I shall endeavor in these volumes to formulate and elucidate some of the fundamental laws and principles underlying the phenomena of life and death, health, disease and cure, and shall try to ascertain in the light of these laws how much of truth and how much of error, how much of usefulness and how much of harmfulness there may be contained in the various theories and systems of living and of healing. Nature Owe an Exact Science One of the reasons why Nature Cure is not more popular with the medical profession and the public is that it is too simple. The average mind is more impressed by the involved and mysterious than by the simple and common-sense. However, it remains a fact that "exact science" reduces complexity and confusion to simplicity and clearness. Science becomes exact science only when the underlying laws which correlate and unify its scattered facts and theories have been discovered. These simple laws rightly understood and applied will do for medical science what the law of gravitation has done for physics and astronomy, and what the laws of chemical affinity have done for chemistry, they will place medical science in the ranks of exact sciences. The understanding and proper application of these truths will explain every fact and phenomenon in the processes of health, disease and cure, and will enable the student to reason from simple, natural laws and principles to their logical effects. The "Regular" school of medicine, so far, has endeavored to build a medical science on the observation of "effects" and "experiences," but since one fundamental law of nature may produce a million seemingly differing effects it becomes self-evident that it is utterly impossible to found an exact science on such uncertain and conflicting evidence. The primary laws and principles once understood, it becomes easy to reason from and to explain through them, the various phenomena which they produce. Herein lie the merit and achievement of the Nature Cure philosophy. THE UPAS TREE OF DISEASE EVIL IS NOT AN ACCIDENT, NOT AN ARBITRARY PUNISHMENT, NOT ALWAYS AN "ERROR OF MORTAL MIND." IT IS THE NATURAL AND INEVITABLE RESULT OF VIOLATIONS OF NATURE'S LAWS. IT IS INSTRUCTIVE AND CORRECTIVE IN PURPOSE, AND WILL REMAIN WITH US ONLY AS LONG AS WE NEED ITS SALUTARY LESSONS. Chapter I What ~Is~ Nature Cure? It is vastly more than a system of curing aches and pains; it is a complete revolution in the art and science of living. It is the practical realization and application of all that is good in natural science, philosophy and religion. Like many another world-wide revolution and reformation, it had its inception in Germany, the land of thinkers and philosophers. About seventy years ago this greatest and most beneficent of reformation movements was inaugurated by Priessnitz in Grafenberg, a small village in the Silesian mountains. The originator of Nature Cure was a simple farmer, but he had a natural genius for the art of healing.