Article October 10, 1908 Issue

One of the most unfortunate things that has come to us...

Orison Swett Marden

Success

One of the most unfortunate things that has come to us through what we call "higher civilization" is the killing of faith in our power of disease resistance. In our large cities people make great preparations for sickness. They expect it, anticipate it, and consequently have it. It is only a block or two to a physician, a drug-store is on every other corner, and the temptation to send for the physician or to get drugs at the slightest symptom of illness tends to make them more and more dependent on outside helps and less able to control their physical discords. During the frontier days there were little villages and hamlets which physicians rarely entered, and here the people were strong and healthy and independent. They developed great powers of disease resistance.

There is no doubt that the doctor habit in many families has a great deal to do with the developing of unfortunate physical conditions in the child. Many mothers call the doctor whenever there is the least sign of disturbance in a child. The result is that the child grows up with this disease picture, doctor picture, medicine picture in its mind, and it influences its whole life. The time will come when a child and any kind of medicine will be considered a very incongruous combination. Were children properly reared. were they trained to right thinking, a doctor or medicine would rarely be needed.

Within the last ten years tens of thousands of families have never tasted medicine or required the services of a physician. It is becoming more and more certain that the time will come when the belief of the necessity of employing some one to patch us up, to mend the Almighty's work, will be a thing of the past. The creator never put man's health, happiness, and welfare at the mercy of the mere accident of happening to live near physicians. He never left the grandest of His creations to the mercy of any chance, cruel fate, or destiny; never intended that the life, health, and well-being of one of His children should hang upon the contingency of being near a remedy for his ills; never placed him where his own life, health, and happiness would depend upon the chance of happening to be where a certain plant might grow, or a certain mineral exist which could cure him. Is it not more rational to believe that He would put the remedies for man's ills within the man—in his own mind, where they are always available—than that He would store them in herbs and minerals in remote parts of the earth, where practically but a small portion of the human race would ever discover them, countless millions dying in total ignorance of their existence?

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