LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY. ARMY LIFE. ELEVEN YEARS OF PRACTICE, INVOLVING A SLOW APPROACH TO NATURE IN DISEASE. DOUBTS AS TO THE EFFICIENCY OF REMEDIES AS GENERALLY USED, WITH RESULTING ABRIDGMENT OF THE AUTHOR'S MATERIA MEDICA. My Friends the Readers : I have invited a few of you into my little private lecture-room where I can talk to you at short range, and where for the purpose of intellectual association you are to become my listeners. I have invited you in particular because you have receptive and therefore responsive minds. You are good listeners, and good listeners you know are always at the intellectual level with the speaker whether his plane be high or low, whether he talks sense or nonsense. To talk to you as I could wish to impress you, as I wish to impress you, I must get very near you, so near that whenever a live thought is so received as to become instantly vitalized, I can see the glow of your countenances, the sparkle of your eyes, that I may realize a reflex stirring up of my own mental and moral powers, and I want to be so near you that you can see the strong conviction behind the strong expression. I choose the morning as the best time for meeting you, because the play of the mental faculties is easier and stronger every way both for me to give out and for you to receive after the night of physical, restful regeneration. I am going to tell you how to feed the sick, even the very severely sick, and even with intense aversion to food, so as to reach the highest possible condition of support to vital power. I am going to tell you how this is done without ever a mistake as to the kind, the quality, or the amount of food to be assimilated. I am going to tell you how this food is made available so that it is drawn upon to support vital power in exact proportion to the need, without the slightest taxing of digestive power. And in connection with this method of feeding the sick, I shall discuss the use of stimulants as remedies. I shall present to you who are crusaders against alcoholics two new arguments against their use. I shall try to make you who are not crusaders, believe that from the time that Noah planted the vineyard, drank wine and was drunken, down to the present, every dose of an alcoholic that ever went into a human stomach has had its degree of debilitating effect upon vital power, and by so much has become a hindrance, and not a support in time of disease. I shall try to make you believe that every dose of an alcoholic that ever went into a human stomach has had its degree of local irritant effect that has proportionately lowered its functional power. If you admit that alcoholics are bad for the well, because of their effects on the brain and stomach, and worse for the sick, because of a decline in defensive power against these effects, then I shall try to make you believe for the same reasons that their use is positively dangerous in all cases of shock from injury, and in every crisis of disease. I am going to tell you of a remedy to create hunger, a genuine appetizer, that is not to be found in any materia medica, that rarely if ever appears in written prescriptions, and never in conspicuous type in authorized works on the practice of medicine, though its name is known to all peoples. It is a remedy or a means that you will habitually make use of when you become aware of its natural power and effectiveness, because it is available to all, absolutely safe in its operation, and never fails to cause the keenest hunger where death is not inevitable. And by its habitual use eating becomes elevated to a luxury of life, and not only enables you to habitually eat more food on the average than before, but it has the supreme merit of permitting Nature to make the bill of fare. Although the remedy is known to you all, the precise way that I make use of it very nearly amounts to an original discovery. In its general application it involves a physiological plan of living by which your health habits will become automatic, a plan that avoids the necessity of worrying thought as to what you must or must not do for the sake of health, what you must or must not eat in order to have your bodies duly nourished-a plan that will relieve in the highest degree perplexing anxiety about the health, depressing apprehension as to the possibility or the probability of disease in short, I shall try to make you see that your ordinary ways of living are suicidal to a degree that you are not in the least aware of. My course of morning lectures will consist, essentially, of a story of an evolution in medicine that began with me, even before I ever saw a medical text-book. Hence what I am to tell you is not what I have found out by delving through medical books in a search for borrowed facts and conceptions to be re-dressed and pre |