“Immunization means that normal alkalinity of the fluids of the body exists…. Health is the only immunity against disease. If there is any state that man can be put into that will cause him to be less liable to come under disease-producing influences than full health, then law and order is not supreme and the world must be the victim of caprice, haphazard, and chance.” “Epidemics and endemics feed upon the auto-toxemic and stop where there are none…. The belief of the medical profession that contagion and infection pass from one human being to another—from a sick man to a healthy man—is an old superstition unworthy of this age. Disease will not go from person to person, unless they are in a physical condition that renders them susceptible and unless environmental states favor decomposition—those of the household and the general atmosphere where the proper amount of oxygen is deficient. So-called contagious and infectious diseases are self-limited. If it were not for this self-limitation, the world would be depopulated every time an epidemic of a severe character succeeds in getting a start. But the medical profession believes that vaccination and antitoxin do what nature has been doing since the world began, namely, set a limit to the spread of disease.” “Tuberculosis is a seed disease. The seed must come _from a previous case_,” Dr. J. N. McCormack, official itinerant lecturer of the American Medical Association and “mouthpiece of 80,000 doctors,” as he terms himself, is wont to declare in the plea that he is sent out to make all over the country for the establishment of a “national department of health and education to bring the benefactions of modern medical science to every household.” But if one contracts tuberculosis from the germs of another case and he in turn from some one else, how did the first case that ever happened originate? ask the leaders among those who reject the germ theory. Did the causes that produced the first case of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, measles, diphtheria, or other diseases commonly regarded as contagious or infectious, quit the business after producing one case, disappear, and go out of existence, or do they still operate and cause all the cases that occur? That troublesome first case is the missing link in the chain of the theory; but it happened so long ago that it has been lost sight of, and doctors are seldom embarrassed by being asked to account for it.