KARL ANDERSON PRESENTS NATURAL HYGIENE CLASSICS Long-time hygienist Karl Anderson has made this collection of articles, mainly from "Dr. Shelton's Hygienic Review." VARIOUS ARTICLES BY DR. SHELTON Disease Is Remedial Activity - 1978 Typhoid The Life of Primitives - 1969 Observations of Nature - 1944 How Far Is Too Far? - 1972 Hygienic Consciousness Is Needed - 1973 Should Women Menstruate? - 1943 Fasting and Multiple Sclerosis Man's Dietetic Character - 1944 What is Normal Bowel Activity? Is Your Boon My Bane? - 1943 Principles or Men, Which? - E.A. Bergholz 1941 Principles or Men, Which? - 1970 What is a Poison? - 1968 Explaining The Apparent Actions of Drugs The Unity of Normal and Abnormal Processes - 1973 The Hygienic Etiology - 1973 Health Education vs. Treatment - 1973 Is Ours a Faith Cure? - 1943 Vital Action vs. Drug Action - 1943 Enervation — Toxemia - 1964 Super-Foods Eating and Cancer - 1972 Reforming the Unreformable - 1972 A Salad A Day - 1972 Hygienic Purity - 1973 Breathing The Value of Good Digestion - 1972 Herbal Medicine — Phytotherapy - 1978 Suffering In Cancer - 1978 Two articles by Christopher Gian-Curso The Importance of Rest in Disease Defense of Natural Hygiene Disease Is Remedial Activity - HM Shelton Hygienic Review Vol. XXXIV July, 1978 No. 11 Disease Is Remedial Activity by Herbert M. Shelton 1 "Polio has struck twice within six days in the family of.... " These words formed the first part of a statement in a news item published a few years ago, and bring up the question once again: "What is disease?" This language implies that disease is an entity, a thing that has an existence, per se, that is capable of striking. It struck one child and, not being satisfied with the havoc it wrought, it struck another child in the same family six days later. In this instance, the disease was the variety or species known as poliomyelitis. The ancient idea that the sick are possessed of devils lingered on in the minds of the people and in the practices "of the priests and physicians for ages after it should have passed into oblivion. All during the Middle Ages and even today in some sects of America and Europe, this doctrine of demonic possession was held to be abundantly proved by the Bible. Jesus is said to have cast out devils and during the Middle Ages it was held that to doubt demonical possession was to overthrow the entire structure of Christian doctrine. The doctrine of demonic possession was as well grounded in the Scriptures as was a belief in witches and witchcraft. This belief in demons that infest the air and take possession of the bodies of man and beast is far older than the Bible. Paracelsus, the vagabond quack of a little over four hundred years ago, whose star of popularity is again rising, held that the air was so full of devils that you could not get a hair between them. Paracelsus was a Cabalist and held to a lot of other ancient and mystical nonsense. He believed devils to be more plentiful than his modem medical successor believes microbes to be. During the long dark night of Christian ascendancy, it was held that the insane are possessed of devils and the only care these miserable beings received was intended to scare away or drive out the devils that had taken possession of them. They were chained in loathsome dungeons and tortured and beaten with a brutality that we do not understand today. Sometimes they were kept awake for a week or more in the effort to exorcize the demon. The demons were cursed in the most elaborate theological blasphemy ever devised, and the mentally sick were compelled to drink the most nauseating and disgusting compounds. Exorcizing devils was done by priests, cabalists, physicians and others. The Jesuits of Vienna, in 1583, boasted that they had cast out no less than 12, 652 devils. Devil-chasers were common in those benighted days and devil-chasing was as popular as microbe slaying is today. Historically and psychologically, the words possession and infection represent only different rationalizations of the same superstition; they stand for identical delusional mental processes and deluding etiological speculations. The medieval wizard who chased devils has evolved into the modem serologist who chases microbes. The belief in devils or demons is by no means dead. Millions pf people in Africa, China, India, Burma, Tibet, and other parts of the world believe in the existence of these "unseen powers and principalities of the air, " and the practice of devil-chasing is as popular among these people as it was two thousand years ago. But we do not have to go to the more backward sections of the earth to find a belief in devils and 2 witchcraft still surviving. We have plenty of people in America who believe in witchery or "hexing, " in haunted houses, spirit communications, and in the existence of great numbers of demons that infest earth's atmosphere and seek to gain control of the bodies and minds of man. The founder of one of the newer sects, some years ago published a book on spiritism, in which he showed from the Scriptures, that spirit mediums do not talk with the spirits of the departed dead, but with demons or "fallen angels" that inhabit the atmosphere. In this book, he describes the procedures adopted by him to exorcize devils from the bodies of those who were possessed. This man was a well-educated ex-atheist, who lived and wrote in the early years of this century. He lived, not in far away superstition-ridden Tibet, but in enlightened America. I am assured by one of the members of this sect, which now numbers many thousands of adherents throughout the world, that its members still believe in demons and in demonical possession. This reminds me of the little Sunday-school boy's statement that, "Faith means believing what you know ain't true. " This very old idea that disease is an entity that attacks the body and wreaks as much havoc therein as possible has taken several forms through the ages and is incarnated in the germ theory that holds sway today. Hippocrates was the first to break away from the theory that disease is a divine punishment, but he was unable to fully emancipate himself from the belief that it is an attacking entity. His humoral pathology was a crude biochemistry and he sought for the cause of disease in an unbalanced chemistry of the body, but at the same time, he held that disease is a positive entity or substance which has to be expelled by hammer and tongs. According to Pliny, Acron was the first to apply philosophical reasoning to the problems of disease. He held that there is an "active cause" of disease possessed of a riotous disposition. Galen regarded disease as "additional forces, foreign and inimical to the animal, with a birth, prime, and decline, like those of a physiological nature. " He is supposed to have borrowed the idea from Plato, but, since the idea was ancient when Plato was born, this presumption seems unnecessary. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the idea still prevailed that disease is a positive and organized entity. Hufland said: "The intestinal canal is, in the great majority of cases, the battle-field where the issue of most disorders is decided. " Hufland declared: "We must introduce the only medicine of which we are thoroughly convinced that it possesses the power of efficiently striving with the enemy, who, by subtle means, has now effected an entrance within our stronghold. " Stille asserted that "the whole of life is a perpetual struggle with an enemy to whom we must at last succumb. " The present day physician would say: "The whole of life is a perpetual struggle with malignant microbes that will eventually destroy us. " A hundred years ago it was freely admitted that the nature and essence of disease was unknown. Many leaders of medical thought frankly expressed the opinion that its nature can never be understood. Prof. George B. Wood, of Jefferson Medical College said in Wood's Practice of Medicine: "Efforts have been made to reach the elements 3 of disease; but not very successfully; because we have not learned the essential nature of the healthy actions, and cannot understand their derangements. " There is inherent in this statement the idea that disease is "disordered physiology. " It was so defined by certain medical authorities in Wood's time. The present views of the profession on the nature of disease are not easy to determine. The subject is never discussed in their text-books of pathology, nor in their works on the practice of medicine. By common consent they seem to have agreed to ignore the subject. Disease is now listed among the "seven modern mysteries. " Sir James McKenzie, one of the greatest clinicians of modem times, said a few years ago: "The knowledge of disease is so incomplete that we do not yet even know what steps should be taken to advance our knowledge. " In spite of this, medical men do have some idea of what disease is, as may be gained from their statements concerning it. It is said to attack us, to run its course, to be very malignant, or quite mild, to ravish the patient, to persistently resist all treatment, to yield readily to treatment, to be seated within us, to be self-limited, to supervene, to retreat, to set in, to travel from part to part, to stimulate each other, to change type, to sweep over the country like a fire, to travel from one place to another, to ride the air lanes, to be carried about, etc.