“’They are free from many other diseases that pester us also.  Tuberculosis is hardly known, and only along the coast, where it has been taken by the whites.  The real curse of the coast country is malaria.  It is bad all up and down the East shore.  I kept away from it myself by taking five grains of quinine and the juice of a lemon once a day on an empty stomach.  That is a good remedy for malaria, for in all my running around I have never had it.”

(Editor’s Note.—­Dr. Senn died January 2, 1908.  The papers stated after his death, that the doctor had never been well since the return from his long voyage, that his heart and nervous system had been seriously affected by the altitudes of the Andes and of other mountains.  We wonder whether the “high altitudes” or the “five grains of quinine daily” were to blame for the celebrated physician’s heart disease and death.)

Suppression, the Cause of Chronic Diseases

Dr. Senn was right.  If men and women lived more naturally, the majority of diseases would disappear.

The primary cause of disease is violation of Nature’s Laws.  “Civilization” has largely stood for artificiality of life and for unnatural habits.  A higher civilization, yet to come, will combine the most exquisite culture of heart and mind with true simplicity and naturalness of living.  Excessive meat eating, strong spices and condiments, alcohol, coffee, tea, overwork, night work, fear, worry, sensuality, corsets, high heels, foul air, improper breathing, lack of exercise, loveless marriages, race suicide, all of these and many other evils of hypercivlization have contributed their share in creating the universal degeneracy of civilized nations commented upon by Dr. Senn.

When the unnatural habits of life alluded to have lowered the vitality and favored the accumulation of waste matter and poisons to such an extent that the sluggish bowels, kidneys, skin and the other organs of elimination are unable to keep a clean house, Nature has to resort to other, more radical means of purification or we should choke in our own impurities.  These forcible housecleanings of Nature are colds, catarrh, skin eruptions, diarrheas, boils, ulcers, abnormal perspiration, hemorrhages and many other forms of inflammatory febrile diseases.

Sulphur and mercury may drive back the skin eruptions, antipyretics and antiseptics may suppress fever and catarrh.  The patient and the doctor may congratulate themselves on a speedy cure; but what is the true state of affairs?  Nature has been thwarted in her work of healing and cleansing.  She had to give up the fight against disease matter in order to combat the more potent poisons of mercury, quinine, iodine, strychnine, etc.  The disease matter is still in the system, plus the drug poison.

Proof positive of the retention of drug poisons in the organism is furnished by the Diagnosis from the Eye.  This will be explained more fully in another chapter.