The Principles of the Nature Cure System, A Fragment
One of the founding fathers of so called ‘Alternative Medicine’, Benedict Lust established a principle of Naturopathy which promoted non invasive self healing, using the medicine of the world around us rather than chemical or developed drugs. Though many of the practices Lust called for have since been widely and rightly discredited, many have become accepted into the mainstream, and scientifically endorsed. His criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry, from the turn of the 20th century up until his death in 1945, remain relevant and potent today. This piece is a fragment from the introduction to his ‘Universal Naturopathic Encyclopedia’, a guide to drugless therapy that combined and utilised folk practices, vitalism, and other alternative cures, published in 1918.
Benedict Lust, March 18, 2025
Since the earliest ages, Medical Science has been of all sciences the most unscientific. Its professors, with few exceptions, have sought to cure disease by the magic of pills and potions and poisons that attacked the ailment with the idea of suppressing the symptoms instead of attacking the real cause of the ailment.
Medical science has always believed in the superstition that the use of chemical substances which are harmful and destructive to human life will prove an efficient substitute for the violation of laws, and in this way encourages the belief that a man may go the limit in self indulgence that weaken and destroy his physical system, and then hope to be absolved from his physical ailments by swallowing a few pills, or submitting to an injection of a serum, that are supposed to act as vicarious redeemers of the physical organism and counteract life-long practices that are poisonous and wholly destructive to the patient's well-being.
From the earliest ages to the present time, the priests of medicine have discovered that it is ten times easier to obtain ten dollars from a man by acting upon his superstition, than it is to extract one dollar from him, by appealing to reason and common sense. Having this key to a gold mine within their grasp, we find official medicine indulging at all times in the most blatant, outrageous, freakish and unscientific methods of curing disease, because the methods were in harmony with the medical prestige of the physician.
Away back in pre-historic times, disease was regarded as a demon to be exorcised from its victim, and the medicine man of his tribe belabored the body of his patient with a bag in which rattled bones and feathers, and no doubt in extreme cases the tremendous faith in this process of cure that was engendered in the mind of the patient really cured some ailments for which mental science, not the bag of bones and feathers, should be given credit.
Coming down to the middle ages, the Witches' Broth — one ingredient of which was the blood of a child murderer drawn in the dark of the moon — was sworn to, by official medicine, as a remedy for every disease.
In a later period, the docteur a la mode, between his taking pinches of snuff from a gold snuff box, would order the patient bled as a remedy for what he denominated spirits, vapors, megrims, or miasms.
Following this pseudo-scientific diagnosis and method of cure, came the drugging phase in which symptoms of disease were unmercifully attacked by all kinds of drugs, alkalis, acids and poisons which were supposed, that by suffocating the symptoms of disease, by smothering their destructive energy, to thus enhance the vitality of the individual. All these cures have had their inception, their period of extensive application, and their certain desuetude. The contemporary fashion of healing disease is that of serums and pills, which, instead of being an improvement on the fake medicines of former ages are of no value in the cure of disease, but on the contrary introduce lesions into the human body of the most distressing and deadly import.
The policy of expediency is at the basis of medical drug healing. It is along the lines of self-indulgence, indifference, ignorance and lack of self-control that drug medicine lives, moves and has its being. The sleeping swineries of mankind are wholly exploited by a system of medical treatment, founded on poisonous and revolting products, whose chemical composition and whose mode of attacking disease, are equally unknown to their originators, and this is called "scientific medicine."
Like the alchemist of old who circulated the false belief that he could transmute the baser metals into gold, in like manner the vivisector claims that he can coin the agony of animals into cures for human disease. He insists on cursing animals that he may bless mankind with such curses.
The natural system for curing disease is based on a return to nature in regulating the diet, breathing, exercising, bathing and the employment of various forces to eliminate the poisonous products in the system, and so raise the vitality of the patient to a proper standard of health.
The prime object of natural healing is to give the principle of life the line of least resistance, that it may enable man to possess the most abundant health.
What is life? The finite mind of man fails to comprehend the nature of this mysterious principle. The philosopher says "Life is the sum of the forces that resist detail," but that definition only increases its obscurity. Life is a most precious endowment of protoplasm, of the various combinations of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, and other purely mineral substances in forming organic tissues. As Othello says, referring to Desdemona's life, which he compares to the light of a candle —
"If I quench thee thou flaming minister,
I can thy former light restore
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
I know not whence is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume."
The spark of life flickers in the sockets of millions and is about to go out. What system of medicine will most surely restore that flickering spark to a steady, burning flame?
Benedict Lust (1872 – 1945) was a German-American doctor who was one of the founders of naturopathic medicine. He helped introduce ideas of psychotherapy, Yoga, and Ayurveda therapy to an American audience.
