Herbert M. Shelton Quotes

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station—all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness.

At the very dawn of history, the care of the sick was actually superior to what the great majority of mankind receive today when ill.

The great error of physicians has been that of attributing recovery to the operations of their poisons, while they have left out of account the healing powers of the body itself.

The power to assimilate crude inorganic matter as it is found in the soil, and convert it into living protoplasm and other organic substances, or to use such substances in performing physiological function, does not belong to the animal organism. It is the office of plant life or vegetation to convert the primary elements from their crude inorganic state into the organic state. This conversion cannot be accomplished by any synthetic process known to the laboratory. After the plant has raised the crude inorganic matter of the soil into plant protoplasm, the animal may take these and raise them to a still higher plane—that of animal protoplasm. But the animal cannot do the work of the plant. He must get his food either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. That is, the animal must either eat the plant or its fruits, or he must eat the animal that has eaten the plant. Food must be in the organic form. Air and water form the only exceptions to this rule.

The effort to cure disease has been, without doubt, the greatest curse that has ever been perpetrated upon the human race. The idea that disease is something that must be cured, the idea that it is something that can be cured, must be eradicated from the human mind before we can hope to arrive at a rational solution of our health problems.

Natural laws admit of no exceptions.

Conventional eating habits violate all of the rules of food combining in the preceding chapters and, since the majority of people manage to live for at least a few years and to "enjoy" their aches and pains and their frequent "spells of sickness," few of them are willing to give any intelligent consideration to their eating habits. They usually declare, when the subject of food combining comes up, that they eat all of the condemned combinations regularly and it does not hurt them. Life and death, health and disease are mere matters of accident to them. Unfortunately they are encouraged in this view by medical advisers.

Moderation is the only rule of a healthful life. This means moderation in all things wholesome.