“I am a subscriber to this magazine and have also had my sister’s name put on the mailing list.  She has a little boy about two years old.  Now, suppose she should read that article of Dr. Lindlahr’s, and as a result, refuse to permit the use of antitoxin, and if the boy should get diphtheria, with a fatal issue as a result, I could hardly feel gratified over the fact that I had placed that reading-matter at her disposal.  I fully appreciate the fact that such an unhappy result might easily ensue in some one or more of the families who read ‘Life and Action’ and look upon its columns as a source of the truly higher light.”

Perhaps Dr. E. has not read one of Dr. Osler’s latest and strongest utterances, his unqualified endorsement of natural methods of healing in the Encyclopedia Americana, quoted on page 154 of this volume.

Nature Cure in Germany

That it is possible to cure all kinds of serious acute diseases by drugless methods of healing, has been proved by the Nature Cure practitioners in Germany, nearly all of whom were laymen who had never visited a medical school.  For over half a century, many thousands of them have been practicing the art of healing in all parts of Germany.  With hydrotherapy and the other natural methods they have treated successfully typhoid fever. diphtheria, smallpox, appendicitis, cerebro-spinal meningitis and all other acute diseases.

It is a significant fact that, in spite of the most strenuous opposition and appeal to the law-making powers on the part of the regular school of medicine, the lay doctors could not be prevented from practicing the natural methods of treatment in law-and police-ridden Germany.

On the contrary, during the last few generations there have been practicing in Germany at all times an ever increasing number of Nature Cure physicians, most of them laymen.

This freedom of Nature Cure practice in Germany is entirely due to the success of its methods.

And this success has been demonstrated in spite of all kinds of opposition and attempted restriction.  While the Nature Cure practitioner is permitted to treat those who come to him for relief, he does not have the right to cover his mistakes with six feet of earth.  If one of his patients dies, a doctor of the regular school of medicine has to be called in to testify to the fact and issue the death-certificate.

Thus the “lay doctors,” the “Nature Cure physicians,” were and are at present constantly exposed to the strictest critical supervision by the “regulars,” and if the latter can prove that a patient has died because the natural methods were inefficient or harmful, the lay practitioner can be prosecuted for and convicted of malpractice or man-slaughter.

But in point of fact, while a number of these lay physicians were brought before the courts, in no instance could the actual harmfulness of the methods employed by them be proven.  The natural methods of treatment became so popular that, as a matter of self-preservation, the younger generation of physicians in Germany had to fall in line with the Nature Cure idea in their practice.