Part 17

A degenerate can be plus or minus, or of each; both being the result of a mal-condition of the body.

If the nerve-ends of an organ are irritated, the corresponding orifices to these irritated nerve-ends may be super-sensitive, hence up to a certain point will be super-acute as to sight, hearing, smell, tasting or feeling. I class them as degenerates plus, and include all genius, poets, painters, musicians and phenomenal freaks; otherwise as possessing an orificial lesion. Of all so-called genius, the history and lives of these men demonstrate them to be physically unsound, producing thereby a super-sensitive perceiving condition. This accounts for all of them having “failings,” many of which, perhaps, are not known to the public until after their death. The treatment of Oscar Wilde was an outrage. He was a sick man, a curable man, and one of the brightest minds of the day.

We will now speak of the degenerate minus, one whose nerve-end irritations has dulled his senses. Why is a man cruel? Because the act which we call cruelty does not arouse in his mind a memory of the suffering inflicted upon the object of his torture. That man’s sensibilities, through proper orificial work, can be restored, and he will lose his seemingly brutal nature. Putting the man in the penitentiary will not make his nerve-ends any more sensitive.

The same with children who do not object to being whipped; their nerve-ends are dull, they cannot comprehend or appreciate pain the same as the alleged normal mind.

Degeneracy minus is really due to the physical condition of man, the nerve-ends of his senses being so dulled that he fails to properly or normally receive impressions.

In a store window across the street is the lithograph of a blind violinist who is to appear here this week. The paper last evening stated that his hearing is so sensitive that if he hears a discord he immediately faints, (lucky for him that he is not rooming in this house; he would be in a constant faint). In the previous pages I told you that all orifices are connected; that two in the head always respond to the irritation of the other end of the nerve. In this case the eye is inactive, dead, the ear super-sensitive. ’Tis very plain. These two extreme responses are daily demonstrated, with your “real nice” person, and the gross. Same cause, practically the same thought, only “extra fine” instead of “extra coarse.” You get either of two positives from every suggestion, positive for—plus; positive against—minus.

Every suggestion forces either one or the other of these positives. We will assume that there are two men standing on the street corner, one whose ideas are so associated with everything connected with drinking, that it is abhorrent to him; with the other everything is congenial. A third party approaches and says, “Let’s have a drink,” which arouses in the “mind” of the first party all of his ideas contrary to drinking and he refuses, not of his own choice, but because the ideas associated in his mind are forced into play. The second man immediately accepts, because his ideas associated are all positive for and in favor of such an act.

The same lesion will result in either a prude, a masturbator, or a prostitute; different modifications forced by external environment.

Cesare Lombroso tells us much as to statistics, but offers no cure. I have but little use for that kind of science.

If the reader will comprehend the foregoing, he will readily see that degeneracy is simply physical, as I have just described. My experience with orificial surgery has proven to me that these conditions can be changed.

That man inherits aught else than a physical condition is false, and he can inherit that only directly from his mother; the male ancestors are eliminated.

Degenerates breed degenerates in several ways. The degenerate mother passes the degeneracy or mal-transformation and also her environment to the daughter. The degenerate is forced to the gross, the coarse, responding naturally and readily to a coarse environment; in fact, everything affecting the senses that is repulsive to the refined, is attractive to this coarse nature. Taste is vitiated; coarse, decayed, cheap food is palatable. He lives in a foul atmosphere, and, consequently, builds his house out of the “foul,” and as the body, so is the mind, foul from environment. Clean your cities, “cleanliness is Godliness”; it is of God,—good. Instead of for penitentiaries, spend the taxes on clean environment and food for the poor, thus lessening crime and insanity. Putting a man in a penitentiary results in nothing but an expense to the state. If this man was sent to a hospital and he was put in a proper physical condition, his new body and mind (he gets one every six months) would be built out of better material; in a few years the rebuilding out of good material, with pure food and good sanitation, the degenerate would be in a fair way to become a moral man.

I feel as certain as that I am sitting here, and hope ere long to prove, that I can take a young child of the most degenerate parentage, showing a vicious and degenerate nature, and in five years make a reputable being of him.

A writer in one of the New York evening papers, who professes to be a hypnotist, has written many words concerning the cures he has made on some degenerates. I deny them to be cures, inasmuch as the cause was never removed. An alleged hypnotic cure, the removal of the cause through hypnosis, I doubt. You may break up the habit, but my experience has proven to me that some new habit replaces it. All cause must give voice in effect, remove one effect and another will appear. I have cured hundreds of people of stuttering through hypnosis alone, but have always found that a new nervous trouble appeared. To-day, I will treat no stutterer by personal suggestion until he has submitted to an orificial operation.

I doubt if drunkenness or morphinism has ever been permanently cured through hypnosis. These diseases are of the secretive nerve-centers. Telling the subject that he will not desire these things, or substituting some other desire in their place, will not deceive the Abdominal Brain (mind) when it wants something and knows what. If, through hypnosis, an operator can learn of an inspiration that will stimulate the proper secretions, the patient can be very readily cured. Taking morphine or liquor from a man does not cure him; stimulate the secretions and he will be freed from the desire or need for the poisons.

The criminal, being a sick man, should be sent to a hospital. If a man suffering from delirium tremens be brought before a judge, he should be sentenced to the hospital until pronounced able to work, then put to work for a period decided by the physician. The patient should first rest in the hospital for a week, then be put on the operating table and the cause of his disease removed; then, two weeks later, when he has recovered from the operation, be put at some light work and given proper food and work until he is re-established. From the day he goes to work his family should weekly be paid by the state for the work done. Thus no one would suffer and all gain. A healthy man would be gained both to the state and to his family. So with all criminals, remove the cause and surround them with a healthy body and external surrounding of “normal” work, not iron bars and walls, but freedom of health.

NOTE.—My experience with the deaf, dumb, and blind, particularly where the cause was given as resulting from scarlet fever, measles, et cetera, is that the so-called cause was based only upon the assumption of a follower of an ignorant philosophy. I challenge those in charge of institutions for the deaf, dumb and blind to produce an inmate that has no orificial lesion, providing the result was not caused by a direct lesion in the organ affected.

If our all-wise legislators would pass a law imposing a fine and punishment on anyone who had diphtheria, typhoid fever, or consumption, would that lessen the extent of disease? Penitentiaries do not lessen crime. Man is not a creature of choice, but of environment. When he responds opposite to what we call normal, it is because his machinery is working wrongly; he is sick, and instead of penitentiaries we should have hospitals. Our thoughts are forced on us through our environment; and our bodies are our closest environment; as our body is, so are our thoughts (actions).

Prostitution is a disease. If a person has a sexual irritation what thought will always be dominant, what ideas will permeate every thought? That of sexuality. Remove the irritation and we will have a person “normal” to external environment, barring for a short time the recurrence of the old associated ideas (nerve habit). By orificial operations, I have also cured young men of blackguarding, smutty story telling, swearing; they making no effort to be cured, after the operations they ceased to give voice to these expressions.

A few weeks ago I visited a family in which was a child some eight years of age, showing in her face perfect health, hence purity, the father and mother carrying in their faces every sign of degeneracy (minus). The more I studied the child, the more I became satisfied that she was not of her seeming parentage. By the time dinner was finished, I had firmly concluded that either that child was not theirs, or my philosophy was an entire failure. A half-hour later, the father, through a series of questions forced upon him, remarked that the child was not theirs, that it had been adopted when it was a few weeks old.

Dear reader, I have proven comprehensively to myself all that is written in this book; it may not be perfect, but it is on the right track.

All confirmed criminals, if they live long enough, go insane, become cripples or pronounced invalids, showing that their criminality was only one of the early attributes of a physical disease. Lombroso tries to show that epilepsy is the ultimate development of a criminal, but I cannot accept that. I unhesitatingly affirm that cigarettes, grief, anger, disgrace, et cetera, never were the cause of insanity; the body was ill and the so-called cause, at most, only hurried the result. The “excessiveness” is a demonstration of the disease. (No well being has an excessive temper, et cetera.)

SUGGESTION

Suggestion, anything that arouses an action.

The following incidents will make my meaning clearer than all the dissertations that could be written. This book is not to teach you how to specifically apply suggestion, but to open your eyes to the power that rules—cause—suggestion.

Man’s closest environment is his body.

A few summers ago, I spent some four months with a family in Ohio, studying particularly a three-year-old daughter of the woman employed to do the housework. The child dined at the table with the others of the family, was very fat, having chops like a monkey and eyes like a pig, and the mother made it her special duty to stuff the child. When the child’s eyes wandered around the table more food was given her, and when she said she had enough her mother insisted on her having a little more. I asked why this was, and the mother replied that she had had a hard time getting enough to eat, so she was going to be sure that the child had enough. I said, “Madam, you are ruining the child, you are making of her a hog.”

She replied, “No, the child is all right.”