COLUMBIA LIBRARIES OFFSITE HEALTH SCIENCES STANDARD HX64170179 QP45 .H29 1 903 What better than ser RECAP Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2010 witii funding from Open Knowledge Commons (for the Medical Heritage Library project) http://www.archive.org/details/whatbetterthanseOOhaug •J##f^^^>*^^ V w 1^1 ^v^ i^mi '^^^ \ WHAT BETTER THAN 'S For copies write H. O. Haughton, 1004 North Calvert Street, Baltimore, Md. ^■KitJUt^ A progressive physician has said: "Place at my disposal a hundred thousand dollars and I will speedily stop vivisection," his thought being to build an attractive Hospital wherein satisfac- torily to demonstrate the success of healing methods other than those resulting from animal experimentation. "What better than serum! What better than the knife? are grave questions worthy of the anti-vivisectioni^^t's earnest con- sideration. Fortunes are expended annually in the study of Disease, and to the ever ready service of dentist, oculist and physician that of surgeon is now frequently added. True it is our specialists have gained world-wide renown. This, however, is not progress to be desired. Better ten thou- sand times the health that dispenses with their services. These provisions for needed relief mark a retrograde move- ment indicative of the impaired conditions under which we seem content to live. Even if the Laboratory shed a true light (instead of a false one) should we not be most reluctant to profit thereby? And can we decry Laboratory practices if we voluntarily fly for relief for our self-imposed ills to results so cruelly gathered therefrom? Is not the astonishing technique of the up-to-date surgeon, whose blade is in ready service to cut off and cut out, gained on living laboratory subjects? And are not drugs on which medical practice so largely depends laboratory - brewed and laboratory- tested? — these serums the study of which holds the fascinated experimenter in his torment-chamber and retards true progress because diverting attention from wiser, more rational methods. Just how much difference is there between him who inflicts and us who make use of results of the barbarous system we strive to expose and abolish? What better way can we find to help vivisectible animals than to show forth the paucity of results, the failures and dan- gers incident to the systems for whose sake alone the Laborator- ies are maintained in full operation. Man irill hare VI ri. section i./ he thinks it trill hclji him. Re- striction save rnt an educational factor has proved hut a dead-letter mocemeiit. The hope for our cause must lie i)t prorimj a more successful, a more rational sricnre. A writtT ill the ••' lioston Transcript" vospondinjj; to claims jiut forth by Dr. C'vrtis Edson regarding seniin cnrcs, eni- l)liasizes llie fact tliat Pasteurism is now " a by-word among investigators" and its principle is "denounced l)y tlie leading scientific men of the world who have carefully looked into its merits;" that the ''antiseptic treatment of Lister is steadily yielding to Tait's method of simple cleanliness;" that "many bacteria once thought to be injurious are now known to be healthful in tlieir influence ;" (bacteria which, notwithstanding the in(iuisitorial torments inflicted, still remains debatable ground;) that " in spite of the much vaunted serum cure for the plague the death rate iu India where it is constantly used is constantly increasing — Indian medical otlicers speaking of it as useless." Dr. Edson speaks of the "honor of having found the anti- toxin for Dii)htheria," but the writer refers to a meeting of the New York Mcdii-al Association (April l»th, 1900) where Doctors Winters, Hupp and Herman, who for years have been investigat- ing the results of the serum, came forward with overwhelming proofs of its uselessness and injurious etTects. The President, Dr. AVeir, said " none of the serums had proved satisfactory." In an article read before the New York Academy of Medicine, ^lay 21, 180G, Dr. Joseph E. AVinters gives the names of thir- teen additional doctors, (mentioning the Hospitals with which they are connected), who, once earnest advocates of the serum treatment in Diphtheria, now with more extensive experience have from conviction become opposed to it. Recent statistics state that in New York, a stronghold of medical practice, forty thousand persons die every year of tuber- culosis alone. It has been estimated that iu the United States seven hundred million dollars are spent annually to keep our- selves in repair. Excessive study in Pathology (life in abnormal phases) marks the medical course ; whereas Physiology (life in its normal posi- tive state) will in the future claim absorbing attention. Health colleges are greatly needed whose course shall include (as valuable knowledge) questions of diet and hygiene, and all that pertains to live issues. (2) Medical Journals, the shifting scene of one unsuccessful remedy after another — dealing with poisonous drugs — to the patient often more harmful than the disease they are given to combat ! Health Journals, buo^^ant with hope and self-help — offering new lines of thought for true, wholesome living ; for the renewing of muscle and constitutional integritj^ ! Authorities estimate that in the German Empire there are six million advocates of Nature Cure, the membership of the Asso- ciation having increased until in 1896 it numbered four hundred clubs with over fifty thousand members — the object being "The cure of disease and the preservation and increase of health." Germany has seventy-eight periodicals advocating ISTatural Heal- ing Methods, with an aggregate of over a million subscribers. And here we may mention our own Health Magazine, "Phy- sical Culture," whose vigorous editor, once weak and ailing, now sends forth to others the glad gospel of self-help and self -cure, which (five cents a cop}') has already obtained a phenomenal welcome. Naturists claim that sickness is due to one or all of the fol- lowing causes : Absorption of injurious material in food or in drugs ; the undue retention of effete products in the system ; lowering of the vital force. They claim there is one disease oul}' — namely : that of impurity — in which all others have their rise and continuance, masquerading and manifesting under guise of various symptoms and names, according to the chance locality of its appearing. Nature Science, believing that disease is the result of impure deposits, and attributing to the system the "automatic faculty of self-cure, has as its object to aid the system to purify and repair itself — (easilj' accomplished in incipient disorder) — dispensing with drugs and, save in rarest exceptions, also with knife. Nature with her benign purpose of working ever towards recovery and self-restoration — maintaining .a just balance between waste and repair, striving to be faithful to her purpose, baffle her as we may ! What earthly surgeon could accomplish Nature's almost in- credible feat of making (as substitute for severed artery) a new course for the blood to run through? "About one-half the food we take" (says a medical writer) " is manufactured into blood and there is a corresponding amount of waste. If this waste is not expelled by the nervous (3) system as fast as it accumulates, poisonous acids originate in it, wiiiclj in turn produce most of the cbronic diseases from which we suffer;" — showing that the maintenance of normal health requires that the nervous system shall be kept suflicieutly strong to keep this waste passing off. " He who will explain " (says Seton Thompson) " the house sparrow's exemption from bacteriological infection, the white bear's freedom from troubles that we attribute to uric acid in the blood, or the buffalo's and tiamingo's immunity from the deadliest malaria — is ou the way to conferring like immunity in man." Is it not that disease-breeding conditions are non-existing in tlie animals' system, owing to equalized waste and repair? — their food, (scant provision to satisfy keenest hunger) obtained only after long search and activity. Is not tliis the animal's phj'sical salvation? Wild animals, we learn, die from old age or sudden death only. AVhereas man so irresistibly' tempted with his luxurious board, given over to sedentar}' habit, sows daily the seeds of disorder, and the system inactive becomes a fit rendezvous for all diseases wliicii need imperfection to feed on. On many a tombstone the inscription must read: "Broken health, with slow suicidal intent," whereas with intelligent care man should attain almost the century mark — substi- tuting for Shakspeare's dreaded description an old age full of vigor, in enjoyment of natural faculties and gifts. The splendid races whose physical well-being we well might envy, resplendent in health and vigor, capable of immense endurance, making it easy for them, as in Soutliern Mexico, for instance, to carry a load of a huudrcd or a hundred and fifty pounds over the worst roads more tlian twenty miles a day — their only food boiled maize sweetened with sugar — would stand aghast at the incredible sums of money which, as a people, we annually expend to re-enforce our health. Their bodies perfectly nourished, normal vitality, hard worked, simplicity-loving ; their perfect digestion enabling them to extract from their meagre fare the deep buried nourishment needed, they bid defiance to ailments which make captives of us. To them the knife, the poison drug and serum would not afford an enticing picture of our advancing progress, proving rather a startling expon- ent of our physical deterioration. The tale of our transgressions is easily told. "We have done those things we should not : leaving nndone those we should do. In simpler life and thought must be found the remedy, with an activity of body not outdone by activity of mind. This will be the message (A) of the new Life _Scienee wiiose- ever widening scope will include pre- vention — sanitation — re-creation. Its. Board of Health will inoCulate not with noxious preparation from disease-saturated animals, but with purity, sunshine and oxygen ; and penetrating every dwelling will bestow disease-destroying, health-conferring benefits upon the people. Only. a few earnest listeners have as yet caught the strains of the divine harmony which the Goddess of Health is prepared to offer those anxious to welcome her. Rich her message for the pres- ent, but secrets of exceeding blessing are locked within her silent keeping to reward the Truth-seeker of the future. .Shameful the cruelties imposed on the calf; shameful those imposed on the dog. Pasteur's inoculations of rabic virus inserted into the brain of the animal, (virus produced from the frenzied brain of another), doomed to endure for days the torments of induced hydrophobia, are familiar to all. In blessed contrast to which we may mention the humane Buisson Bath whose cleansing process has, after long-tried experience in India and elsewhere, proved its immediate preventive and curative virtue. Not in Hydrophobia alone but in other affections, such as lock- jaw, hot water and hot water alone, scientifically prescribed, is doing its sanative duty. To gather vaccine the process is this : In one laboratory men- tioned one hundred and fifty cuts are made on the calf — on the shaved abdomen — the animal having been firmly secured to a tilting- table made for the purpose. Into each incision the lymph is rubbed in with a lancet. Proper time intervening the calf is again bound down, each sore or vesicle is clamped, the virus is scraped off and then is ready for sale and for use. Such cruel procedure must make us loyally welcome the glad, and sufficing gospel of hygiene, which scientifically applied purified, the cities of Leicester (in England), and Cleveland, Ohio — whichi cities at the time were, and had been, small-pox infested ; thorough vaccination having been long enforced and its assumed virtue exhaustively tried, but when weighed in a critical balance, vaccina- tion was found to be totally unavailing, the plague spot getting larger and larger ! In both these cities (see Arena for April, 1902) „ sanitation systematically enforced wiped out the scourge, and so^ effectual the result not even the dread of its re-appearance remained. In the New York Herald (August 8th) we read that the Harlem Hospital surgeons were elated over the discharge from that institu- (5) tion of a lock-jaw patient after twenty-six days' treatment of serum inoculations into the spinal cord. The boy's front teeth (we are told) were knocked out in order to insert a tube through which to give needed nourishment. On the fifteenth day the jaw relaxed and the boy was able to take a little nourisliment. In strong contrast to the above, the following, taken from the " North American," has special interest. "Lock-jaw is a contraction of the muscles. The remedy is the relaxing of the same. lu view of the many dying in this country of lock-jaw it seems my duty to relate how I cured my daughter four years ago. . . . Her jaws were set and the muscles of her throat were contracted. I hastily prepared a hot water bath. . . . I kept her in this bath about one hour. In a half hour she could move her jaws. In one hour she could eat, talk, laugh, and was apparently well. I kept her jaws well protected with a cloth, and kept her in a warm room for several days, as the secret of the cure is warmth aud moisture, and she is a living example of the hot water cure." The writer adds : " Stay in bath a long time. Keep water hot and jaws submerged, putting cotton in ears, and lie on side. Afterward apply a mild drawing plaster to the wound to draw out inflammation." Kindly note that under the simple hot water treatment in half an hour smiles and assured convalescence rewarded the paternal doctor and in one hour the patient eating, laughing, talking, was apparently well, whereas under serum inoculation the surgeons were surprised that on the fifteenth day their patient's jaw relaxed and he was able to take nourishment, being discharged as cured August 7th — eleven days later. Proving all things — holding fast to that which is good ! " Facial Diagnosis " (Louis Kiihne, the author) presents to the reader a standard of Health with suggestive ideas of great interest, illustrated as it is with noble ideals of perfection in beauty, physical development and health, including relative measurements of height, size, weight, poise and strength. By facial diagnosis the physician may discover through the false lines of the jaw, the face, the neck, corresponding abnormalities which exist in the system, and is able to forewarn against premoni- tory ailment or incipient disaster, thus making his science one to prevent as well as to cure. To his searching eye the least "devia- tion" means, unless corrected, a " premier pas" in the direction of (6) exi], betokening incipient weakness in spine, lungs or digestion, and promptly discovered, Nature's just claim is only dismissed on pledge of bettered conditions. Would that beneath the keen eye of such diagnostician could be placed every child in our land, making it that oculists, dentists, and all other specialists, could by such timely fore- warning be easily dispensed with. The consistent vegetarian will not eat meat. The consistent Temperance worker touches not, handles not — only in rarest exception would duty direct otherwise. But we anti-vivisectionists ? Let us be diligent to hasten the hour when we also may wear upon our bi'east-plate the rare jewel of consistency lest our ready acceptance of ill-gotten gain, increasing demand and supply, shall condemn to surgical technique or drug-testing torment the living material we strive to protect. The Laboratory system, spending its millions in its secret star-chamber endeavoring to find the germs of disease, manufacturing and testing disease-made corruption, too absorbed in its search for the microbe to note predisposing conditions which invite germ propa- gation ! The accepted methods: tonics to brace us (an inflated basis) sleeping draughts for insomnia, deadening narcotics to relieve us of pain ; combating one threatened disease by imposing another ; for overtaxed nerves (needing rest and repair) a stimulant ordered ; old age prematurely invited, intestinal disturbance calling for knife, €olds I'unning into pneumonia, heart failure and death quite often the victor. Nine hundred persons in a million, only, it is said, die of old age. The surgical parlance which pronounces operations " success- ful " unless death ensues omits to mention the shattered conditions often remaining from anaesthetics and shock, which afterwards follow the patient for years and sometimes for life. Thank God for the speedy relief of the humauer Science. Nature Cure reverently asking, ' How best to take out of our path the problems which vex us. How best to maintain a reserve vital power with physical stamina unhindered, whose motto is : Not more poison but less ; not more impurity but to cast out that already existing ; not added disease or drug injury but to loosen the grip of that which alread}'- encumbers — to preserve and not to destroy ! ' Nature Cure has on honorable record many remarkable cures made on despair-stricken invalids on whom medicine and surgery had in vain expended their best endeavor. It includes all healing (7) methods which aid tlie system to solf-cuiv Ity poison elimination, renewed vital force and restored eirenlation. Among ''natnre assisted" methods may he mentioned: Water Cnre — inclnding Food Reform and the deep searching processes of skin elimination — whose distingnished clientele unmbers .many of Enrope's elite as its followers ; the " no breakfast" cure — a merciful plan for cruelly taxed digestive apparatus, whose telegraphic com- munications record its messages of idiopathic distress in apparently irrelevant members ; the IJuisson or vapor bath, the great purifier; the occult or diaphramic system of breathing, in great favor in India, vivifying the blood and sending its sanative influence to the '' brain- stomach," — the solar plexus ; the X-ray and the Finsen Light, used in consumption and tuberculosis; Mental Healing, not always mes- meric or hypnotic, whose theory, when understood, seems simple and scientific, namely, that an influence from the mind of the Healer rouses into renewed activity some dormant, unrecognized spiritual power. Not by faith or expectant attention comes this renewal of life's forces ; not by touch of the hand save to secure more concentrated attention. No greater marvels have ever been wrought on long suffer- ing invalids than those due to mental curative influence ; mental anaesthesia (doubtless its ally) with quieting power eijual to that of ether or chloroform, which tlrugs may well whisper needed warning of caution and danger ; Osteopathy, the aggressive young science, diag- nosing and working along original lines of its own, whose successful anatomists are skilful enough to i-estore to atrophied limb lost vigor and power, casting quickly aside the prevailing surgical appliance of plaster and brace, which impede circulation ; whose deftly trained fingers passed over the spine (a region usually ignored) can quickly detect in what they term ''deviation" or " mal-adjustment," con- cealed causes of battling disorders — ensuing relief proving the skill of the osteopathic physician — cures due to the healing touch of restored vital power and renewed circulation. Not in outward helps but in ourselves ; not in vicarious sacrifice but in individual reform nuist be found the cure for our distresses. Inoculation with diseased blood of animals is as far from the highest truth as would be the use of an odorous i>erfume to deaden a plague spot that needed purification. "Bacteriology, if it lives," (says the Medical Brief) "will assume a distinctively subordinate place in medicine. Men will cease to fear and fight germs. All one's weapons will be leveled at the conditions which breed them." (8) Greatly needed in every University a chair for the '■''Study of Healtli-promoting conditions," Tvhich in contrast to the Universal Study of " Bacteriology and Disease " shall illumine the dark maze of ills that civilization imposes — a department of Nature Research, (and it may well be a National Department also) whose object shall be the " Comparative study of law-abiding conditions" under which different nations have attained the highest standard of physical well- being. " In some industries," says a recent writer, " a workman is not efficient after forty-live, and his children never efficient because inheriting a spent constitution ! " Would that every Laboratory could be turned into a Temple of Comparative Research, that therein could be reflected as in a mirror the preventable ills which afflict humanity. Marked the discontent freely expressed by medical writers. Professor Jamieson, of Edinburgh, says: "Nine times out of ten our miscalled remedies are absolutely injurious to our patients." " Of all the iuexact sciences, therapeutics is probably at the present day the most iuexact," says a writer in the London Lancet. "That medical practice" (writes Dr. R. E. Dudgeon to the Abolitionist) , "has improved greatly during the last half century is not owing to the experiments of vivisectors, but chiefly to the dis- continuance of many evil practices which were in full swing at the beginning of that period. I refer to bleeding by lancet, by leeches, and by cupping, blisters, setons and drastic purgation. It was not vivisection that led to the cessation of those disastrous methods, but the persistent teaching of a small — and at flrst discredited — body of men within the medical profession." Says another physician (Dr. John jNFason Goode) : "Medicines have destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and famine combined." Says another (Dr. Evans, F.R.vS., of London) : "The medical practice of our day has neither philosophy nor common sense to commend it to confidence." Says another (Dr. Bostwick, author of a History of Medicine) : "Every dose of medicine given is a blind experiment upon the vitality of the patient." Still another (Dr. Ralnage, F.R.C., of London) : " The present system of medicine is a burning shame to its professors." The claims so constantly put forth " that studies in Biology have done more than anything else for the bettering of humau health" need a little revising ! (9) if we take the period of twenty j'ears from 1.S77 to 18'.)7, during wliicli vivisection iuis hud fullest swing and biological science claims to have made its gieatest strides — the niimlter of vivisectors in Eng- land during this period having increased from 23 to 22-1 — we shall be startled to lind that just within these years (in which vivisec- tors claim their greatest honors) no less than twenty-four of the worst scourges that afllict manlvind have actually become more fatal ; in some cases doul)ly and trebly fatal — experimentation keeping pace with the fatal increase of disease ; the number of experiments in 1888 being one thousand and sixty-nine — and in the year 1901, eleven thousand six hundred and forty -Jive — experimenters, as we see, having increased within tlie twenty years mentioned from 23 to 224, and experiments having increased during the past thirteen years from about 07ie thousand to over eleven thousand. The Restrictive Act took effect in the year 187fi. The mortality table above referred to (see Abolitionist, May, 1899) is taken from the Sixtieth Report of the Registrar General, and is as follows : DISEASES. Diphtheria Cholera Rickets Cancer Forms of Tuberculosis other than Pul- monary and Scrofula Anaemia, &c Diabetes Mellitus Insanity — General Paralysis of Insane Chorea (St. Vitus' Dance) Paraplegia— Diseases of Spinal Cord . . Otitis (inflamed Ear) and Otorrhoea. . Angina Pectoris Senile Gangrene Embolism— Thrombosis Pneumonia Pleurisy Gall Stones Acute Nephritis Bright's Disease and Albuminuria. . . . Thyroid Body (Disease of the) Deaths per Million Persons in Great Britain in 1878. Deaths per Million Persons in Qreat Britain in 1897. 246 31 46 787 175 60 78 119 5 71 29 23 41 42 1122 48 14 73 265 (10) Sir Frederick Treves stated in the British Medical Journal, November 5, 1898, that his former vivisections of dogs "had done little but unfit " him " to deal with the human intestine" and that in his practice upon man he "had everything to unlearn" from his experiments on dogs. Lawson Tait defined Vivisection as "crude in conception, unscientific in its nature and incapable of being sustained by any accurate or beneficent results applicable to man." The time is coming nearer and nearer to which he referred when he said: "I feel confident that before long the alterations of opinion which I have had to confess in my own case will spread among the members •of my profession." Doctor George Wilson, LL.D., in his recent address before the British Medical Association, said: "After all these long y^ears of flickering hope, I am prepared to contend that the indiscriminate maiming and slaughter of animal life, with which these bacterio- logical methods of research and experimentation have been inseparably associated, cannot be proved to have saved one single human life or lessened in au}^ appreciable degree the load of human suffering. I have ventured to make that pronouncement before, but in halting, academic fashion. I reiterate it here and now with the strongest and fullest conviction." The importance of Lord Coleridge's entreaty to his followers not to give a penny to any hospital having vivisectors on its staff is better understood when we learn that the London Anti-vivisection Society has recently issued a list of between one and two hundred hospitals in the United Kingdom which, according to the list pub- lished, employ vivisectors — giving the names of those upon the staff. The two Bills in our own country, one presented in Ohio in 1894 — one prepared in Indiana in 1901, demanding criminals for vivisection (because animals fail to render satisfactory results), seem in their outrageous demand to savor of an expansive policy rather than hoped for restrictive intent. The annual meeting of the National A nti- Vivisection Society, held in St. James' G-reat Hall, London, Ma^^, 1902, was attended by a remarkable audience. The Church, the Bar, the Army and Navy were there represented. The gallant Admiral, Sir W. Kennedy, K.C.B., expressed his thanks : "That when my time comes, at the day of judgment, what- (U) ever sins may be charged against nie, at any rate tlioy will not be able to say I was a Vivisector." Colonel Loekwood described the movement to be : " One of the most sacred and the most holy that ever actuated the breast of man." The venerable Basil "Wilberforce, D.D., Archdeacon of "West- minster (from the Chair) delivered one of his most telling denuncia- tions. The Hon. Stephen Coleridge, the honorary secretary, spoke at length in his usually powerful strain, concluding as follows : " From one stronghold to anotlier has cruelty been driven out by an ever rising spirit of humanit}', mercy, and loving kindness. Sheltering itself now in its most repulsive form behind those ancient and glorious institutions (hospitals) founded and sustained for their Christ-like work of healing the sick, sapping their foundations, and smirching their fair fame, malignant cruelty has taken up its ])osition in its last ditch. There it has summoned to its aid vast interests, ancient prejudices, euoi'mous endowments, and under illustrious patronage it has pilfered the funds subscribed for the poor ! (Shame.) But we believe that it is doomed. Few though we be, we believe that we shall ultimately drive it out from this its last lurking place, for we believe in mercy, we believe in loving kindness, we believe in justice even to animals, we believe in right conduct, we believe in God. (Loud cheers.) Here, then, Ave shall be found year after year, some of us, as long as we live, fighting this fight till it be won. Hope atid faith Avill never leave us while thousands gather together, as they have to-night, and as they do all over P2ugland — (cheers) — to lift up their voices with ours in ceaseless protests against these awful deeds. Here we stand for God's great law of love, and in His own good time He will give us the victory I " (Loud and prolonged cheers) . In no way, it seems to me, can we so effectually hasten the day when this dark, inexcusable crime shall disappear from the face of the earth as by helping to solve the pressing question : What better than serum ? AVhat better than the knife ?