[In the January issue of this journal there appeared an appreciation of Mr. Are Waerlands excellent book, “In the Cauldron of Disease”, published by David Nutt at 7s. 6d. With the permission of the gifted author, this Journal is privileged to reprint a few pages from his book, which will be read with the greatest interest by thousands of readers. Such a sample is of much greater value than any appreciation, however enthusiastic. I would add that Mr. Waerlands book has been introduced by Sir Arbuthnot Lane, the great surgeon, who has given it the highest praise. EDITOR, “HEAL THYSELF.”].
IN the whole assembly of Nordic gods there is not one devoted to the art of healing. This is of the deepest significance. If a newly-born child was found unfit to live, it was taken into the forest and left to fall asleep for ever in the arms of Nature. Of ailments and diseases our forefathers were equally ashamed of f infirmity and decrepitude. They simply did not tolerate them in themselves or their surroundings.
Ruled by these gods, the North produced a race of which the world has never seen the like in physical, mental and moral vigour.
It is upon the “health-capital” they build up that their descendants of thirty generations have been drawing for over a thousand years.
At present the whole of the Nordic race is bitter to the marrow of its bones by wrong principles of living, and to the core of its being by a wrong outlook on life.
The race is rotting and is in danger of being swept off the surface of this globe unless a revolution is brought about. Not a social or industrial revolution concerned with money hoarded in the vaults of banks, nor wealth of buildings, ships and machinery, but a physical and moral revolution concerned with riches of another kind, stored up in tissues, blood and bones, and in those moral fibres which produce healthy minds and strong characters to whom disease is infamous and fear unknown.
One of the main features of disease is that it produces a corresponding outlook upon life, calculated, like the scavengers that settle in the organs and tissues of diseased body, to accelerate its decay and terminate its existence. For Nature, in her philosophy, is wholeheartedly on the side of our forefathers. Her aim is the production of the highest type, not that of a people in decay or the care of weaklings.
“We must be cruel to be kind.” Natures cruelty is her greatest kindness; mans kindness is his greatest cruelty.
No system of feeding and healing is better calculated to produce an ever-increasing amount of physical, mental and moral suffering than the present. Consequently “suffering” is glorified as a moral asset just because of its ubiquity.
Never has man lived in a poorer state of health and in a greater abundance of food. Consequently “the soul” is glorified and the body looked sown upon-as if the soul could ever reach its height and fulfil its destiny in a decaying body!.
Never has man lived in a poorer state of health and in a greater abundance of food. Consequently “the soul” is glorified and the body looked down upon-as if the soul could ever reach its height and fulfil its destiny in a decaying body!.
Where is the man or woman with any insight into eugenics who believes for a moment that, with the present state of health and way of living, a single descendant of the millions which now populate this great city of London, will be left to carry on after ten generations? [In “The Frustration of Medicine”, referred to in the previous chapter, Professor Mottram expresses himself on behalf of his profession as follows:.
“One of the most pressing problems of all civilized countries is how to produce satisfactory children, and from satisfactory children satisfactory adults… Putting the whole matter on a purely physical basis it will be granted that we make a pretty bad mess of the solution of the problem, Recently it was stated that in the North of England 68 (sixty-eight) per cent. of the recruits for the army had to be rejected for physical unfitness. At the other end of the social scale the results are not much better.
The boys of the public school class have mostly had to have their tonsils removed and very few have class have mostly teeth. a high percentage of the children of the well-to-do are forced to wear spectacles. Faculty nutrition may easily prove to be the main cause of maternal mortality, defective teeth, and poor resistance of the body to infection.”] And yet their social and political leaders go on talking about economic and political measures as if they were their only concern, and about “old england” as if it would remain for ever.
The cliffs and the sea, the hills and the green fields will remain, but what about the people who once cultivated them and built by their physical, mental and moral qualities the greatest Empire the world has seen?.
Without a good sturdy physique, impregnable to disease, the most excellent qualities of mind and character will hand on the air and ultimately disappear.
Geology tells us to what extent small imperceptible causes will being about great results. The same rule holds good in biology, where small changes in the life of a species may be sufficient either to alter it fundamentally or bring about it extermination.
The causes working for destruction in our habits of life at present are tremendous. The alarming thing about them is that they work so swiftly that we are able to see whole families swept out of existence before our very eyes. But what is, at the same time, so hopeful, is that the forces of destruction can so easily and quickly be staved off if only a helping hand is given to the regenerative forces within us, working in the opposite direction.
Nature is still the great master. But her true artisans and craftsmen are not those who mend or repair but those who build.
It is builders we want. Our forefathers were true builders. Their world was never ready-made, it was always in making. It did not simply “exist”, it was being built-an enterprise in which man and God worked hand in hand.
The results achieved speak singularly in their favour. The word “disease” is scarcely mentioned in their literature. They cared so little for the art of healing that it was left in the hands of old women and witches. They had no doctors, no apothecaries, no chemists, no laboratories or other “blessings” of modern civilization. Not a single prescription for the cure of a disease of any sort has been handed down to our days. And yet they far surpassed us in health and vigour.
They did not mend life, they made it so that there should be little need for mending and healing. Their goddess of health was Idun, [Idun, actually “lifes renewal”] the goddess of eternal youth of “lifes renewal”. The symbol of this renewal was the apple, the very fruit of which we have today no less than 5,000 varieties, or just as many as there are “more important treatises” written by doctors on “Gastric Ulcer”.
There are many sayings about what would keep the doctor away, but the oldest and best known is “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”.
Perhaps we should have had 5,000 fever works on gastric ulcers if doctors had studied the qualities of this wonderful fruit which surpasses, as a health restorer and preserver, all the remedies of the chemists. Doctors never prescribe it. They manifest their belief in the proverb by being afraid of the fruit.
“The aim of the doctor is to maintain life at any cost,” declares Dr. Dahl in his book, The Diseases of the Digestive Organs.
The civilized nations of to-day will have to pay for this principle with the certainty of becoming extinct and leaving their countries to be populated by yellow-skinned hordes from Asia and the dusky masses of Africa, unless they take their lives in their own hands and start investigating the laws governing their physical welfare, which laws will be found to be quite different from those worshipped by the doctors.
Nature does not aim at the upkeep of life at any price regardless of quality. What is not fit to live is thrown on her scrap-heap to be dealt with by the countless armies of he “house- breakers” or scavengers. Disease of any kind is a sign that an individual is not fully qualified to represent his species. Natures aim is the production of higher types; the doctors: to keep any type alive as long as possible, with a complete disregard for the necessity of producing specimens of “homo sapiens” impervious to disease and fit to carry on the evolution of their own species upon the foundation which Nature herself has so firmly laid in the course of millions of years.
[It is commonplace that human life is changing, not only rapidly but also at an ever-increasing pace. Conditions of life have probably changed more in the last fifty years than they did in fifty million years of the early history of the earth. If they change so much in fifty years, what will they be after another fifty million years? Will the human race be transformed into something more wonderful than we can now imagine, or will it have vanished entirely from the scene, like the can now imagine, or will it have vanished entirely from the scene like the weird animals who occupied the earth fifty million years ago?” Sir James Jeans].
