Part 22

This last summer in Ontonagon, Michigan (and, dear reader, you would never be able to find the place if I told you where it is), I hypnotized a lad of ten and stuck him full of pins. That night the family physician was seated in the second row of seats in the theater. I brought the lad from off the stage, told him to go to sleep, that he had no feeling in his ear, and although he went into hypnosis, he had plenty of feeling in the ear, and would not take the inspiration. I awakened him; he was trembling all over. On the stage I told him to go into hypnosis, but he was afraid. After assuring him that I would not put any pins into him, he did as I requested. After the performance I asked him what was the matter, and he replied, “I didn’t care about your sticking pins in me when the doctor ain’t there; but,” he added, “I am afraid of the doctor, the doctor always makes trouble.”

“Isn’t he the family physician?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “but I am afraid of the doctor.”

Why this association of ideas so contrary to the doctor. Whose fault is it, the doctor’s or the profession’s? No. Because the grandest profession in the world is that of medicine (?). (Rather, that of healing.) He who ministers to the sick, and will give them a sound body, a good body, a clean body, therewith a clean “mind,” can do more for the world than the spiritual (?) adviser. Why is it, when the minister calls on us, that the children and nearly all of the family go out? The minister as a rule does not seem to be welcome. Why is this? His profession, next to that of the doctor, is the noblest, the grandest, still the children very rarely welcome him. There must be something wrong. It is this: they arouse thoughts antagonistic to themselves, instead of the thoughts they desire. This is done by using negative (telling the people what not to do, instead of surrounding them with suggestions of what they should or what they can do).

Man, being ruled by his environment, is the reproduction of that environment; the wise (?) doctor, examining a child’s throat, says, “Ah, the child has diphtheria,” and he locks up the family of six or eight in the house to keep the disease from spreading (?). No; but in an attempt to murder the others of the family. The environment forced on the child the diphtheria, and he locks up the healthy people in that environment to see if they get the disease and die or not. The same with small-pox and every alleged contagious disease; they lock the people in the environment that produced the result, expecting them not to get well. Why is it the doctor, who does not live in that environment, very rarely gets the disease, unless the disease is caused by the environment of the entire city?

“I am a Jew (doctor). Hath not a Jew (doctor) eyes? Hath not a Jew (doctor) hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same disease, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winters and summers, as a Christian (the sick) is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? * * * If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”—Shylock, Act III. Scene I.

If he is safe (and rarely does he contract the disease), why are not the others of the family safe if removed from their present environment? If you wish to isolate them, build a hospital, a pest house, or whatever you wish to call it, in the most sanitary portion of the city, then move these people to that healthy environment, and see how quickly the disease will die out, and how few of the remainder of the family will “catch it.”

Yellow fever was very prevalent in Santiago; the moment the environment was changed through the establishment of good sanitation, the yellow fever disappeared. It has long been observed that when the frost comes in the South, yellow fever disappears; cold kills the yellow fever germs (?). Oh! our wise (?) doctors. Take a man suffering with yellow fever and put him in cold storage and the germs will quickly die (?); so will the patient. When the frost comes, a latent mineral element is released by its action, and the moment that element once more permeates the atmosphere and man gets his natural allowance, he no longer has the mal-transformation or yellow fever, but gets a “normal” or healthy transformation and well being.

If our doctors would study the environment, the elements necessary for health, there would be more well people on the face of the earth.

Epidemics are caused by the lack of an element, and when the demand is greater than the supply, those most in need fall by the wayside. The moment the supply and demand are equalized, some wise (?) doctor discovers a cure (?) for the alleged epidemic. During all the epidemics at least ninety per cent die from fear. I think it was in 1893, during the cholera epidemic in France, that for ten days, successively, a reporter on the New York World ate the germs of cholera and seemed to thrive on them. A homeopathic doctor rarely loses a cholera patient if he can get the case in any of its early stages. More men die of pseudo disease than real disease, but that is only something for the learned (?) scientists to wrangle over; he dies, whether it was through cholera or pseudo cholera, it makes no difference; he dies.

I once took in charge a subject who had suffered from a severe form of Southern malaria; his blood had been examined by a physician and pronounced most healthy. I hypnotized him, forced on him the thought of the malaria and in two days he had perfect malaria, even to the protoplasm in the blood.

Our hospitals and prisons carry with them every suggestion positive against the result sought. The patient lies in a ward of the hospital, thinking sickness; the prisoner, in jail, thinking crime. Hospitals should suggest health. There should be healthy doctors, sunlight and flowers, and live animals (other than bed bugs); but our hospitals of to-day have sick doctors, the majority of the nurses are sick, and the whole environment is one against just what the doctors are striving to accomplish.

The history of the so-called advance in medicine travels side by side with the advance in sanitation.

Rational medicine has made no progress. We have gained anesthetics, and skilled butchers, who can cut neatly and cleanly. Hunchbacks now walk straight, but live no longer. Other than the “orificial” thought (and that is the surgeon’s), I deny any advancement.

The Law of Suggestion balances itself. The sexually degenerate die off as consumptives, et cetera, conditionally failing to reproduce, while those in health continue the race.

Civilization carries with it filth. If the germ theory be right, the first thing that our wise (?) boards of health should do is to abolish sewers, pipes that lead to a cesspool where the germs are propagated, and from there conducting them into our bedrooms, our ballrooms and our offices, thereby committing murder by distributing these alleged germs that they seem so anxious to destroy. If the germ theory be true, abolish sewers. Primitive races, races that lived out of doors, and did not congregate in great numbers, were free from disease. Man, civilized (?) man, always leaves disease in his wake. Doctors are needed only in modern civilization.

Our soldiers, before being sent to Cuba, were vaccinated—polluted with cow-syphilis—and, although the papers and army reports tried to keep the knowledge from the public, small-pox was prevalent among these vaccinated soldiers, the excuse being that the vaccination “didn’t take.” Tommy-rot.

Man, being a creature of his environment, can find about him all that is necessary for his welfare; and, if he would obey the law discovered by Darwin, by Herbert Spencer, he would find that he who is most apt, who is most quickly assimilated with his environment, is the one who will survive the longest.

The government murders our soldiers in the Philippines and in Cuba by feeding them with hog meat, “embalmed” beef, and food-stuffs that grow only in the temperate zones, while all round them are the necessary and proper foods to keep them in health in their present environment. Natives in the tropics eat but little of flesh, little of the elements that are found in the foods of the colder climes; yet our soldiers, unaccustomed to the enervating environment of the tropics, are fed on flesh, a food necessary (?) to keep men alive in a cold climate. It is simply murder; there is no excuse for such stupidity.

Why is it that those who live in the Southern climes eat so much of red-peppers, spices, et cetera? For the reason that the heat of the atmosphere, draws all of the energy and circulation to the surface of the body to induce perspiration, the evaporation of which cools the skin. The stimulation of the hot spices is a counter-irritant and draws the blood to the stomach, giving it the energy necessary to perform its proper function. Our soldiers in the Philippines are fed with the most indigestible food, unprovided with the irritants necessary to produce the required digestion, and although our newspapers fail to tell the public, our army insane asylums are being filled at a rate that is appalling. The meat trust and the ignorance of our doctors are decimating the ranks of our soldiers far more rapidly than the Filipinos could were they furnished with arms. Eat of your environment if you would be of that environment and survive.

In a certain hospital in Chicago an old maid, a patient, had undergone a successful operation, but was firmly convinced that she would die. Her old maid sister visited her and agreed with her that she would die. Every time she saw the doctor she told him she would die; and, at last, losing patience (not “patients,” though sometimes he did) one evening, after she had repeatedly informed the doctor she would die, he turned to her and said, “Damn you, die!” and went down stairs. About forty minutes later the nurse called the doctor and said, “She did it.”

“Did what?”

“As you told her.”

“What was that?”

“She has died.”

The question is did the body force the thought, or did the external environment force the thought, which resulted in death?

Another time, a young lady living at home became ill. Her physician concluded that drugs would be of little avail, and hired a robust, rosy-cheeked, romping tomboy of a nurse, to whose presence the family objected. The doctor insisted, and the patient got well. The family still hold that the doctor made a grave mistake in forcing them to endure the presence of this nurse, who was a suggestion of health in appearance, in tone, and in manner; and her constant attendance on the patient was more potent through its effect on the patient’s senses than all the medicine in Christendom.

The Mental Scientists believe in telepathy, claiming that if all the neighbors wished health to the sick one, they would get a telepathic effect of mind upon mind. This explanation will not hold water. What you think, you look, you do. Therefore, if you think health, you communicate that suggestion to the patient through the patient’s senses, for in no other way can he receive the impression. It is open (direct), personal suggestion—nothing telepathic about it.