DEAR MR. BARKER, I am a Civil Servant and am 24 years of age. Some years ago, I came across your book Good Health and Happiness, which I read, as I thought it a book likely to contain useful information on health matters. After finishing it, I was encouraged to read your volume Chronic Constipation and later your two volumes Cancer and Cancer, The Surgeon and Researcher.
Whereupon the morbid dread against medical study which I had, in common with the majority of laymen was completely exercised, and in its place was implanted an enthusiasm for your particular theory of disease aetiology and treatment. Since then I have studied anatomy, physiology and pathology and read every medical work I could lay hands upon with the fundamental background of your work to test and adjust what I read.
I have had what might be called some clinical experience. My mother (God rest her soul), who died early this year had been semi-invalid for nearly two years previously with heart disease; and I attended her a lot, and saw her sinking slowly month by month under the terrible symptoms of circulatory and respiratory failure which accompany a progressing mitral stenosis.
I did what I could do put your principles into operation by looking after her diet and elimination, but many things militated against me, particularly a lack of satisfactory resources. She, of course, had a doctor whom she visited occasionally and who prescribed digitalis. so my job also consisted in mastering there digitalis technique and sometimes altering it to strophanthus.
My own initiative in remitting and changing these drugs brought many temporary periods of recovery to her, and saved the expense of more frequent visits to the doctor. She went at last to hospital and died there, but not before her system was officially poisoned with purgatives, mercurial diuretics, digitalis, iron, quinine, strychnine, bromide, opium and morphia.
At that time I had not read your later books or known anything about homoeopathic medication. If I had, I would never have been an accessory to that tragedy. Now, since you have proved and recommended the study of it, I intend to devote my attention to it.
I hope now that you will excuse me writing to you and monopolising even a fraction of your time, since I know you must be a very busy man. Your literary labours as the leading opponent of orthodox medicine in your country and the care of your visible and invisible army of patients must be a terrific strain and fully engage every moment of yours without being bothered in other ways.
Your writings, however, have made a tremendous impression on me. Fortunate indeed have you been in appearing at a time when the twin problems of disease and medical incompetence are growing yearly by leaps and bounds and tending to threaten civilization; for thereby your work in lucidly and vigorously expressing the ordinary commonsense laws of health and combating the pseudo-scientific medical heresy of the age will become epochal when viewed in retrospect by the generations to come.
In some future and happier era I am confident that when the history of medicine is being written up, you will take a significant and honourable place in the line of the great healers.
Your writings have been of inestimable benefit to me. There has not been published anywhere to my knowledge so courageous and devastating a challenge to the evil habits of diet and doctoring that are widespread to-day. At the moment I am reading the huge volume on cancer by Professor Blair Bell and colleagues of the Liverpool Medical Research Organization; and if ever there was required a justification for your “Cancer” volumes it is the publication and acceptance of such productions.
Their treatment is lead: briefly, the rationale is that lead destroys the normal “malignancy” of the chorionic cells and causes abortion, wherefore it should inhibit abnormal malignancy elsewhere, malignancy being defined as the differentiation of cells to their ancestral undifferentiated condition of the embryonic type. Cures are reported; but I am thinking that after a cure in that way the resulting nothing in nature and would lead, caeteris paribus, to the swift destruction of the body in some way at a later date.
Their theory may seem right in theory, but is preposterous biologically. If there can spring from outraged nature diseases deadlier than cancer, our scientists are going the right way to discover them and give them to us.
Blair Bells treatment of malignant disease is despicable. The man is blind to the fact that cancer is a four dimensional problem. One may cut out or annihilate the growth, length, breadth and depth, but there is still left its extent in time in the body and the problems connected with its origin and evolution therein.
The only correct approach to cancer treatment is to recognize that fact and to attempt to make the tumour recede through its stages of malignant development by constitutional treatment until the body can deal naturally with it. I suggest that, to perform such treatment thoroughly on a large scale, it will be necessary to form cancer concentration camps in suitable parts of the country wherein all the forces of sun, air, bathing, massage, physical exercise, diet, bowel detoxication, psycho- therapy and homoeopathy will be mobilized and vigorously instituted for the benefit of the inmates, and where some degree of sports and amusement will obtain to keep their minds healthy.
The horrible and hopeless precincts of the hospital set apart for this malady are lethal to numbers of individuals. Of course all this raises political and economic problems, and in any case is no substitute for active national steps to stamp out the disease by educating the people into the true preventive treatment of it on the lines of your work. The elements of physiology and health instruction should be made a compulsory subject in the various classes of elementary schools with routine examinations in it.
I have in my hands Bayer Products Medical Diary, 1934, in which over thirty pages are devoted to showing how every disease and ailment can be treated by one or other of their patent preparations. For Aneurism give Theominal, for Arteriosclerosis give Padutin, for Diarrhoea give Eldoform and so on. Truly the medical profession have hitched their wagon to an evil and deluding star.
