True Healing Art : Hygienic vs. Drug Medication

True Healing Art
author:R. T. Trall, M.D.

1st Published 1862

The soldiers of our camps and hospitals were dying off fast of typhoid fever, pneumonia, measles, dysentery, etc., and quite unnecessarily. I knew that the application of our system of hygienic medication would save most of their lives. I was well advised that there were surgeons of our school in the army who gave no drug medicines in these diseases, and who lost no patients.

Excerpt:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for the physicians of one School to dissolve the fraternal and philosophic bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the institutions of the earth, the position to which Truth and Nature entitle them, as free thinkers and independent actors, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, and a conscientious regard for the welfare of the human race, should prompt them to declare the causes which impel them to a separation.

I hold these truths to be self-evident, or, at least, susceptible of positive proof and absolute demonstration That the doctrines and theories commonly entertained among men, and taught in medical schools and books, and practiced by the great body of the medical profession, and which constitute the so-called "Science of Medicine," and on which the popular practice of the so-called "Healing Art" is predicated, are untrue in philosophy, absurd in science, in opposition to Nature, and in direct conflict with every law of the vital organism; and that these are the reasons, and the only reasons, why medical science does not progress as do all other sciences; why success in the healing art bears no relation to the advancement of all of the collateral sciences, and to the progress of intelligence among mankind; why medical theories are ever changing; why all of its assumed principles are in controversy; its hypotheses in dispute; why its fundamental rules and primary premises are wholly overlooked or misunderstood; and why its application to the cure of disease and the preservation of health is so uncertain, so dangerous, often so fatal, and, on the whole, so vastly more injurious than useful to the world.

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