I HAVE long and publicly taught the doctrine that, as a general proposition, man causes his own sickness and suffering-that in almost all cases, he is more or less to blame for being sick, and that he as truly owes society an apology for being sick as he does for being drunk.
--Sylvester Graham, July 13, 1884 DEDICATION
TO THAT brilliant company of men and women who served as accoucheurs at the rebirth of Hygiene, and to the glorious future that their labors make possible for all mankind, this book is sincerely dedicated by
---The Author
WE ARE NOT reformers; we are revolutionists. Medical reform--the world has had quite enough of that. Reforming the drug system by substituting one set of drugs for another is a ridiculous farce. It may, to be sure, substitute a lesser for a greater evil, in many cases, but is like reforming big lies with little falsehoods. It is like reforming swearing with obscene language; or like reforming robbing with cheating. Reforming allopathy with homeopathy and both with physio-medicalism, and all these with eclecticism, is like promoting temperance by substituting cider and lager for rum, brandy, gin, wine, or flesh eating by substituting milk, butter, cheese, for animal food.We have no substitute for drug medicines. We let them alone as evil things, and prescribe good things. We cannot reform or change a falsehood. We have only to teach the truth. Our system is independent of all others. Its premises are original. Its doctrines have never before been taught in medical schools, nor written in medical books, nor recognized by medical men. They go back, (or perhaps forward), of all that has even heretofore been taught, assumed, or pretended, to the very Laws of Nature Themselves and we recognize no text book of authority although we have many for reference except that written by God's own hand--the out-spread volume of Nature.
From his introductory lecture on "The Problems o f Medical Science," delivered before the 1863-4 class of the New York Hygeio-Therapeutic College, by R. T. Trall, M.D.