Observations placeholder

SHADOW LAND OR  LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE by Elisabeth d’Esperance(1897)

Never in my life before had I suspected the want, misery, and sickness which existed in the world, nor how little doctors could do to alleviate it; how in spite of all efforts made by the charitable and kind-hearted benefactors in our midst such wretchedness could exist.

I turned absolutely sick sometimes, when standing face to face with the horrors of disease and want, which I felt how powerless I was to help. Many times have I asked myself,, when visiting some den of squalor and misery,  "Can this be God's world; can these be his children? Of what use to give medicine to these pale emaciated little ones, who were starving for sunlight and fresh air or for nourishing food whose limbs refused to carry the wasted forms, a consequence of their parents' weakness or culpability inheriting disease from them as their only birth-right?"

 I have wondered often, if I had made a world and peopled it with such a result, whether I would not have done as I used to do with a faulty drawing-destroy it and begin afresh. It seemed to me that there was no mercy in helping these poor miserable victims of ignorance and disease, to prolong a wretched existence.

But Stafford [spirit helper] thought differently.

He was indefatigable in his efforts to assist in mitigating the suffering; never wearied in advising, teaching, exhorting, divining at once to the root of the evil, pointing out where mistakes had been made, and how to remedy them if not too late.

He never hesitated in pointing out, and rebuking in scathing words, diseases caused, not by ignorance, but by deliberate infraction of the laws of Nature. His sympathy with suffering was as unbounded as his wish to help; consequently there was no lack of objects on which to expend any surplus funds.

Medicines he objected to, on the ground that drugs only set up another disease, in many cases as harmful as the one to be cured.

His methods of remedy were chiefly, a more natural way of living, simple diet, fresh air, physical exercise, and a knowledge of right and wrong to enable the sick person to cure himself.

"Give the children food," he would write sometimes, "and let drugs alone."

So that the medicines carried into some of the courts and alleys of the slums were more frequently in the shape of oat-meal, bread, fruit and similar comestibles, than in unpalatable mixtures from the chemists.