"Nature ever points the true and perfect way, Therefore, learn betimes ne'er from her path to stray."

The System built by Jennings, Trall, Graham and their contemporaries and successors, they called the Hygienic System or Hygieo-therapy. In the first volume of this series we saw how Trall became skeptical of the value of drugs and the bleeding practices then in vogue, and of the correctness of medical principles, while still a medical student. Jennings was forced to abandon the medical doctrines and practices he had been taught, after years of practice, by experiences that revealed the incorrectness of (he theories and the evil of the practices.

These two men worked independently. While their theories differed in some particulars, as did their practices, fundamentally, both their theories and practices agreed. This becomes all the more plain when one reads their long-drawn-out debate of the subject. Graham, whose work, also, was begun independently, was influenced by these men and in turn, influenced them, converting Jennings to vegetarianism.

These men agreed to call the principles and methods they launched, the Hygienic System. In the Jenning-Trall debate, which ran serially in Trall's magazine during 1864, Jennings says of Trall; "he only needs to understand the hygienic theory a little 'more perfectly' to place him on a vantage ground where he can chase a thousand Allopaths, and two can put ten thousand of them to flight".

In a biographical sketch of Trall, which appeared in the Herald of Health for July 1864, are these words: "His writings and books have placed him at the head of a new system, which he has entitled the 'Hygienic' or 'Hygieo-Therapeutic'--repudiating the term 'Hydropathy', as expressive of only a single one of its remedial appliances.' His school, founded in 1852, as the Hydropathic and Physiological School, was chartered in 1857 under the name of the New York Hygieo-Therapeutic College.

This biographical sketch says: "Dr. Trall may justly claim to be the father of the literature of the Hygienic Medical System, and the chief exponent and, indeed, the discoverer of its philosophy: and his writings are accepted as standard if not authoritative in this country and in Europe."

In 1872, a small book, by Trall, was published under the title. The Hygienic System, in which he defined the Hygienic System to be the "treatment of disease by hygienic agencies". In this booklet he listed as "Nature's Materia Medica", the following agencies and forces: "air, light, temperature, electricity, magnetism, exercise, rest, food, drink, bathing, sleep, clothing, mental influences, and mechanical or surgical appliances". He explained that "truly remedial agents are materials and influences which have normal relations to the vital organs, and not drugs, or poisons, whose relations are abnormal and anti-vital" and added that, "the true Healing Art consists in supplying the living system with whatever of the above it can use under the circumstances, and not in the administration of poisons which it must resist or expel".

Drs. Jackson, Densmore, Walter, Page, and others accepted and employed the term, Hygienic System. For example, in his How to Treat the Sick Without Medicine (1868) Dr. James C. Jackson uses the term, "hygieo-therapeutic agencies" and calls himself a "hygienic physician." Doctor Walter uses the term "The Hygienic School," although he seems to have preferred the terms, "nutritive cure" and "nutritive system". In 1877 he began the publication of a magazine under the title The Laws of Health in which he advertised his sanitarium, at Wernersville, Pa., as one that "relies for its success upon proper hygienic conditions in connection with special application of the best hygienic agencies".

Another magazine of the period, The Science of Health, was "an independent health monthly which teaches the Laws by which Health is preserved and Disease eradicated, and Life prolonged, on Hygienic Principles. Its agencies are: Food, Drink, Air, Exercise, Light,

Temperature, Sleep, Rest, Bathing, Clothing, Electricity, Right Social Relations, Mental Influences". I am unable to locate any reference to the Hygienic System in the works which I have of Dr. Dio Lewis; he does refer to "Natural Methods" and he makes almost exclusive use of Hygienic or Natural Methods and placed practically no reliance in hydrotherapy. Even Dr. Lahmann, of Germany, though associated with Kuhne, and a strong advocate of the "water cure", entitles one of his books, Natural Hygiene.

In his How Nature Cures, Dr. Densmore, repeatedly refers to hygienists and "hygienic physicians who use no medicine whatever," and refers to Hygienists as "Physicians of the reform school". Dr. Page, who was born in 1840; in his True Healing Art (1906) poses "genuine hygienic treatment" opposite that of the "anti-Naturalists" and defines the "hygienic physician" as one who "knows how to apply all known hygienic agencies", and speaks of the necessity of "having the hygienic instead of the unhygienic physician in attendance" upon the sick.

Shryock says, "During the seventies and the ensuing decades many of the 'cures' (institutions) were established practicing what became known as the 'Hygienic System'. Most of these were located in towns of the East and Middle West, and a considerable number owed their origin to men trained by Trall."--Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Sept. 1931.

Similar evidence could be offered from other sources, but this is enough to establish the fact that the Hygienic System is the original and correct name for our System. Orthopathy is one principle of the system, not the name of the system.

Reference has been made to the Water Cure System (Hydropathy). This was early mixed and mingled with the Hygienic System and has been more or less mingled with it in the practice of most Hygienic practitioners. Trall, Shew, Jackson, Walter, Page, Densmore, Tilden, and others have employed it, some of them but little, others extensively. It seems necessary to say a few words about this system of palliation at this point. It was introduced into this country from Germany during the fourth decade of the last Century and proved far less deadly than the old system. When Trall broke away from the old school, he seems to have adopted the "water cure" at once. Only with the passage of time was he led step by step into the hygienic practice. Jennings, on the other hand, rejected the "water cure" and penned some very strong criticisms of it.

In his Philosophy of Human Life, (p. 251-2-3) Jennings says: "The great Hydropathic experiment is also most effectively sustaining the claims of Orthopathy, and nullifying those of Heteropathy. Hydropathic physicians as a body, discard medicine as the rule in practice as much as Orthopathists do; and when they come to steer clear of the old Heteropathic bug-bear notion of disease, and depend less on water as a curative means, their practice will be admirable.