New Zealand's Greatest Doctor:
Ulric Williams of Wanganui
A Surgeon who became a Naturopath
By Brenda Sampson
Explaining Natural Therapy
Part of a letter written by BS to a doctor interested in diet and nutrition, who asked for information about Ulric Williams and about Nature Cure.
The basis of natural therapy is that germs don't harm us if we are well. I heard this on the radio once in a talk called "Why does food go bad?" The speaker, a scientist, began by saying that all living organisms have a symbiotic arrangement with smaller organisms such as bacteria. The bacteria do no harm to the larger creatures, because as long as the latter are alive, they have defence mechanisms against the germs. After death the defence mechanisms no longer operate; the corpse becomes food, and the bacteria eat it. Their excreta are stinking and sometimes poisonous and this is what we call "gone bad". The reason why meat goes bad more quickly than fruit is that fruit takes longer to die; it does not die immediately it is picked off the tree. When I heard this I thought, "If a germ is harmless to a person who is fully alive(i.e. healthy) we must be in the process of gradually dying, like a fruit, before we catch a contagious disease. It is not (as we think) that when we have flu we are sick. We catch flu because we are sick, i.e. not fully alive. Natural therapy and diet therapy believe that this "not-fully-aliveness" is caused by toxins accumulating in the body.
In his book "Health and Healing in the New Age", Dr Williams described the sources of these toxins. He believed very strongly in the Life Force and the body's power to heal itself. When the conditions that are making the person sick are removed, the body grows back to health, as surely as a plant that has had a plank over it grows upright to the light when the plank is removed. Natural therapy does not believe in germs as the cause of disease. The basic principal is that the body makes use of germs to clean itself. When a toxic state occurs, germs multiply, temperature rises. Heat is therapeutic if the person follows the nature cure procedure for cleansing the body, by fasting, drinking water and citrus juices copiously, using an enema, and taking exercise in fresh air. I have used Dr Williams' method of dealing with infections since 1942 and can testify that it works.
An infectious disease is a healing crisis, and should not be suppressed with antibiotics. A person who treats an infection with nature cure methods, comes out of it with a feeling of well-being, quite different from the jaded state of those treated with antibiotics, who tend to say to their friends, "I've had flu and it has left me with this awful bronchitis",or "I've had flu and I can't shake off this cough". This is because the conditions that the body was trying to clean up are still there, and if the person continues to suppress nature's attempts to remove them, the body will eventually succumb to a chronic disease.
