Medical students, studying in their materia medica what are designated the properties of all the poisons of the three kingdoms of nature and firmly believing everything they read of the medicinal properties of herbs, minerals and synthetics, must be lost in wonder and admiration at their astonishing qualities and powers and at the great array of cures with which physicians are equipped. No one ever hints to them that the alleged medicinal properties of drugs are their poisonous qualities--that the so-called cathartic property of a drug is due to its poisonous quality, that the so-called emetic property of a drug is due to its poisonous quality, that the so-called diuretic property of a drug is due to its poisonous quality, that the so-called narcotic property of a drug is due to its poisonous quality, that the so-called stimulant property of a drug is due to its poisonous quality.

How little true claim do physicians have for the confidence of the people! A physician boasts of his success in practice and he is only boasting, without knowing it, that he did not give enough poison to his patients to kill all of them. His doses were not large enough or frequent enough to prevent the body's recuperative powers from asserting their superiority and supremacy, in spite of the brakes supplied by the physician to her wheels, to accomplish her end. The physician may pound his chest and cry in a loud voice: "What a great man am I," but his assumed greatness is an illusion. It is not customary for individual physicians to openly behave in this manner, but the profession as a whole is constantly crying out about its greatness.

The drugging practice has not the shadow of scientific principle for its basis; but its practitioners have been accustomed so long to blindly groping their way in uncertainty and experimentation, without system or consistency, that they fail to perceive the deplorable state of their alleged science. What was at first a conviction has long since been demonstrated to be a certainty--that the entire drug system is essentially, intrinsically and everlastingly false. Medical colleges turn out new physicians fast enough and pharmaceutical firms pour out a sufficient flood of new and old drugs to very rapidly lessen the amount of disease among our people, if the drugging practice were based on truth. But we do not see a lessening of disease; instead, diseases multiply endlessly and will continue to do so unless the drugging system is overthrown.

No man can watch the newspapers for a number of years without being struck by the great number of promises that medical researchers make that are never fulfilled. The never-ending stream of new drugs that are announced in the press, as offering hope to the sick, only to disappear from the drug stores in a short time indicates, as few things do, the utter confusion of the medical mind. A new drug is produced; it enjoys a brief period of newspaper glory and passes unnoticed to the land of shades, only to be followed by another new drug which goes through the same experience. No matter how high the hopes raised, no matter how great the promises made, none of medicine's cures remain cures for very long. Medicine tries so hard to find cures but turns up only false cures.

So long as they continue to live, those who suffer with incurable disease continue to run after the new medicines; when one nostrum fails, they go after a new one with the same eagerness with which they took up the old one. For the people will continue to run after new nostrums as fast as they are made or discovered, until they fully understand that the healing principle exists in the living organism and nowhere else and that every drug ever used always was and always will be a hindrance instead of a help to the healing process. The people must learn that the drugging practice is the arch foe of the sick.

Let us not be fooled. Physicians are well aware that their professed knowledge of the "science of medicine" is all equal to a cipher. They have no science. They cannot tell us of the modus operandi of a single drug. They have no correct definition of disease. Yet they utter sounds, after the manner of a certain biped that paddles in our pools, whenever they find that someone knows them and can fathom the shallow depths of their wisdom. They have cried "quack" so long and so loudly that it is now accepted as a term belonging exclusively to them. We congratulate them upon their happy choice of a title.

The specious plea in defense of the employment of certain drugs that, "if they do no good, they can at least do no harm," is palpably false. Whatever involves an expenditure of organic forces, whether a drug or a Hygienic agent, must of necessity be positively injurious if it fails to do good. There can be no neutral ground that can be occupied by either drugs or Hygienic materials and conditions. In using them or in resisting and expelling them, the forces of life are expended and if there is nothing inherent in them that provides rumuneration, they are to be condemned and rejected as enemies of life and health. It is upon the basis of this principle that food becomes an enemy under those conditions of the organism in which it cannot be used, that exercise becomes harmful when rest is the great need, etc., etc. If Hygienic materials are harmful when they are not usable or needed, should not drugs, which are never usable, also prove harmful "if they do no good?"

It has long been known (it was much stressed by Trall) that there is no way to tell in advance of its administration what effects will follow a drug in any individual. As a simple example: a dose of castor oil may be given as a cathartic and it may be expelled by vomiting instead. Nor is it possible, by any scientific method, to predict with accuracy what side effects will develop in any particular individual. Effects may differ in the same individual at different times and under different conditions. The sex of the patient is a factor in determining this. A report comes from the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that studies made during a two-year period established the fact that women are more susceptible to adverse reactions to drugs than men. Studies have also shown that drug reactions may be complicated by some foods, such as cheese and, also, by previous medication. The whole matter is so complicated that, even if drugs had any value, the physician would be forever working in the dark.

Giving drugs to the sick is a great charlantanry, the sheerest empiricism, the veriest folly, and should be classed as the most outrageous knavery and the most audacious crime listed on crime's calendar. If the men who prescribe drugs were as intelligent as they are deluded, they would long since have ceased poisoning their patients. As for the recipients, no suicide that was ever buried could compare with drug taking, did the people but know how surely they are killing themselves.