This book was not written at one sitting or many, but it is the culmination of several _years' preparation_. While the first part is the result of thorough reasoning and experience, the second is a collection of the best modern data on prominent diseases and their remedies, with our own annotations. Both sections represent thoughtful and painstaking labor. Even if you are so bold as to maintain that you possess health, happiness, and are sure of longevity, we believe you cannot fail to find practical, valuable truths in these pages. Whether you are an editor, merchant, lawyer, doctor, minister, or day-laborer, we hope at least to entertain you. Are we right? Read and judge. From the mythological times of _AEsculapius_ down to the present day, votaries of medical science have been compounding, diagnosing, and prescribing for helpless, suffering humanity. For many ages this condition may have been a necessity, but in the light of our present civilization, sound common sense is the best physician. That _doctors_ cannot be trusted to be right in every instance or even in a majority of them is shown by practical experiments. They certainly are well proved to be an inharmonious crowd by the experience of a _Boston Globe_ reporter, who recently called upon ten regular physicians on the same day, and described his symptoms in exactly the same language to each. He received ten prescriptions, of which no two were alike, and a majority were utterly inconsistent each with the other. _Nellie Bly_, the famous lady writer of the New York _World_, had a cold and went to over fifty of the city's leading physicians, in October, 1889, asking them to prescribe for her. They did, and among the collection there were no two alike, and many diametrically opposite in nature and effect! In a lecture recently delivered before the Cooper Medical College, San Francisco, Cal., on the subject of "Quacks and Quackery," by Prof. L. C. Lane, the speaker said: "Every good thing in the world has been counterfeited, and in these advanced times the work is so well done that it takes an expert to detect the true from the false. Everything is now more or less adulterated, especially the food we consume. The three great professions also of theology, law, and medicine, have been and are grossly counterfeited, especially the latter, which opens up the widest field for imposture."