The More Things Change..

Recently I came across the text of a speech by Dr Russell Thacker Trall from 1872 called ‘The Healing Art: Hygienic vs Drug Medication’.

It’s a doozy.

He gave the speech at the Smithsonian Institute to a bunch of very prominent people - politicians, senior military leaders, physicians and scientists.

The point of his speech was that (at the time) modern medicine was killing more people than it helped.

When he gave the speech the American Civil War was still a recent memory. During that war, significantly more soldiers died of disease and ill health than died in battle. Some said for every three soldiers who died from weapons, five died from a medical problem.

According to Dr Trall, many of these medical deaths, along with lots of other deaths in the United States, could be attributed more to the medicine given to the people than to the actual disease.

He even claimed that people who weren’t treated with any medication had much better health outcomes than those treated with generally-accepted pharmaceutical treatments at the time.

How much better? Way better. In his speech he gave some examples of doctors giving no medications at all. Or giving placebos such as water and telling patients it is medicine:

Sound like it might be a bit familiar?

Now for a bit of context. Dr Trall seems to be affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventists and was a big advocate for vegan lifestyles. In fact he is credited with writing the first vegan cookbook, “The Hygeian Home Cookbook”.

He founded the New York Hydropathic and Physiological School for the promotion of natural healing techniques such as hydrotherapy, diet, exercise, fresh air, hygiene, and massage. The school trained doctors just to administer medications but to do the same things to sick people that healthy people do to maintain their health.

I know it’s also easy to dismiss this kind of philosophy because it was comparing natural healing methods to the antiquated medications of the day. “Medications” like arsenic and quinine (poisonous in higher doses) were administered on a regular basis back then.

What is hard to dismiss is that he says repeatedly that natural remedies had an enormous success rate. That hardly anyone died from dread diseases like smallpox, typhoid and dysentery when they were just left alone, fed good food and stayed clean.

I’m seeing the same in my assisted living homes. Residents seem to do better with his recommendations than a lot of modern medications.

A lot of other practitioners at the time seemed to come to the same conclusion:

You can read the full speech here. It’s pretty eye-opening. And it sure seems relatable to modern allopathic medicine today.