Natural Healing, Life Science or Natural Hygiene had its awakening in 1822 when Dr. Isaac Jennings,
who had a medical practice in Derby, Connecticut, despaired of drugging. In his many years of practice he was distressed to see his patients become worse from the drugging modality. His patients died and many became chronically afflicted. His yearning to help his fellow beings was sincere.
Dr. Jennings noted that as physicians became older they drugged less and less. He did likewise and found his patients were faring better under less drugging. Then he quit prescribing drugs altogether and found that it wrought miracles.
When patients with problems came to Dr. Jennings he would dispense pills of colored flour and vials of tinted waters. He gave strict instructions for their use just as other physicians gave detailed instructions for the ingestion of drugs. But, in Dr. Jennings’ case, he made a prescription that was to launch a great health movement and an infant science. In 1822 at age thirty-four Dr. Jennings gave his patients placebos with instructions to take them at specified hours of the day with a glass of water. His prescription
was that no food could be taken, or else the pills would not work. His patients were ordered to do this for a number of days and then return for a check-up. Upon return they would be terminated from the regimen or continued on it “a few more days.”
Under Dr. Jennings’ new modality, his patients invariably became well. While other physicians lost patients by the graveyard full, his thrived. The ailing flocked to him from far and near.
The success of his “no-drugging” system astounded Dr. Jennings as much as it did his patients and colleagues. Wisely, in his initial years, Dr. Jennings did not reveal his “secrets.” Instead he sought the rationale for his success. He called his treatments “the leave alone” method while professing to dispense pills of unnamed composition. They came to be regarded as pills with magic curative properties.
From this rather inauspicious start, Dr. Jennings began to develop a few laws relative to his observations and experience. He called the system that flowed from the employment of these laws “orthopathy,” or correct affection.
He formulated many of the “laws” of life and named some of them as follows:
The Laws of Action and Repose, i.e., the necessity for activity and rest (sleep).
• The Law of Economy which resulted from his observation of the way in which the body managed its vital energies.
• The Law of Physiological Distribution or the way in which the body supplies all its parts and faculties adequately.
• The Law of Stimulation or how the body accelerates its physiological activities at a frenzied level when a toxic material is introduced therein.
• The Law of Accommodation or how the body adjusts to poisons by decreasing its vital resistance and more effectively quarantining itself from the toxins’ baneful influences. The body gradually builds defensive mechanisms much as armies grow to ward off attack as the need becomes greater.
• The Law of Limitation or the conservation of vital energies.
• The Law of Equilibrium or the revitalization of debilitated parts and faculties when normalcy has been restored to an ailing organism.