Excerpt from The Cottage Physician for Individual and Family Use: Prevention, Symptoms and Treatment
Every intelligent human being should study medicine. There is need of wisdom, accuracy, and judgment in the care of our bodies. The knowledge of medicine should be as universal as the need of it. No one can be considered well educated who does not understand the make-up of his own body and the care and requirements necessary to keep it in a state of health.
The average man knows too little about himself, and no one knows too much, but the facts which have been demonstrated, and which are beneficial to mankind, should be a part of the common knowledge. This is true philanthropy. To cure a person of disease is a good thing, but to teach him how to keep well is a better one.
The ignorance or indifference in respect to these things which prevails among enlightened and thinking people is almost incredible. All classes of men, lawyers, farmers, and business men, clergymen, teachers, and men prominent in national affairs, show the greatest eagerness and enthusiasm in mastering any detail of their respective callings which may be to their advantage. Yet, too often these same men manifest no anxiety whatever as to their own physical well-being. Men submit themselves, complacently, to fatigue, exposure, and excesses, which ruin the body, and frequently mind and soul as well.
A part of this is due to carelessness, but the greater part can safely be laid at the door of ignorance. Men do not know the right rules of living. They do not know the certain and sure penalties which follow the breaking of these rules. There is, at the present day, more need of teachers for the people than for the educating of physicians. The world does not need more physicians. On the contrary the demand of the times is for fewer physicians, and better ones, and it always will be so. But the highest and best achievement of the medical profession is to prevent disease, and this can be accomplished in no better way than by teaching the people how to live.
So, too, a book which shall teach the principles of right living in a clear, scientific, and God-fearing way is a boon to humanity. Such a book The Cottage Physician aims to be.
But the world is awakening to a realizing sense of its own lack. It is looking for sources of relief.
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