“Be careful how you give mercury; it is a treacherous medicine.  It seems often indicated.  You give it and relieve; but your patient is worse again in a few weeks and then you give it again with relief.  By and by, it fails you.  Now, if I want to make a permanent cure, for instance, in a scrofulous child, I will very seldom give him mercury; should I do so, it will be at least only as an intercurrent remedy.”

Chapter X

Suppressive Surgical Treatment of Tonsillitis and Enlarged Adenoids

The following paragraphs are taken from an article in the Nature Cure Magazine May, 1909, titled “Surgery for Tonsillitis and Adenoids.”  They will throw further interesting light on the dangerous consequences of suppressing acute and subacute diseases.

“The tonsils are excreting glands.  Nature has created them for the elimination of impurities from the body.  Acute, subacute and chronic tonsillitis accompanied by enlargement and cheesy decay of the tonsils means that these glands have been habitually congested with morbid matter and poisons, that they have had more work to do than they could properly attend to.

“These glandular structures constitute a valuable part of the drainage system of the organism.  If the blood is poisoned through overeating and faulty food combinations, or with scrofulous, venereal or psoriatic poisons, the tonsils are called upon, along with other organs, to eliminate these morbid taints.  Is it any wonder that frequently they become inflamed and subject to decay?  What, however, can be gained by destroying them with iodine or extirpating them with the surgeon’s scissors or the ‘guillotine’?

“Because your servants are weakened by overwork, would you kill them?  Because the drains in your house are too small to carry off the waste, would you blockade or remove them?  Still, this is the orthodox philosophy of the medical schools applied to the management of the human body.

“. . .  In case of any morbid discharge from the body, wherever it be, whether through hemorrhoids, open sores, ulcers or through tonsils, scrofulous glands, etc., a fontanelle has been established to which and through which systemic poisons make their way.  If such an outlet be blocked by medical or surgical treatment the stream of morbid matter has to seek another escape or else the poisons will accumulate somewhere in the body.

“Fortunate is the patient when such an escape can be established, because wherever in the system morbid excretions, suppressed by medical treatment, concentrate, there will inevitably be found the seat of chronic disease.

“After the tonsils have been removed, the morbid matter which they were eliminating usually finds the nearest and easiest outlet through the adenoid tissues and nasal membranes.  These now take up the work of ‘vicarious’ elimination and, in their turn, become hyperactive and inflamed.