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The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It 95
person in order to improve their health. After having studied medicine in France where they kept
statistics on treatments, Jacob Bigelow of Harvard acknowledged, in an 1835 address entitled
“self-limited diseases” that contemporary medicine had little if anything to offer the sick.
Bigelow maintained that “the unbiased opinion of most medical men of sound judgment and long
experience [is that] the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less, if all disease
were left to itself.” This realization of Bigelow's and others led to what Oliver Wendell Homes
referred to as the “nature-trusting heresy.”
257
Bigelow's opinion was based on his experience with
the medicine of physicians but there was also lay medicine and household medicine.
Lay medicine included a wide variety of methods that included both natural and
supernatural. Among the supernatural were witchcraft which included some folk medicine which
had its basis in the occult, native Indian magic and Christian prayer. Healing methods based in
the occult, magic and witchcraft proved to be just as ineffective as the medicine of physicians. In
fact, the practice of using inoculations or vaccinations was adapted by physicians from occult
practitioners who used the scabs of small pox victims to create inoculations. Inoculations or
vaccinations were not based on science but on the occult.
On the other hand, the experiences of those who trusted in the natural healing properties
which God placed in herbs and in prayer is quit different from all others. The healing power
which God placed in herbs is not diminished when the knowledge comes from sources that use
other heretical supernatural methods based on magic, charms or positions. The early settlers
gained a great deal of knowledge about the healing properties of herbs native to North America
from the Indians. Many Indian doctors were very highly regarded. Cotton Mather thought that
many of the Indians cures were “truly stupendous” and another early American said their cures
were “too many to repeat.” Of the Indians diseases John Wesly wrote they were “exceedingly
few” and their herbal preparations were “quick, as well as generally infallible.”
258
According to Starr, the early American home depended on herbal cures. He writes,
“Woman were expected to deal with illness in the home and to keep a stock of remedies on hand;
in the fall, they put away medicinal herbs as they stored preserves. Care of the sick was part of
the domestic economy for which the wife assumed responsibility. She would call on networks of
kin and community for advice and assistance when illness struck, in worrisome cases perhaps
bringing in an older woman who had a reputation for skill with the sick.”
259
While vitamins and minerals are essential to our survival; herbs, grains, nuts, berries,
fruits and vegetables contain these life sustaining vitamins and minerals in natural forms along
with other micro-nutrients which are readily used by our bodies. God made herbs for healing.
Different varieties of herbs from around the world provide vitamins and minerals and other
nutrients which are capable of aiding the body's immune system in overcoming nearly every
disease known to man. On the other hand pharmaceuticals are made from coal tar and more
recently Petrochemicals (chemicals made from petroleum). These are toxic which explains why
over 106,000 people die each year from properly prescribed and administered prescription drugs
in the US.
The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 which killed approximately 500,000 in the US offers
the perfect illustration of the difference between God's natural healing methods and the drug
treatments of physicians. “It is reported that the drugless [natural] therapy centers had 100%
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