Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/96

 sound and well; but instead of that she is plied with lime, cod-liver oil — pah! — mustard-plaster, onion syrup, iron, soda, morphine, and a hundred other unavailing nostrums. Wait awhile: "What's the news?" "She died last night!" And thus it is in the majority of cases of real or apprehended tubercular consumption, asthma, dyspepsia, bronchitis, neuralgia, female complaints, prolapsus uteri, spinal disease, and all that vast host of illnesses that have their origin in disturbed affection, unrequited love, uterine diseases, and continued grief in women, married and single. And yet these are not diseases, but symptoms of one great disease, — a chemical disturbance, originating mainly in morbid conditions of the nervous apparatus, hence emotional systems, of men and women, — causing radical changes in the fluids of the body, and thereby loading them with bitter, acid, acrid, corroding, biting elements, which malignant elements never were, nor can be, driven out by any amount of drenching or mere drugging; for so long as they are there the patient must move graveward. Now, when once the fluids are thus charged with these angular and corroding atoms, the latter invariably locate themselves in, and fasten upon the weakest spot. If the lungs are weak and shallow, look out for consumption, bronchitis, asthma, pneumonia, or peritonitis; if other parts be more vulnerable, then dyspepsia, epilepsy, nervous weakness, magnetic depletion, fits, uterine prolapsus, cancer, scrofula, spinal complaint, are sure to follow, and not unfrequently the brain itself is attacked. And no drugs can cure them, because they indicate the absence of five great elements from the body, and three others in excess. Now, I affirm that a judicious combination of the elements already named will unquestionably banish all such forms of disease from the world forever, and I believe that I shall not have been many years in the land of disbodied souls, ere the discoveries I now announce will be accepted the wide world over, and that the binary combinations of these few elements will supersede all other medical agents on the globe. In making these disclosures I do not pretend to say that I am not desirous of duly reaping a fair profit for the brain-toil given to perfect my discoveries, for to do so would be untrue; but personal gain is by no means the strongest motive that actuates me; for I know these dynamic agents will cure all nervous diseases. I know all nervous diseases spring from disarrangements of the