One of the bottles I took to a W. C. T. U. meeting, and in the presence of the ladies I opened it and drank the contents.  Then I had two of them to take me down to a Doctor’s office.  I fell limp on the sofa and said:  “Doctor, what is the matter with me?”

He looked at my eyes, felt my heart and pulse, shook his head and looked grave.

I said:  “Am I poisoned or in an abnormal state?”

“Yes, said the Doctor.”  I said:  “What poisoned me is that beer you recommended Bro. ——­ to take as a tonic.”  I resorted to this stratagem, to show the effect that beer has upon the system.  This Doctor was a kind man and meant well, but it must have been ignorance that made him say beer could ever be used as a medicine.

There was another, Dr. Kocile, in Medicine Lodge who used to sell all the whiskey he could.  He made a drunkard of a very prominent woman of the town, who took the Keely cure.  She told the W. C. T. U. of the villainy of this doctor and she could not have hated anyone more.  Oh! the drunkards the doctors are making!  No physician, who is worthy of the name will prescribe it as a medicine, for there is not one medical quality in alcohol.  It kills the living and preserves the dead.  Never preserves anything but death.  It is made by a rotting process and it rots the brain, body and soul; it paralyzes the vascular circulation and increases the action of the heart.  This is friction and friction in any machinery is dangerous, and the cure is not hastened but delayed.

I have given space in this book to one of the most scientific articles, showing how dangerous alcohol is to the human system.

Any physician that will prescribe whiskey or alcohol as a medicine is either a fool or a knave.  A fool because he does not understand his business, for even saying that alcohol does arouse the action of the heart, there are medicines that will do that and will not produce the fatal results of alcoholism, which is the worst of all diseases.  He is a knave because his practice is a matter of getting a case, and a fee at the same time, like a machine agent who breaks the machine to get the job of mending it.  Alcohol destroys the normal condition of all the functions of the body.  The stomach is thrown out of fix, and the patient goes to the doctor for a stomach pill, the heart, liver, kidneys, and in fact the whole body is in a deranged condition, and the doctor has a perpetual patient.  I sincerely believe this to be the reason why many physicians prescribe it.

I was doing my own work at the time God spoke to me; cooking, washing and ironing; was a plain home keeper.  I cooked enough for my husband until next day, knowing that I would be gone all night.  I told him I expected to stay all night with a friend, Mrs. Springer.  I hitched my horse to the buggy, put the box of “smashers” in, and at half past three o’clock in the afternoon, the sixth of June, 1900, I started to Kiowa.