disease_.

With the discovery of dysaemia as the governing cause of disease,
another idol of regular medicine has been cast down.

Since the discovery of the bacillus or microbe, which in varied form
accompanies nearly every variety of disease, it has become a dogma of
the at present dominant school of medicine that the various bacilli are
the actual causes of the different varieties of disease, and the
tendency has been to find some poison that would kill the bacilli in
order to heal the disease.

The truth is that the bacillus is not the cause, but the effect of
disease; in fact is nothing but another consequence or symptom of a
specific form of disease. Bacilli grow spontaneously in the ready soil
which the diseased and decomposing tissues provide, through lack of the
necessary chemical elements; but to attempt to exterminate them, while
the underlying conditions for their reproduction remain unchanged, can,
of course, never bring about healing.

And thus the high hopes and claims attached to the sero-therapy
inocculation process, the injection into the blood of anti-toxins
prepared with the serum of animals, have positively vanished.

Hundreds of thousands of human beings have perished in the course of
this delusion; but countless numbers will have cause, yet in our day,
to rejoice at the exposure of the stupid and unnatural theory, so long
legally enforced, that the introduction into the human system of such
poisonous substances could remove or overcome the natural consequences
of constitutional disease.