Natural Therapeutics-Vol. 4 Iridiagnosis HB

The greatest and most articulate of the pioneers of the Nature Cure movement. The appearance after fifty years of a new edition of the works of Dr Henry Lindlahr is an event of great importance to the increasing number of people, including many doctors, who are interested in what has come to be called Alternative Medicine or who are seeking a new approach to the problems of the human body in health and disease. Lindlahr was perhaps the greatest and most articulate of the pioneers of the Natural Therapeutics movement. He sought to draw together all the different methods of natural treatment into a complete system and to build up a genuine science of health and therapeutics based on the belief that heaith and disease, like everything else in nature, are subject to laws and are not a matter of chance and beyond our control. He has, moreover, laid down some of the basic laws on which health depends and he shows very convincingly that disease is the result of our individual or collective violations of those laws either through ignorance or wilfutness. Health is thus the natural heritage of mankind and it is within our grasp if we can learn to conform ourselves to its laws. He also points out that when disease does appear it cannot be cured by a doctor, or by anyone else, except the patient or the \'vis medicatrix naturae\' working through the patient. All the doctor can do is to put the patient into a condition in which the healing forces of body are liberated; it should be his concern not to fight disease but to promote health which will lead to the disappearance of disease. The editor has added a number of appendices and Footnotes where it has seemed right to draw attention to other points of view, to changes which have taken place in medical thought and practice and to advances in scientific knowledge which appear to have a bearing on Lindlahrs arguments and conclusions.