The most important and most essential factor in the preservation and restoration of good health is an abundance of vital or healing power. A knowledge of the means or conditions of the conservation, accumulation and recuperation of this power is, therefore, of more importance than any other thing discussed in this book. There is a broad sense in which the whole subject of health and "disease" is involved in this knowledge, and in which the conservation and recuperation of vitality is the "all-inclusive condition of good health and the very first step in the direction of hygiene."

Rightly did Dr. Walter say: "Even causes or occasions of disease fail to produce disease as long as the power of health is abundant. For which reason we easily persuade ourselves that bad habits are not so bad after all. If tobacco may be used for sixty years and we still survive, it must be a very slow poison. If one may keep himself soaked in alcohol for the greater part of a century and still live, it cannot be as bad as it is painted. The answer is that we had such an inheritance of vitality, or what is called constitution, that we could continue for long years to waste our substance and still have enough for moderate use."--Life's Great Law, p. 191.

The processes of cure are the processes of health. Repair is a necessity of living existence. It is always in process in every living thing. The power of repair is the same power whether in health or "disease." The object of repair is also the same in these two states of the body. The essential difference between health and "disease" is the extent of the repairs requiring to be made. Health, if one possesses it, is easily maintained by healthful living. If it has been impaired it is to be restored, repaired, in the same way and by the same agencies that maintain health. Special conditions require special applications as dictated by normal, undepraved instinct, but the condition called "disease" never calls for processes of treatment that will produce "disease" in a well man. The employment of means that make well men sick in an effort to make sick men well is not only unreasonable and based upon delusions, but is damaging and deadly. Recuperation is best secured by:

1. Physical rest: best obtained through relaxation in bed. Complete relaxation is not possible if there is pain, worry, noise, unpleasant surroundings, an overactive imagination and a craving for stimulation.

2. Mental rest: Obtainable only by stopping all emotional unrest and curtailing mental (and sensory) activities which, by intensity of application and concentration use up nerve energy in a wasteful manner.

3. Sensory rest: Secured by quiet and by not taxing the eyes and other senses.

4. Physiological rest: Most effectively brought about by (a) abstinence from food for a limited time; or, (b), the next best procedure, a limited diet requiring the least possible physiological expenditure.

To reduce the food intake is to materially rest every other organ and function in the body. Man needs food with which to build his body, but the power to build is of greater importance. Reduced nutrition in spite of the habitual consumption of large quantities of food is an ever-present fact in our existence. Increased nutrition following upon a reduction of food is becoming equally as common as people learn the facts of life. Rest of the organs of the body, through reducing the food consumed, recuperates power and improves nutrition.

In this plan of rest we approach most closely nature's own practices during the period of man's passivity in sleep. Here the cardinal principles of cure--nature cure--are observed by putting the patient to bed and prohibiting mental stress, emotional excitement, and muscular exhaustion, and by withholding food. If we are to imitate nature during her periods of regeneration during sleep, these things must be eliminated; for at these times the body has none of them.

Rest is the remedy; nothing but rest can cure enervation. Physiological rest is the most important remedy in treating all "diseases." Since all "diseases" are based on enervation, rest, physical, physiological and mental, is the most potent of all remedies. The sicker an organism is, the greater is the need for rest. The weaker is the patient, the greater is the need for doing nothing. These conclusions are opposed to the prevailing practice of stimulation. The weaker a patient grows under the prevailing practices, the more he is stimulated, and the more he is stimulated, the weaker he grows.

Dr. Walter well observed: "As therefore activity expends and exhausts, while passivity recuperates and preserves, and the power of life being the all important consideration, it follows that the recovery of health, preservation of life, and the cure of disease, takes place and must be calculated directly as the amount of the power and inversely as the degree of its activity. The inactivity of sleep, not the strength of stimulation, is the great representative process of recuperation and health, and all treatments that should be successful with the enfeebled and chronically ailing, no less than with the acutely sick, must operate as sleep does. It must reduce activity and increase power, instead of increasing activity and reducing power, as is the plan everywhere in vogue."

Any mode of living that is not based upon the conservation of the body's powers, rather than their dissipation, must sooner or later lead to weakness, "disease" and premature death. It matters not whether your energies are wasted by thrills and excitement, or by drugs and mechanical stimulants, sexual excesses, worry, anger, tenseness, loss of sleep, and dissipations and excesses of various kinds, the ultimate results are all the same.

Any method of caring for the sick that does not aim at conserving the patient's powers must result in much needless suffering and many premature deaths. Work exhausts, whether it is work of one organ or of the whole body--rest is the condition of recuperation. Rest for each organ is as important as rest for the whole organism. Whether it be calomel for the liver, salts for the bowels, digitalis for the heart, or whiskey or hot and cold baths and tonics for the general system, whatever arouses or increases vital activity, and particularly vital resistance, exhausts the patient's powers and hinders or prevents recovery. Promoting increased action in the present necessitates reduced action in the future. The future reduction must necessarily be commensurate with the present increase--"action and reaction are equal but opposite."

We are influenced too much by appearances. We must learn to distinguish between processes of expenditure and processes of recuperation. Prevailing modes of medical practice produce the "diseases" they seek to cure and exhaust the powers they seek to sustain because men are content to be guided by appearances. A more enlightened age will look back upon the practices of the present schools of healing (killing) with greater horror than that with which we now look back upon the practices of a thousand or two thousand years ago.