Those who preach fear of germs today are the mental offspring of those who have preached fear of God, devil, hell, and heaven in the past. They do not know that the fear which they inculcate is more to be dreaded than the object of their warning. Fear does a thousand times more harm than any other one cause of Toxemia.
–Dr. John H. Tilden
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To blame the microbe is so easy; to live cleanly so difficult.
It follows that the natural antiseptics of the body are to be found within the body itself, when this is whole and wholesome. And it is kept whole and wholesome by the great natural antiseptics, which are eternal. These are sunshine, fresh air, pure water, and muscular exercises, a combination which is more potent in warding off disease than even the slyest and most subtle germicides which ever issued from a chemist shop.”
–Leonard Williams, M.D.
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The multitude does not know, and we ourselves often forget, that the activities of the microbe as a pathogenic agent are very often dependent on those very conditions of life which give rise to the discomforts and sufferings of the victims of such maladies as indigestion and mucomembranous colitis. It is these conditions of life and imperfect nutrition which prepare the soil of the body for the rank growth of bacterial agents.
It is necessary to recognize a further fact, namely, that one cannot in practice dissociate from the effects of deficient and ill-balanced foods those of bacterial or protozoal agencies whose ravages have been made possible by faulty food.
–Robert McCarrison, M.D.
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Are we to wait while the bacteriologist patiently investigates the nature of these diseases, until he triumphantly isolates some characteristic germ and announces that here, at last, is the dread bacillus of cancer? Should we even then be any nearer a cure? Could we rely on inoculation, and even if we could, what is to be the end? Are we to be inoculated against every known disease till our bodies become depressed and enervated sterilities, incapable of action on their own account? I pray not, for such a physical condition would imply a mental condition even more pitiable. The science of bacteriology has its uses, but they are the uses of research rather than of application. Bacteriology reveals a few of the agents active in disease, but it says nothing about the conditions which permit these agents to become active. Therefore I look to that wonderful instrument, the human body, for the true solution of our difficulty, an instrument so inimitably adaptable, so full of marvelous potentialities of resistance and recuperation, that it is able, when properly used, to overcome all the forces of disease which may be arrayed against it.
–F. Matthias Alexander
The researchers have falsely and wickedly heralded the fear-engendering story that the world is teeming with a host of vicious microscopical and ultra-microscopical beings against which no amount of integrity is a shield and the ravages of which we can escape only by placing ourselves in bondage–a servitude born of fear–to the man with the squirt gun and hollow needle. So-called research has supplied the world of men with unnecessary occasions for fear and has done this deliberately in order to cause them to abandon self-help and self-reliance and place their trust in a half-baked mere hope of a science.
–Herbert M. Shelton
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Kissing and the Germ Theory
You may make a wound and poison it–
That is, vaccinate my child;
But kiss him! The very thought of it
Is enough to drive me wild
Implant the seeds of Lock-jaw,
Consumption and decline
By any means save kissing him–
It’s there we draw the ine
– The Open Door, Jan. 1918
