But as I have touched upon medicine, let me say--for I ought here to
say it--that there are some methods of modern medicine which Theosophy
emphatically condemns. It declares that no knowledge which is gained
from a tortured, a vivisected creature, is legitimate, even if it were
as useful as it has been proved to be useless. It declares that all
inoculations of disease into the healthy body are illegitimate, and it
condemns all such. It declares that all those foul injections of modern
medicine which use animal fluids to restore the exhausted vitality of
man are ruinous to the body into which they are put. Here again France,
by the very excess of its methods, is beginning to recoil before the
results which have come about. Only two years ago I was told by a
leading physician of Paris that many of the doctors had met together to
look at the results which had grown out of the methods that for years
they had been following without hesitation and without scruple, and that
they feared that they had caused more diseases than they cured. Why are
these things condemned as illegitimate? Because the building up of the
human body is the building by a living Spirit of a temple for himself,
and it is moulded by that Spirit for his own purposes. The higher powers
of intelligence have made the human body what it is, different from the
animal bodies out of which, physically, in ages long gone by, it has
grown. Your delicacy of touch, the exquisite beauty and delicacy of your
nervous system, these things are the outcome of the higher powers of the
Spirit expressing themselves in the human body, where they cannot
express themselves in the animal form. And if you ignore this, if you
forget it, if you forget that this splendid human temple built up by
the Spirit of man through ages of toil and of suffering, to express his
own higher qualities--compassion, tenderness, love, pity for the weak
and the helpless, protection of the helpless against the strong--if you
forget the whole of that, and act as a brute even would not act, in
cruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the
body you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are
trying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagery
which is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the
inheritance of the civilised races.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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