The Home Physician And Guide To Health

With some 250 useful illustrations, and charts, this unique medical book was written in 1923 when physicians still made house calls, and many hospitals were still called sanitariums. The modern medical care of the day incorporated healthful living and simple remedies such as hydrotherapy (one of the book's largest chapters) in its routine approach to practically all disease states. Our modern world presents a strange paradox. Men work with all the energy of their being to amass a fortune, so that they may live in ease and comfort in the autumn of life. But they have no more than ceased from their strenuous labors, when some disease overtakes them, and they go the way of all flesh, and their hard earned dollars go to another.How foolish is the course that so many pursue! For what pleasure can a million of money give if the body be racked with pain! Or of what value are extensive property holdings in a great metropolis if an outraged constitution commits the offender to a narrow lot in a city of the dead!It has well been said that "to keep the body in a healthy condition, to develop its strength, that all its machinery may act harmoniously, should be the first study of our lives." Too many not only do not make this the "first study" of their lives, they fail to study it at all. If our modern age of efficiency and higher education has taught us one thing, it is that success and development are possible in any line to those only who study the subject thoroughly and act upon the principles discovered in such study. Even so with health. Real physical well-being is rarely the result of chance. It comes rather from following, either consciously or instinctively, definite rules.Despite the apathy of some toward the great subject of life and health and the prevention and cure of disease, there is a marked awakening on the part of men and women in every land to the need of educating themselves on these vital subjects. They are finding that the time thus spent is far more than offset by the reduction of days consumed by sickness, and that the money invested in such study pays big dividends in decreased doctor bills and smaller life insurance premiums. Men are beginning to realize that most gratifying results follow from taking an intelligent interest in the welfare of their bodies.Formerly about the only kind of literature put out for the laity, on this subject, dealt wholly with sets of rules, which were generally prefaced with the suggestive phrase, "What to do before the doctor comes." Today men are asking that the scope be enlarged to include a full discussion of what to do, and how to live, to make unnecessary the doctor's coming. They desire that the matter be presented to them in a simple yet scientific form. They ask that the latest findings of scientists be translated into terms which can be easily understood, and adapted to everyday life.This volume is the answer to such a request. Indeed, it is the result of an insistent demand on the part of men everywhere, who have failed to find in the many popular medical books that which they desire. Written not by one doctor but by a large staff of skilled physicians, it presents every phase of the subject from the standpoint of the specialist. Each chapter has been composed by one peculiarly fitted for the task.Many pages are devoted to the great principles underlying health and happiness. Much is said concerning the prevention as well as the cure of disease. Little has been said about medicine in the cure of disease. This is in harmony with the latest findings of medical men, who are turning from drugs to such rational methods of treatment as are described in this book.The Publishers. (Adapted 1923 Preface)