It was the following letter from Mr. William Louden to the editor of “Health Culture” which prompted the author to issue the “Nature Cure Magazine” (published from November, 1907, to October, 1909). In the series of books of which this is the first volume, he will endeavor to collect and systematize all his former writings in the~ “Nature Cure Magazine,” “Health Culture,” “Life and Action,” the “Naturopath,” the “Volksrath,”~ and other publications, and to amplify these by new material obtained through further research and wider experience.
Mr. Albert Turner,
Editor of ~“Health Culture.”~
DEAR SIR—I write to ask what you consider the best book or pamphlet to put into the hands of people generally, in regard to the preservation of health. I know ther e are a number of very excellent publications, but as a rule they deal with certain details or phases of the question, and do not begin with the great underlying principles in such a way as to attract and hold the attention of the masses. One advocates one plan, and another an entirely different, and sometimes a directly opposite plan—such as uncooked vs. thoroughly cooked food; a strictly vegetarian diet, and mental culture in place of attention to either, etc. Such a state of affairs makes it confusing to average people and gets them to believe that health reformers are all at sea, and what is good for one is not good for another, or, in common language, “what is one man’s meat is another’s poison.”
Now, I know it is natural, and doubtless best, that there should be a difference of opinion on any question, but at the same time, if any movement is to be crowned with great success, there should be some underlying principles upon which all should agree, and these should be pressed to the forefront, so as to attract and hold the attention of the people, in place of the divergent details upon which they disagree. If these fundamental laws and principles are thoroughly studied and well defined, it may be found that they would explain the discrepancies between the different theories, and that under certain conditions, one plan is best, and that under different conditions another plan is more applicable, etc. The pushing of these fundamental principles to the front would also tend to correct errors into which the different theorists have fallen, and would certainly tend to make the different theories more homogeneous and more easily understood by people in general, than at present.
In my opinion, the general fundamental principles of life and health are what people need to understand more than anything else. Without this, most of the details will be meaningless or at least confusing dogmas. I don’t mean by these fundamental principles the details of anatomy, or, for that matter, the details of anything else, but the general rules governing life and death, so that people may know which way they, are tending, and may understand the many illusions with which life and death, as well as all else in nature are beset.
Yours truly,
WILLIAM LOUDEN
Louden Mfg. Co.,
Fairfield, Iowa.
The present volume and others of the “Nature Cure Series” which are to follow are an attempt to answer Mr. Louden’s inquiry and to formulate and elucidate the fundamental laws of health, disease and cure for which he and many others have been vainly seeking. Who among you at some time or another, has not thought and felt like Mr. Louden and in doubt and perplexity voiced Pilate’s query,
What Is Truth?
The exact information and rational method of teaching which Mr. Louden is seeking, has heretofore been wanting in healthculture literature.
Many, indeed, stand ready and willing to show the way to physical, mental and moral perfection. Hundreds, yes, thousands, of different cults, isms, teachers, books and periodicals treat of these subjects, but their teachings are so manifold, so contradictory and confusing, that one becomes bewildered amid the ever increasing testimony. As is often the case in the study of complicated subjects, the more one reads and the more one hears, the less one knows. I believe that no one has described more strikingly this state of general perplexity than Mr. Louden in his excellent letter.
Nevertheless, these simple fundamental laws and principles really exist. They must exist, because everything in Nature, including the processes of health, of disease and cure, of birth, of life and death, are subject to law and order.
Allopathy, or Old School Medical Science, admits that it does not know these fundamental principles; that it reasons, not from underlying causes, but from external symptoms and personal experiences. It is, therefore, self-confessedly full of doubts, errors and confusion; in short, empirical—and necessarily, a failure.
Many teachers of Nature Cure, Hygiene and Health cults have stumbled accidentally upon some of the natural laws and true methods of healing, but have failed to grasp and to formulate the broad underlying principles. For this reason they are often partly right and partly wrong and very apt to overdo certain methods to the neglect of others just as effective and essential, or even more so.
I shall endeavor in these volumes to formulate and elucidate some of the fundamental laws and principles underlying the phenomena of life and death, health, disease and cure, and shall try to ascertain in the light of these laws how much of truth and how much of error, how much of usefulness and how much of harmfulness there may be contained in the various theories and systems of living and of healing.
Nature Owe an Exact Science
One of the reasons why Nature Cure is not more popular with the medical profession and the public is that it is too simple. The average mind is more impressed by the involved and mysterious than by the simple and commonsense.
However, it remains a fact that “exact science” reduces complexity and confusion to simplicity and clearness. Science becomes exact science only when the underlying laws which correlate and unify its scattered facts and theories have been discovered.
These simple laws rightly understood and applied will do for medical science what the law of gravitation has done for physics and astronomy, and what the laws of chemical affinity have done for chemistry, they will place medical science in the ranks of exact sciences. The understanding and proper application of these truths will explain every fact and phenomenon in the processes of health, disease and cure, and will enable the student to reason from simple, natural laws and principles to their logical effects. The “Regular” school of medicine, so far, has endeavored to build a medical science on the observation of “effects” and “experiences,” but since one fundamental law of nature may produce a million seemingly differing effects it becomes self-evident that it is utterly impossible to found an exact science on such uncertain and conflicting evidence.
The primary laws and principles once understood, it becomes easy to reason from and to explain through them, the various phenomena which they produce. Herein lie the merit and achievement of the Nature Cure philosophy.
THE UPAS TREE OF DISEASE
EVIL IS NOT AN ACCIDENT, NOT AN ARBITRARY PUNISHMENT, NOT ALWAYS AN “ERROR OF MORTAL MIND.” IT IS THE NATURAL AND INEVITABLE RESULT OF VIOLATIONS OF NATURE’S LAWS. IT IS INSTRUCTIVE AND CORRECTIVE IN PURPOSE, AND WILL REMAIN WITH US ONLY AS LONG AS WE NEED ITS SALUTARY LESSONS.