Natural Cure
Introduction
It was the following
letter from Mr. William Louden to the editor of
"Health Culture" which prompted the author to issue
the ~"Nature Cure Magazine"~ (published from
November, 1907, to October, 1909). In the
series of books of which this is the first volume,
he will endeavor to collect and systematize all his
former writings in the~ "Nature Cure
Magazine," "Health Culture," "Life and Action,"~ the
~"Naturopath,"~ the ~"Volksrath,"~ and other
publications, and to amplify these by new material
obtained through further research and wider
experience.
Mr. Albert Turner,
Editor of ~"Health Culture."~
DEAR SIR-- I write to ask what you consider the best
book or pamphlet to put into the hands of people
generally, in regard to the preservation of
health. I know there are a number of very
excellent publications, but as a rule they deal with
certain details or phases of the question, and do
not begin with the great underlying principles in
such a way as to attract and hold the attention of
the masses. One advocates one plan, and another an
entirely different, and sometimes a directly
opposite plan--such as uncooked vs. thoroughly
cooked food; a strictly vegetarian diet, and mental
culture in place of attention to either, etc. Such a
state of affairs makes it confusing to average
people and gets them to believe that health
reformers are all at sea, and what is good for one
is not good for another, or, in common language,
"what is one man's meat is another's poison."
Now, I know it is natural, and doubtless
best, that there should be a difference of opinion
on any question, but at the same time, if any
movement is to be crowned with great success, there
should be some underlying principles upon which all
should agree, and these should be pressed to the
forefront, so as to attract and hold the attention
of the people, in place of the divergent details
upon which they disagree. If these fundamental laws
and principles are thoroughly studied and well
defined, it may be found that they would explain the
discrepancies between the different theories, and
that under certain conditions, one plan is best, and
that under different conditions another plan is more
applicable, etc. The pushing of these fundamental
principles to the front would also tend to correct
errors into which the different theorists have
fallen, and would certainly tend to make the
different theories more homogeneous and more easily
understood by people in general, than at present.
In my opinion, the
general fundamental principles of life and
health are what people need to understand more
than anything else. Without this, most of the
details will be meaningless or at least confusing
dogmas. I don't mean by these fundamental principles
the details of anatomy, or, for that matter, the
details of anything else, but the general rules
governing life and death, so that people may know
which way they, are tending, and may understand the
many illusions with which life and death, as well as
all else in nature are beset.
Yours truly,
WILLIAM LOUDEN
Louden Mfg. Co.,
Fairfield, Iowa.
The present volume and
others of the "Nature
Cure Series" which are to follow are an
attempt to answer Mr. Louden's inquiry and to
formulate and elucidate the fundamental laws of
health, disease
and cure for which he and many others
have been vainly seeking. Who among you at some time
or another, has not thought and felt like Mr. Louden
and in doubt and perplexity voiced Pilate's query,
What Is Truth?
The exact information and rational method of
teaching which Mr. Louden is seeking, has heretofore
been wanting in health-culture literature.
Many, indeed, stand ready and willing to show the
way to physical, mental and moral perfection.
Hundreds, yes, thousands, of different cults, isms,
teachers, books and periodicals treat of these
subjects, but their teachings are so manifold, so
contradictory and confusing, that one becomes
bewildered amid the ever increasing testimony. As is
often the case in the study of complicated subjects,
the more one reads and the more one hears, the less
one knows. I believe that no one has described more
strikingly this state of general perplexity than Mr. Louden in his excellent letter.
Nevertheless, these simple fundamental laws and
principles really exist. They must exist, because
everything in Nature, including the processes of
health, of disease and
cure, of birth, of life and death, are subject
to law and order.
Allopathy, or Old School Medical Science, admits
that it does not know these fundamental principles;
that it reasons, not from
underlying causes, but from external symptoms and
personal experiences. It is, therefore,
self-confessedly full of doubts,
errors and confusion; in short, empirical--and
necessarily, a failure.
Many teachers of
Nature Cure,
Hygiene and Health cults have stumbled accidentally
upon some of the natural laws and true methods of
healing, but have failed to grasp and to formulate
the broad underlying principles. For this reason
they are often partly right and partly wrong and
very apt to overdo certain methods to the neglect of
others just as effective and essential, or even more
so.
I shall endeavor in these volumes to formulate and
elucidate some of the fundamental laws and
principles underlying the phenomena of life and
death, health, disease
and cure, and shall try to ascertain in the
light of these laws how much of truth and how much
of error, how much of usefulness and how much of
harmfulness there may be contained in the various
theories and systems of living and of healing.
Nature Owe an Exact Science
One of the reasons why
Nature Cure is not more
popular with the
medical profession and the public is that it is too
simple. The
average mind is more impressed by the involved and
mysterious than
by the simple and common-sense.
However, it remains a fact that "exact science"
reduces complexity
and confusion to simplicity and clearness. Science
becomes exact
science only when the underlying laws which
correlate and unify its
scattered facts and theories have been discovered.
These simple laws rightly understood and applied
will do for medical
science what the law of gravitation has done for
physics and
astronomy, and what the laws of chemical affinity
have done for
chemistry, they will place medical science in the
ranks of exact
sciences. The understanding and proper application
of these truths
will explain every fact and phenomenon in the
processes of health, disease and cure, and will enable the student to
reason from simple, natural laws and principles to their logical
effects. The "Regular"
school of medicine, so far, has endeavored to build
a medical
science on the observation of "effects" and
"experiences," but
since one fundamental law of nature may produce a
million seemingly
differing effects it becomes self-evident that it is
utterly
impossible to found an exact science on such
uncertain and
conflicting evidence.
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