The race has become diseased, is suffering, cries out for a betterment of its conditions, grows constantly more embittered and renounces its faith in the powers, human and divine.

Epidemics of terrific proportions sweep their recurring millions into the arms of death; diseases of stupendous mortality, such as tuberculosis, cancer, syphilis, diabetes, and the extensive array of so-called contagious diseases of children, are continually increasing, in spite of doctors, hospitals, sanatoria, hydros, hygienics, asylums, nostrums and serums, and continue to afflict humanity, taking their ghastly toll in daily thousands, despite the vaunted but theoretical advancement of Medical Science.

In the field of medical science the controversy rages at full blast today.

An endless succession of hypotheses, conjectures and dogmas lies widespread before us—­a troubled sea of uncertainties—­a complex labyrinth of doubt.

The “doctors of medicine” are many but responsible physicians are few, while disease is constantly on the increase among mankind.

It is really little that the people have to learn, for instinct has taught them there is little to be hoped of succour from the professional source.  But the world-old habit of superstitious fear and reverence for the “Medicine Man” fetish yet holds its grip upon the race—­alike in the savage or the Senate and, despite the knowledge of its fallacy, humanity, still faithful, turns to it weakly, fear-driven, in its hour of distress, knowing no self-reliance and no safer refuge.

The reader will pardon this digression, since it is better that from the outset we should divest ourselves of all delusions and recognize existing conditions as they really are in order that it may help to eliminate these ignorant superstitions from the public mind and implant therein the wholesome fact that there is no magic in medicine but simply an ordinary problem of cause and effect.

Existence is movement; the whole visible world is progress, development.  These are facts which, in truth, are daily becoming more generally known.  But man—­even modern man—­is still so stubbornly unyielding in his faith that what he learns in an instant becomes immovably rooted in his mind to the utter exclusion, generally, of anything new, which even though it be a matter of demonstrated fact, it matters not if at variance with this earlier knowledge; to him it is an impossibility.

How often the fallacy of such ultra-conservative principles has been demonstrated has no bearing upon the case; the fact remains—­irrational, stupid though it be—­that, sublimely indifferent to criticism, it survives, with all the wrong and persecution that follows in its train.