HYGIENICS: INTRODUCTION
The ultimate aim of the study of medicine is therapeutics and only secondarily the prevention of disease. Yet, the bringing about of such perfection in the manner of living that slows the inevitable mode of death — the natural and gradual decay of health leading to old age — shall be probable. It is obvious that we can make no attempt at prevention of disease unless we know the cause. In the 19th century an empiric flourished whose beautifully simple theory was based on his belief that all diseases were caused by germs. Many of the theories of medicine of today are as preposterous, or as idiotic, and are built upon total error, stupidity or mere fractions of truths.
The preservation of health and the attainment of ripe old age are of such eminent importance to mankind that, though perhaps ignorantly or heedlessly disobeying the simplest rules of hygiene, make many inquirers are spending their lives in the eager search of the magical or alchemical agent. And the heavens, the earth, the Bible, the shadowless spirit-land, even the caldrons of the votaries of the Black Prince, are explored and probed for the unattainable Elixir Vitae.
The more ridiculous or incomprehensible the theory of any new cult of universal health, the greater, apparently, is the following. The ancient custom of wearing amulets to ward off disease has not yet entirely disappeared from even the most civilized communities. In this respect the world has made but little progress since the age of the knightly Ponce de Leon, who reputedly explored the wilderness of Florida in search of the fountain which was to restore to him his youthful ardor. Still today in spite of all advancements, for the world at large the very essentials of our well-being are generally overlooked or neglected — the air that we breathe, the food that is to sustain us, and the water we drink with to slake our thirst. In the improper use of one or all of these lies in almost at every instance the root of our afflictions. And it is a sad reflection upon our vaunted civilization that the lower the station of a race, often the less common is disease.
The observance by successive generations of mankind of proper hygienic principles will not only overcome the inherited morbid proclivities of their forebears, but it will modify the character and virulence of pathogenic bacteria or their lives, and will endow the body with a natural immunity against their evil influence; for it is necessary to infection that the tissues shall be, in some degree, toxic and disordered.
If life is worth living at all, it certainly is worth living well; and to live it well, to accomplish the most good possible and secure the greatest amount of happiness, we must acquaint ourselves with the laws of health that control us. No one doubts that we are under the domain of natural laws, that there is some power superior to man. We must know these laws in order to use them to our best advantage, to enable us to put ourselves in accord with the inevitable results of ageing and fate.
Hygiene is a set of practices performed to preserve health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "Hygiene refers to conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases." However, as a branch of natural medicine that appeared in the late 19th century, a small and still neglected ‘school of hygienics’ appeared and disappeared. Hygienics is a concept related to cleanliness, health, diet, and medicine. Today it is variously called ‘wellness.’ Yet hygienics is more than personal and professional care practices. In medicine and everyday life settings, hygiene practices are employed as preventative measures to reduce the incidence and spreading of disease. This is well established. Other uses of the term appear in phrases including body hygiene, personal hygiene, sleep hygiene, mental hygiene, dental hygiene, and occupational hygiene, used in connection with public health.
However, hygienics is also the name of a branch of science that deals with the promotion and preservation of health. According to Robinson, one of the founders of the Hygienic System: "Diseases are caused by obstructions the obstructing materials being poisons or impurities of some kind. The truth of this follows from what has already been said. The Hygienic System removes these obstructions and leaves the body sound. This is the true way to treat disease.”
“Drug medicines add to the causes of obstructions and change acute into chronic diseases. Chronic diseases are characterized by deficient vitality. When drugs "cure" (?) disease, it is by exciting nature to increased effort, and thereby exhausting the vitality of the patient and consequently leaving him with debilitated organs. Hygienic Medication cures disease without the unnecessary exhaustion of the patient's vitality. When a patient recovers from a disease under drug treatment he usually is a long time convalescing. When a person recovers under Hygienic treatment he goes about his business as well as ever. "To attempt to cure disease by adding to the causes of disease is irrational and absurd.”
The ultimate aim of the study of medicine is therapeutics and only secondarily the prevention of disease. Yet, the bringing about of such perfection in the manner of living that slows the inevitable mode of death — the natural and gradual decay of health leading to old age — shall be probable. It is obvious that we can make no attempt at prevention of disease unless we know the cause. In the 19th century an empiric flourished whose beautifully simple theory was based on his belief that all diseases were caused by germs. Many of the theories of medicine of today are as preposterous, or as idiotic, and are built upon total error, stupidity or mere fractions of truths.
The preservation of health and the attainment of ripe old age are of such eminent importance to mankind that, though perhaps ignorantly or heedlessly disobeying the simplest rules of hygiene, make many inquirers are spending their lives in the eager search of the magical or alchemical agent. And the heavens, the earth, the Bible, the shadowless spirit-land, even the caldrons of the votaries of the Black Prince, are explored and probed for the unattainable Elixir Vitae.
The more ridiculous or incomprehensible the theory of any new cult of universal health, the greater, apparently, is the following. The ancient custom of wearing amulets to ward off disease has not yet entirely disappeared from even the most civilized communities. In this respect the world has made but little progress since the age of the knightly Ponce de Leon, who reputedly explored the wilderness of Florida in search of the fountain which was to restore to him his youthful ardor. Still today in spite of all advancements, for the world at large the very essentials of our well-being are generally overlooked or neglected — the air that we breathe, the food that is to sustain us, and the water we drink with to slake our thirst. In the improper use of one or all of these lies in almost at every instance the root of our afflictions. And it is a sad reflection upon our vaunted civilization that the lower the station of a race, often the less common is disease.
The observance by successive generations of mankind of proper hygienic principles will not only overcome the inherited morbid proclivities of their forebears, but it will modify the character and virulence of pathogenic bacteria or their lives, and will endow the body with a natural immunity against their evil influence; for it is necessary to infection that the tissues shall be, in some degree, toxic and disordered.
If life is worth living at all, it certainly is worth living well; and to live it well, to accomplish the most good possible and secure the greatest amount of happiness, we must acquaint ourselves with the laws of health that control us. No one doubts that we are under the domain of natural laws, that there is some power superior to man. We must know these laws in order to use them to our best advantage, to enable us to put ourselves in accord with the inevitable results of ageing and fate.
Hygiene is a set of practices performed to preserve health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "Hygiene refers to conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases." However, as a branch of natural medicine that appeared in the late 19th century, a small and still neglected ‘school of hygienics’ appeared and disappeared. Hygienics is a concept related to cleanliness, health, diet, and medicine. Today it is variously called ‘wellness.’ Yet hygienics is more than personal and professional care practices. In medicine and everyday life settings, hygiene practices are employed as preventative measures to reduce the incidence and spreading of disease. This is well established. Other uses of the term appear in phrases including body hygiene, personal hygiene, sleep hygiene, mental hygiene, dental hygiene, and occupational hygiene, used in connection with public health.
However, hygienics is also the name of a branch of science that deals with the promotion and preservation of health. According to Robinson, one of the founders of the Hygienic System: "Diseases are caused by obstructions the obstructing materials being poisons or impurities of some kind. The truth of this follows from what has already been said. The Hygienic System removes these obstructions and leaves the body sound. This is the true way to treat disease.”
“Drug medicines add to the causes of obstructions and change acute into chronic diseases. Chronic diseases are characterized by deficient vitality. When drugs "cure" (?) disease, it is by exciting nature to increased effort, and thereby exhausting the vitality of the patient and consequently leaving him with debilitated organs. Hygienic Medication cures disease without the unnecessary exhaustion of the patient's vitality. When a patient recovers from a disease under drug treatment he usually is a long time convalescing. When a person recovers under Hygienic treatment he goes about his business as well as ever. "To attempt to cure disease by adding to the causes of disease is irrational and absurd.”
Does it not strike you so, Reader ? If people were not ignorant of the real nature of medicine they would discard the whole drug system at once. The Hygienic System not only teaches how to cure disease, but also how to avoid being sick, and it does more than that, for its universal adoption would tend to do away with vice and crime, and thereby add to the sum total of human happiness.” [HYGIENIC SYSTEM. E. T. R0BINS0N, M. D., A GRADUATE OF THE NEW YORK HYGEIO-THERAPEUTIC COLLEGE, 1870].
Thus, by observing the founders of the Hygienic System, we learn the rules for wellness, detoxification, and proper diet. In this 21st century we have ample science and clinical knowledge to construct the general rules for health and wellness.
Thus, by observing the founders of the Hygienic System, we learn the rules for wellness, detoxification, and proper diet. In this 21st century we have ample science and clinical knowledge to construct the general rules for health and wellness.
- Msgr. Prof. McWilliams: Maria Popova
A naturopathic precept is that 'a body that cannot detoxify, cannot heal!' The various methods of detoxification, both East and West are covered in the lessons, including the GI detox, liver cleansings, lymphatic drainage, and 'draining of the impediments,' etc.
The word senescence is derived from the Latin word senex, meaning old man, old age, or advanced in age.
Senescence or biological aging is the change in the biology of an organism as it ages after its maturity. Such changes range from those affecting its cells and their function to those affecting the whole organism. There are a number of hypotheses as to why senescence occurs; for example, some posit it is programmed by gene expression changes, others that it is the cumulative damage caused by biological processes. Senescence is not the inevitable fate of all organisms. A variety of organisms, including some cold-blooded animals, have negligible senescence. Whether senescence as a biological process can be slowed down, halted or even reversed, is a subject of current scientific speculation and research.
In human nutrition and biology, advanced glycation end products, known as AGEs, are substances that can be a factor in the development or worsening of many degenerative diseases.
Eating brown rice instead of white is seen as a way to cut down on advanced glycation end products.
Photo by Dan McKay
These harmful compounds can affect nearly every type of cell and molecule in the body and are thought to be one factor in aging and in some age-related chronic diseases. They are also believed to play a causative role in the blood-vessel complications of diabetes mellitus. AGEs are seen as speeding up oxidative damage to cells and in altering their normal behavior.
Senescence or biological aging is the change in the biology of an organism as it ages after its maturity. Such changes range from those affecting its cells and their function to those affecting the whole organism. There are a number of hypotheses as to why senescence occurs; for example, some posit it is programmed by gene expression changes, others that it is the cumulative damage caused by biological processes. Senescence is not the inevitable fate of all organisms. A variety of organisms, including some cold-blooded animals, have negligible senescence. Whether senescence as a biological process can be slowed down, halted or even reversed, is a subject of current scientific speculation and research.
In human nutrition and biology, advanced glycation end products, known as AGEs, are substances that can be a factor in the development or worsening of many degenerative diseases.
Eating brown rice instead of white is seen as a way to cut down on advanced glycation end products.
Photo by Dan McKay
These harmful compounds can affect nearly every type of cell and molecule in the body and are thought to be one factor in aging and in some age-related chronic diseases. They are also believed to play a causative role in the blood-vessel complications of diabetes mellitus. AGEs are seen as speeding up oxidative damage to cells and in altering their normal behavior.
A catastrophic illness is an extremely harmful event bringing physical and/or financial ruin. This can range from a catastrophic depression; to an illness harboring a ruinous course of action. This course is designed to teach the signs and symptoms that may be lurking in an otherwise normally appearing patient. Unlike other aspects of a typical health screening encounter, there is a current void of knowledge for many on detecting expensive and catastrophic illness experiences and harboring malignancies. Student will learn to recognize conditions that need emergency measures in the clinical setting.
Noxacology, Miasmology & Nosoode Therapy
In this pioneering Course of Natural Medicine study, I combine archeology, psychology, medicine, anthropology, and sociology to reveal how and why standards of hygiene have come to exist today. Using hundreds of sources, from the Neolithic age tales to the present day osphresiology, we examine the ancient belief in foul and noxious odors as a source of contagion, their diagnostic clues to bodily sickness which dominated medicine in the 18th century, its counterpart in the alchemical art of perfumery, and the development of Hahnemann's theory of miasmatic constitutions and their counteracting homeopathic remedies.
Suffice it to say, today's meager schooling in history comes deodorized, sanitized, and pre-packaged, wrapped in bit-sized behavioral controls, totally excluding if not denying this frank history the culminated in the French revolution. Thanks
to so-called experts in art, anthropology, and artifacts; combined with the social engineers who feel compelled to construct our future civilization;
our eyes have been closed to what the past
really looked and smelled like. In the "world we have lost" before today's hygienic regimes, stenches filled the nose; but they also filled the mind and emotions before the World Wars.
Smell featured crucially in leading theories of life, disease, sanitation, and the atmosphere. In medicine and emerging technologies of health, smells and odors from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth-century were being transformed by the culinary delights of the New World, while the microscope was exposing the anchors of disease: bacteria. Pre-Pasteurian medicine held that sickness arose from pestilential miasmas given off by the environment, swamps, corpses, and urban fetid populations. Stench was, in fact, the disease, it was called miasma. Miasma was the contagion, the plague, the pestilence of cholera, yellow fever, malaria, and tuberculosis.
It has been said that the reason René Laënnec invented the stethoscope, was not only for female patients embarrassed by the traditional method of Immediate Auscultation, which involved the doctor pressing his ear to the patient's chest, but also to avoid the stench of halitosis and body odor. And as experts like Florence Nightingale and John Snow increasingly sniffed out the sources of stench among the "great unwashed," sanitary reformers and social engineers joined forces in crusades against filth in all its modes—physical, moral, religious, and verbal.
Subconscious cleanliness has been with us since the first mammaliam cell ejected a foreign invader. Even at the earliest stages of human development, our bodies produced pleasure-giving chemicals like opiates when things smelled or felt clean or sexy, inducing us to do things like fornicating, bathing and burning dirty clothes.
During medieval times, life was filthy, but that was not always the human experience. In Eurasia during the Bronze Age, an emerging hierarchy of wealthy elites turned their love of grooming into an explosion of the cosmetic and luxury goods industry, greatly effecting the culture and economy of a vast area, including Rome, and leading to advances in chemistry and medicine.
The history that follows, from Greece and Rome, where citizens focused much of their leisure time on perfecting, bathing, or exercising the model athletic body, through Europe in the middle ages and the following centuries, is full of intriguing customs, convoluted treatises, and many unusual practices the modern day person for which has no clue. But by the dark ages, baths were healthy if you were Muslim, baths were bad for you if Roman catholic, baths were good again when the monasteries were ordered closed, and there was birthed hydrotherapy, along with douching, enemata, and the cold bath, making the rudiments of today's naturopathy. Even the enlightenment of medical knowledge of those emerging times of vaccines and homeopathy could not stop an onslaught of health remedies, treatments, spas, and nature cures that were to follow.
This engrossing and highly original Course of study will introduce you to the customs and ideas of a myriad of cultures from centuries of human history to allow the student to really understand what Miasm meant not only in medicine, but also in religion and culture. Not only will you gain a new perspective on the wonderful diversity of the medical world, but you'll never look at your toothbrush and toilet paper the same way again.
Even for the seasoned homeopath or aromatherapist, this course is a guaranteed shocker and illuminator!