BOTANIC  THEORY  OF  HEALTH
By  William  Fox,  M.D.

A state of health upon which our happiness depends is the legitimate result of a correct mode of living.  Persons
who trangress the physical laws of their nature will incur a penalty for breaking this law.  The result of a violation
of the physical laws of nature is to produce misery and disease in proportion to the extent of those violations.

Thousands are ralling in wealth who would trade their finances for perfect health.  How then can we preserve our
health?  It may be argued that health is a blessing given by Divine Providence and He continues or destroys
according to His will or pleasure, without any help from us.  However, He has established certain unchangeable or
immutable laws by which all matter is governed.  Obedience to these laws secures our health and all its
blessings.  In other words, to preserve health, proper attention must be paid to food, drink, clothing, exercise,
pure air and water.

Oh no, one thing does perfect health so depend than on the quantity and quality of our food.  A great amount of
disease is produced by improper mastication of food; the majority of mankind swallows down, half chewed and in
large quantities of food.

Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Plutarch, Pythagores and many of the old Greek philosphers abstained from animal food
and from stimulants and they lived to an old age.  When improper food is placed into the stomach, it becomes
disordered and the whole system is affected.  Vegetable matter ferments and becomes gaseous; while animal
substances are changed into a putrid, abominable and acid stimulus.  Some of the effects of overeating animal
foods and other improper stimulants are blotches on the face and body, gout and inflammation.

Disease and life are a forced state which are the effects of stimuli: all bodies are composed of 4 elements - earth,
air, fire and water.  Earth and water constitute the solids, air and fire the fluids of the body.  The healthy state
consists in the proper balance and distribution of these 4 elements and disease in their disarrangement.

All disease is caused by obstruction: the mode of the cure is to remove it by diffusing heat over the system, for
heat is life, the absence of heat death.  All disease is the effect of one general cause and therefore requires a
genreal remedy.  Whatever supports the internal heat and directs the determining powers to the surface, will
expel the disease and save the person.

One means to do this is by the vapour bath.  The vapour bath has very good effects, particularly in chronic
ailments; and its action is on the skin and through that medium on the nervous system.  The vapour or Turkish
Bath is a valuable remedial agent because more than half of our food and drink passes out of the body through
the pores of the skin.

The vapour bath brings the blood to the surface of the body, warms and invigorates the whole system and
produces a natural perspiration which serves to rid impurities from the circulating fluid.  This communicates heat
or caloric to the blood, rendering circulation more active and vigorous.  During a vapour bath, the pressure of the
atmosphere is diminished allowing the heat to propel the blood to the different parts of the body which it could not
do under other circumstances, with a restoration to health being the consequence.