Instruction to be Given on Health Topics
259
Letter B 145, 1904
In our medical institutions clear instruction should be given in
regard to temperance. The patients should be shown the evil of intox-
icating liquor, and the blessing of total abstinence. They should be
asked to discard the things that have ruined their health, and the place
of these things should be supplied with an abundance of fruit, oranges,
lemons, prunes, peaches, and many other varieties can be obtained;
for the Lord’s world is productive, if painstaking effort is put forth.
Manuscript 22, 1887
The health institutions for the sick will be the best places to educate
the suffering ones to live in accordance with nature’s laws and cease
their health-destroying practices in wrong habits in diet, in dress, that
are in accordance with the world’s habits and customs, which are not
at all after God’s order, they are doing a good work to enlighten our
world.
There is now positive need even with physicians, reformers in the
line of treatment of disease, that greater painstaking effort be made to
carry forward and upward the work for themselves, and to interestedly
instruct those who look to them for medical skill to ascertain the cause
of their infirmities. They should call their attention in a special manner
to the laws which God has established, which can not be violated with
impunity. They dwell much on the working of disease, but do not, as a
general rule, arouse the attention to the laws which must be sacredly
and intelligently obeyed in such to prevent disease. Especially if the
physician has not been correct in his dietetic practices, if his own
appetite has not been restricted to a plain, wholesome diet, in a large
measure discarding the use of the flesh of dead animals,—he loves
meat, he has educated and cultivated a taste for unhealthful food. His
ideas are narrow, and he will as soon educate and discipline the taste
and the appetite of his patients to love the things that he loves, as to
give them the sound principles of health reform. He will prescribe for
sick patients flesh-meat, when it is the very worst diet that they can
have; it stimulates, but does not give strength. They do not inquire
into their former habits of eating and drinking, and take special notice
of their erroneous habits which have been for many years laying the
foundation of disease. Conscientious physicians should be prepared