipated, and had nearly every form of disease, I speak from my own thorough experience and not from that of anyone else. Why should not my story, then, have a beneficial influence? If any man knows how he can improve the welfare of his fellows, it is his duty to spread the information. True it is that many of the quasi reformers, or informers, are cranks or dreamers; but we wish the fact distinctly understood and appreciated that we come not under that category. We raise no false standard; we send forth no untried hypothesis.