By the term “means,” is understood the varied remedies, medicines, and potions commonly used by the world at large and prescribed for the sick -- in short, Materia Media.
This should be an extremely easy question for anyone to decide. The world has always had her system of healing. They were the thousand and one systems of healing evolved in all the centuries. They were mankind’s endeavor to alleviate suffering. They existed in the days of Jesus, just as they exist today.
Systems of so-called healing are without number. The ancient Egyptians used them and were apparently as proficient in the practice of the same as our modern physicians.
Indeed, their knowledge of chemistry seems to have superseded ours, as they were able to produce an embalming substance that preserved the human body and kept it from dissolution, for almost every museum of not has its samples of Egyptian mummies.
It is the unintelligent who suppose that the ancient physicians were any less skillful in the healing of the sick through their means, remedies, and systems that the modern physician.
Of the supposed curative value of our modern medical practice, there is an abundance of testimony from the varied heads of the medical profession that should be sufficient to convince any candid thinker of their valuelessness.
The public commonly believe that medicine is a great science and that its practice is entirely scientific. Whereas, so great a man as Professor Douglas McGlaggen, who occupied the chair of medical jurisprudence in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, declared, “There is no such thing as the science of medicine. From the days of Hippocrates and Galen until now we have been stumbling in the dark, from diagnosis to diagnosis, from treatment to treatment, and have not found the first stone on which to found medicine as a science.”
Mr. James Mason Good of London, Englad, who was so eminent in his profession that for twenty-five years he had in his car the royal house of Britain, declared his convictions before the British Medical Association in these words, “The science of medicines is founded upon conjecture and improved by murder. Our medicines have destroyed more lives that all the wars, pestilences, and famines combined.”
The famous Professor Chauss of Germany, states with emphasis, “The common use of medicines for the curing of disease is unquestionably highly detrimental and destructive and in my judgment, is an agent for the creation of disease rather than its cure, in that through its use there is continuously set up in the human system, abnormal conditions more detrimental to human life than the disease from which the patient is suffering.”
Our own Dr. Holmes of Boston, formerly president of the Massachusetts Medical Association, said in an address before the Massachusetts Medical Association, “It is my conviction, after practicing medicine for thirty-five years, that if the whole Materia Medica were cast into the bottom of the sea it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”
From these quotations from the heads of the medical profession in various countries, we perceive the power of the Word of God, which declares, “In vain shall they use many medicines. There is no healing for thee there.”
Dr. John B. Murphy, the greatest surgeon our country has ever produced, has spoken his mind concerning surgery as follows, “Surgery is a confession of helplessness. Being unable to assist the diseased organ, we remove it. If I had my life to live over again, I would endeavor to discover preventative medicine, in the hope of saving the organ instead of destroying it.”
Just prior to his death he wrote an article entitled, “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” condemning cutting out of tonsils and adenoinds, demonstrating that the presence of inflammation and pus and the consequent enlargement was due to a secretion in the system that found lodgment in the tonsils and that the removal of the tonsils in no way remedied the difficulty, the poison being generated in the system. He purposed to give his knowledge to the public for their protection from useless operations that he regarded as criminal.
