How to cure is an obvious sequence - an antedote to fear, frenzy and the popular mad chasing after so-called cures

Introduction to Toxemia

THE medical world has built an infinite literature without any (except erroneous and vacillating) ideas of cause. Medicine is rich in science, but now, as well as in all past time, it suffers from a dearth of practical ideas. The average doctor is often educated out of all the common-sense he was born with. This, however, is not his fault. It is the fault of the system. He is an educated automaton. He has facts— scientific facts galore—without ideas. Ford has mechanical facts—not more, perhaps, than thousands of other mechanics, but he joined them to an idea which made him a multimillionaire. Millions have facts, but no ideas. Thousands of doctors have all the scientific data needed, but they have not harnessed their science to common-sense and philosophy.
Without a clear conception of cause, cure must remain the riddle that it is.

The late Sir James Mackenzie—while living, the greatest clinician in the world—declared: “In medical research the object is mainly the prevention and cure of disease.” If cause is not known, how is prevention or cure possible—as, for example, by producing a mild form of smallpox or other so-called disease by poisoning a healthy person by introducing into his body the pathological products of said disease? Certainly only pathological thinking can arrive at such conclusions. Vaccines and autogenous remedies are made from the products of disease, and the idea that disease can be made to cure itself is an end-product of pathological thinking. This statement is not so incongruous after we consider the fact that all search and research work to find cause by medical scientists has been made in dead and dying people.

As ridiculous as it may appear, medical science has gone, and is still going, to the dead and dying to find cause.

If prevention and cure mean producing disease, surely prevention and cure are not desirable. If prevention can be accomplished, then cures will not be needed. At the time of his death, Mackenzie was laboring to discover prevention. A more worthy work can not be imagined. But the tragedy of his life was that he died from a preventable diseases he could have cured the disease that killed him if his conception of cause had been in line with the Truth of Toxemia—the primary cause of all disease. In spite of Mackenzie’s ambition to put the profession in possession of truth concerning prevention and cure, he died without a correct idea of even in what direction to look for this desirable knowledge’ as evidenced by such statements as: “Our problems being the prevention of disease, we require a complete knowledge of disease in all its aspects before we can take steps to prevent its occurrence.”

There is the crux of the whole subject. It is not disease; it is cause “in all its aspects” that we need to know before we can take steps to prevent “disease.” Mackenzie stated the following concerning diagnosis:

"But it appear to be unlikely that in the present state of medicine there would be any great dissimilarity in the proportions of diagnosed and undiagnosed disease in many series of investigation such as we have made. The proportion depends, not on the skill or training of individual pratictioners, but on the unsatisfactory state of all medical knowledge. The similarity of the statistical records from the institute and from private pradctice goes far to support this vies.

In spite of additional time given at the institue to the examination of cases which are undiagnosable in general practice, and the assistance given by the special departments - clinical groups - in their investigation, they remain profoundly obscure. Although we know that it is from among them that there will gradually emerge the case of advanced organic disease and the end result which from so large proportion of the inmates of hospital wards. And the tragedy is that many of them suffer from no serious disabilities, and might, but for our ignorance, be checked on their downward course."

Isn’t this about as sharp a criticism of medical inefficiency as Tilden has ever made? This brings vividly to mind the statement, made only a short time ago, by Dr. Cabot, of Boston, that he himself was mistaken in his diagnoses about fifty per cent of the time—that he had proved it by post-mortems. Such a
statement as this, coming from a man of his standing, means much. To me it means that diagnosis is a meaningless term; for, as used, it means discovering what pathological effects—what changes—have been brought about by an undiscovered cause. Diagnosis means, in a few words, discovering effects which, when found, throw no light whatever on cause.

Again I quote Mackenzie: “The knowledge of disease is so incomplete that we do not yet even know what steps should be taken to advance our knowledge.” This being true, there is little excuse for laws to shut out or prevent cults from practicing less harmful palliations. How many reputable physicians have the honesty of Sir James Mackenzie?

In spite of Mackenzie’s high and worthy ambitions, he could not get away from the profession’s stereotyped thinking. The early symptoms of disease he declared held the secret of their cause, and he believed an intense study of them would give the facts. But functional derangements are of the same nature and from the same universal cause that ends in all organic so-called diseases.

All so-called diseases are, from beginning to end, the same evolutionary process.

The study of pathology—the study of disease—has engaged the best minds in the profession always, and it surely appears that the last word must have been spoken on the subject; but the great Englishman believed, as all research workers believe, that a more intense and minute study of the early symptoms of disease will reveal the cause. There is, however, one great reason why it cannot, and that is that all symptom-complexes - diseases - from their initiation to their ending, are effects, and the most intense study of any phase or stage of their progress will not throw any light on the cause.

Cause is constant, ever present, and always the same. Only effects, and the object on which cause acts, change, and the change is most inconstant.

To illustrate: A catarrh of the stomach presents first irritation, then inflammation, then ulceration, and finally induration and cancer. Not all cases run true to form; only a small percentage evolve to ulcer, and fewer still reach the cancer stage. More exit by way of acute food-poisoning or acute indigestion than by chronic diseases.

In the early stages of this evolution there are all kinds of discomforts: more or less attacks of indigestion, frequent attacks of gastritis—sick stomach and vomiting. No two cases are alike. Nervous people suffer most, and some present all kinds of nervous symptoms—insomnia, headaches, etc. Women have painful menstruation and hysterical symptoms—some are morose and others have epilepsy. As the more chronic symptoms appear, those of the lymphatic temperament do not suffer so much. As the disease progresses, a few become pallid and develop pernicious anemia, due to gastric or intestinal ulceration
and putrid protein infection; in others the first appearance of ulcer is manifested by a severe hemorrhage; others have a cachexia and a retention of food in the stomach, which is vomited every two or three days, caused by a partial closing of the pylorus. These are usually malignant cases.

To look upon any of these symptom-complexes as a distinct disease, requiring a distinct treatment, is to fall into the diagnostic maze that now bewilders the profession and renders treatment chaotic. It should be known to all discerning physicians that the earliest stage of organic disease is purely functional,
evanescent, and never autogenerted so far as the affected organ is concerned, but is invariably due to an extraneous irritation (stimulation, if you please), augmented by Toxemia.

When the irritation is not continuous, and toxin is eliminated as fast as developed, to the toleration point, normal functioning is resumed between the intervals of irritation and toxin excess. For example:

a simple coryza (running at the nose—cold in the head), gastritis or colonitis. At first these colds, catarrahs, or inflammations are periodic and functional;
but, as the exciting cause or causes—local irritation and Toxemia—become more intense and continuous, the mucous membranes of these organs take on organic changes, which are given various names, such as irritation, inflammation, ulceration, and cancer.

The pathology (organic change) may be studied until doomsday without throwing any light on the cause; for from the first irritation to the extreme ending - cachexia - which may be given the blanket term of tuberculosis, syphilis, or cancer, the whole pathologic panorama is one continuous evolution of intensifying effects. Germs and other so-called causes may be discovered in the course of pathological development, but they are accidental, coincidental, or at most auxiliary - or, to use the vernacular of law, obiter dicta.

The proper way to study disease is to study health and every influence favorable or not to its continuance. Disease is perverted health. Any influence that lowers nerve-energy becomes disease-producing. Disease cannot be its own cause; neither can it be its own cure, and certainly not its own prevention.
After years of wandering in the jungle of medical diagnosis—the usual guesswork of cause and effect, and the worse-than-guesswork of treatment, and becoming more confounded all the time—I resolved either to quit the profession or to find the cause of disease. To do this, it was necessary to exile myself from doctors and medical conventions; for I could not think for myself while listening to the babblings of babeldom. I took the advice found in Matt. 6:6.

According to prevailing opinion, unless a doctor spends much time in medical societies and in the society of other doctors, takes postgraduate work, travels, etc., he cannot keep abreast of advancement. This opinion would be true if the sciences of medicine were fitted to a truthful etiology (efficient cause) of disease. But, since they are founded on no cause, or at most speculative and spectacular causes, as unstable as the sands of the sea, the doctor who cannot brook the bewilderment of vacillation is compelled to hide away from the voices of mistaken pedants and knowing blatherskites until stabilized. By that time ostracism will have overtaken him, and his fate, metaphorically speaking, will be that of the son of Zacharias.

An honest search after truth too often, if not always, leads to the rack, stake, cross, or the blessed privilege of recanting; but the victim, by this time, decides as did the divine Jew: “Not my will, but shine, be done;” or, as Patrick Henry declared: “Give me liberty or give me death!” The dying words of another great Irishman is the wish, no doubt, of every lover of freedom and truth: "That no man write my epitaph; as no man who knows my motives dares now vindicate them. Let them and me rest in peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nation of the earth, then, and not until then, let my epitaph be written."

The truth is larger than any man, and, until it is established, the memory of its advocate is not important. In the last analysis, is not the truth the only immortality? Man is an incident. If he discovers a truth, it benefits all who accept it. Truth too often must pray to be delivered from its friends. I must acknowledge that I have not been very courteous to indifferent convention; and the truth I have discovered has suffered thereby. It has always appeared to me that the attention of fallacy-mongers cannot be attracted except by the use of a club or shillalah; and possibly my style of presenting my facts has caused too great a shock, and the desired effect has been lost in the reaction.

That I have discovered the true cause of disease cannot be successfully disputed. This being true, my earnestness in presenting this great truth is justifiable. When I think back over my life, and remember the struggle I had with myself in supplanting my old beliefs with the new—the thousands of times I have suspected my own sanity—I then cannot be surprised at the opposition I have met and am meeting.

My discovery of the truth that Toxemia is the cause of all so-called diseases came about slowly, step by step, with many dangerous skids. At first I believed that enervation must be the general cause of disease; then I decided that simple enervation is not disease, that disease must be due to poison, and that
poison, to be the general cause of disease, must be autogenerated; and if disease is due to an autogenerated poison. what is the cause of that autogeneration?

I dallied long in endeavoring to trace disease back to poison taken into the system, such as food eaten after putrescence had begun, or from poisoning due to the development of putrescence after ingestion. In time I decided that poisoning per se is not disease. I observed where poisoning did not kill; some cases reacted and were soon in full health, while others remained in a state of semi-invalidism. I found the same thing true of injuries and mental shock. It took a long time to develop the thought that a poisoned or injured body, when not overwhelmed by Toxemia would speedily return to the normal, and when it did not, there was a sick habit - a derangement of some kind - that required some such contingency to bring it within sense-perception.

To illustrate: An injury to a joint is often complicated with rheumatism; the rheumatism previous to the injury was potentially in the blood. Just what change had taken place in the organism which, under stress of injury or shock of any kind, would cause a reaction with fever I could not understand until the
Toxemic Theory suggested itself to my mind, after which the cause of disease unfolded before me in an easy and natural manner. And now the theory is a proved fact.

After years of perplexing thought and “watchful waiting,” I learned that all disease, of whatever nature, was of slow development; that without systemic preparation even socalled acute systemic diseases could not manifest. In a few words: Without Toxemia there can be no disease.

I knew that the waste-product of metabolism was toxic, and that the only reason why we were not poisoned by it was because it was removed from the organism as fast as produced. Then I decided that the toxin was retained in the blood, when there was a checking of elimination. Then the cause of the checking had to be determined. In time I thought out the cause.

I knew that, when we had a normal nerve-energy, organic functioning was normal. Then came the thought that enervation caused a checking of elimination. Eureka! The cause of all so-called diseases is found! Enervation checks elimination of the waste-products of metabolism. Retention of metabolic toxin—the first and only cause of disease!

Those who would be freed from the bondage of medical superstition should study “Toxemia Explained.”Toxemia Explained NO ONE on the outside of the medical profession knows so well as doctors themselves the great need of more knowledge of what disease really is. Never in the history of so-called medical science has there been so much research work done as in the past decade; but with every new discovery there follows very closely on its heels the stark and stalking nemesis that chills the honest and earnest researchers to the bone—the inevitable word Failure. Why inevitable?

Because, back in the beginning of man’s reasoning on the subject of his discomforts, his pains, and his sicknesses, he made the monstrous mistake that
something outside of himself—outside of his own volition—had wished him harm. Man being a religious animal, he early thought he had in some manner offended one of his many deities. The history of how man evolved the idea of disease being an entity is too long to do more than allude to it in a book of this kind. Any of the old mythologies may be referred to by those who are curious enough to look the matter up. That man is still saturated with centuries of mythological inheritance was brought out vividly when the germ theory was introduced. It answered the instinctive for demoniacal possession!

At last man’s search for the demon—the author of all his woes—had been rewarded, and a satisfactory apology could be made to his conscience for all his apparent shortcomings. However, seventy years of vicarious atonement for man’s sins by the demon germ are waning, and reason be praised if the
microbe is the last excuse that man can make for his sins of omission and commission before the throne of his own reason!

Medical science is founded on a false premise—namely, that disease is caused by extraneous influences, and that drugs are something that cures or palliates discomfort.

The term “medical” means pertaining to medicine or the practice of medicine. Anything used in a remedial way carries the idea of curing, healing, correcting, or affording relief, and this doctoring is all done without any clear understanding of cause. The words “medical,” “medicine,” “disease,” and “cure”
have become concrete in our understanding, and shape our thoughts and beliefs. And so arbitrary are these beliefs that new schools and cults are forced to the conventional understanding.

They may declare that an impinged nerve is the cause of any pathology. But they do not trouble themselves to find why one impinged nerve creates a pathology and another does not.

The psychologist does not trouble himself to explain why worry in one subject causes disease and in another it does not; why hope in one subject cures and in another it does not; why negation does not always cure; why faith does not always cure; begging the question by declaring that there was not faith enough, etc.

No fool is a bigger fool than the fool who fools himself.

Why should not all new schools of thought be found harking back to their mother-thought—I say, why not? So long as the idea that disease is a reality, an individuality, an entity, is firmly fixed in the mind, even those in research work will be controlled and directed in their labors by the conventional understanding. That is why every wonderful discovery soon proves a mistaken belief. There is no hope that medical science will ever be a science; for the whole structure is built around the idea that there is an object—disease—that can be cured when the right drug—remedy, cure—is found.

It is my intention to portray the common, every-day foibles of scientific medicine so that the people may see the absurdities concerning disease and cure which they are and have been hoodwinked into believing by the blare of science. Then I shall describe the only worked-out rational explanation of the cause of so-called diseases, hoping, by contrasting the old and new, to start a few to thinking and building new brain-cells, which in time may supersede the
old and conventional.

Until Toxemia was discovered and elaborated by myself into a medical philosophy there was no real medical philosophy. The cause and cure of disease is and has been a medley of guesswork and speculation which has confounded the best and most industrious medical minds in every generation. Today, as never before, the brightest minds in the profession are delving into research work, endeavoring to find the efficient cause of disease. But they are doomed to disappointment; for they fail at their beginning. Why?

Because all the work that has ever been done in searching for cause has been along the line of critical study and examination of effects; and certainly reasoning minds cannot believe that an effect can be its own cause. No one believes in spontaneous generation. The remnant of this belief was annihilated by Pasteur’s discovery of germs as the cause of fermentation—a discovery so profound that it created a frenzy in the medical world; and, as in every
epidemic of frenzy, mental poise was lost.

The importance of the germ as a primary or efficient cause of disease was accepted nolens volens, willy nilly. Everyone was swept off his feet. As in all sudden gushes in change of belief, it was dangerous not to agree with the mob spirit; hence opposing or conservative voices were suppressed or ostracized.

The germ frenzy was fierce for two or three decades; but now it is a thing of the past and will soon be, if not now, a dead letter.

Cause of disease is being looked for everywhere, and no less a personage than the late Sir James Mackenzie, in “Reports of the St. Andrews Institute for Clinical Research,” Volume I, declared: “The knowledge of disease is so incomplete that we do not yet even know what steps should be taken to advance our knowledge.” At another time he wrote: “Disease is made manifest to us only by the symptoms which it produces; the first object in the examination of a patient is the detection of symptoms, and therefore the symptoms of disease form one of the main objects of our study.”