by Alan Tillotson

Until his death several years ago, Dr. Thomas Marsteller, N.D., was the last practicing Doctor of Drugless Therapy in Pennsylvania. As delineated in this series of personal interviews done by JWB editor Alan Tillotson in 1984, Dr. Marsteller graduated Hahnemann University in 1929, a few years before the University board dropped its Drugless Therapy degree program.

Dr. Thomas Marsteller: My great-grandfather came over to this country from Holland, and he was a doctor. Six other of my ancestors came over at the same time, and all were doctors. In Holland they took care of the animals as well as the human beings. Homeopathy was used over there, or Naturopathy. Four of them stayed North of here, between Philadelphia and Allentown, and three went South."

TM: That's right, seven of them came here at the same time. They were in the army, and all were doctors. My great-grandfather was one of the seven. He fought in the Civil War, and he also started a hospital in a village near Pittsburgh called Marsteller's. My other great-uncle was the surgeon who took care of Lincoln when he was shot, and also was Surgeon General of the United States Army. Another one was a general in the Southern army, a Marsteller. The rest of them stayed in practice around here, or in the South.

"My grandfather lived to be 92, and I closed his eyes while he was talking to a patient. My own father was killed by his carriage horse when I was about nine years old. When he came up to the post to hook up the carriage horse, before he could move from the seat of his buggy—she threw up her feet and kicked him in the privates. He lived two years after that . . . they cut him and did surgery and everything . . but he had two years of hell.

TM: He was trained as a doctor from childhood up, same as I was. My first recollections are of being put out into the field to gather certain herbs in a gunny sock, while grandpop was on his way to some patient or something. On his way back he would pick me up. We picked Larkspur, we picked Poke root . . . any number of different things, whatever was blooming at that particular time."

TM: "When I was small. Now, my grandmother's family were hotel people. They had seven hotels which my grandmother inherited. Whenever grandpop would stay a day or two at one of them, he would treat the people in that vicinity. He used to go around to the different places with her. They called her aunt Kate because she could help to treat you and tell you what to do. When he was young grandpop had these trotting horses at what is now Hannover stables. He would raise these horses to get around, because he would go between Philadelphia, Bethlehem, Allentown, and so forth. They didn't have much transportation here except for the trains. If a woman was having difficulty delivering her baby, grandpop would go out to her no matter what time it was, and maybe stay the whole day!

"Now, we didn't have instruments in those days, and we delivered the babies without all these things we have today. I was trained the same way. I delivered many children by being sent out. It used to the joke around this neighborhood that they didn't like the 'boy' to come and deliver the baby, because I was very young looking. When I was 16 or 17, they didn't believe that I knew what I was doing.

"I went to the high school in Allentown. High school was only a couple of years in those days. I also took some classes in Quakertown, Then I went from there to Philadelphia to Hahnemann, when I was about 17 or 18. 1 fired coal on the railroad on the old camelback engines. I worked so I didn't have to pay the fare." I would do that six days a week. That was the way I had to do it. I would go from the train yard over to Hahnemann, and work over there from about 8 or 9 In the morning to about three. Then I would walk over to the passenger car yards and wash and sweep cars out. For two weeks I got 31 dollars. It paid my way back and forth from Quakertown."

TM:"Hahnemann was only a small little bit of of a place. It didn't have too much. You had to go four stories. Up in the tower we had all the nerves put on black velvet. All the nerves of the body. It was a woman by the name of Josephine, who donated her body to Dr. Weaver. Dr. Weaver was one of the professors at Hahnemann. He mounted it. I think it took him seven or eight years to mount all the nerves onto this black velvet."

TM: He kept the body floating in salt water. He took the nerves out piece by piece. A picture of it is over here by the doorway."

It gives the impression of a complete circuit. One gets a clear idea of the nervous system as a whole.

When you were brought into Hahnemann as a freshman, after you started to go, the other students would ask you if you knew Josephine. Once they started asking you that, you knew you were being invited into the club, like these fraternities nowadays. Of course, you didn't know who Josephine was, and you would say so. After a while, a couple of them would take you over to the elevator--in those days you pulled a rope to go up and down— and brought you up to the tower. You were blindfolded before you were brought in there, and then you were made to get down on your knees and to pay homage to her. She was up there with all the nerves mounted, even the brain, but you couldn't see her.

"As you were paying homage to her, your backside is sticking up, and they had these paddles. They slammed across the backside until you hollered 'Mercy, Josephine.' They didn't tell you to say that; It was up to you to find out yourself. After that you were sworn to secrecy , not to tell the next student.

"This was how you were initiated, and after you swore secrecy they opened your eyes. That was your first interview with Josephine."

"That was one of the many things I remember about medical school in those days."

I look around and notice for the first time the decorations. The whole room is early American in tone. There are a number of commemorative plates with flags and so forth, a china closet, a grandfather clock ticking away faithfully, a dog bowl with "our dog~ written on it, lampshades with painted birds, and, near the couch a sculpture of the front of the house made of scrap tin. Just what you would expect from a country doctor. We continue our discussion of Dr. Marsteller's early days at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia.

TM: Then, you see, I used to run around with Dr. Lenford Marter's son. Dr. Marter was the dean down there, and his son and I used to run around together. We had an old Doosenburg car which we rebuilt in our spare time. Don't ask where we got all this time; When you're young you get around."

This young man and myself got this Doosenburg that belonged to Burdock, the brewer who was convicted of draft evading in the first World War. It was very much the same as your Mercedes today. But anyhow, one day he went out speeding in Fairmount Park with a couple of the nurses, and the police saw him. So he turned down where there were some stairs leading up to an abutment, and couldn't make the turn and he hit the abutment. The girls were thrown out and killed. So he threw himself out and crushed his own skull. The whole three of them died.

The father, Dr. Marter--belng as how my friend was his only child--grabbed ahold of me and wanted to make me into an ear, nose and throat man, and a brain specialist. He got ahold of my grandfather, and seeing how bad this old professor was, my grandfather agreed with him. So I started to learn about the eyes, nose and the brain. My first two patients died when I was borlng into their brains. They died on the table. And the third one withstood it for a week or so, and then also died. This was normal for those days in brain surgery.

I got disgusted and ran away and joined the Army Air Force. I learned under old Pop Pitkern at the Pitkern Airways. I had started to learn from him a few years before while I was still in medical school. Now in those days your medical schools only had two years straight through. You had no break in between. Surgery was another year you stayed in there, if you wanted it.

TM: Yeah. Well, actually, I was sent up to New York to Bellvue Hospital with some doctors who knew my grandfather. I worked the ambulance. In those days it was two horses and a long wagon with canvas sides to it. In the wintertime you had to contend with the ice and snow, and the horses would fall and so forth. You'd have to get out and take the blankets and put them under the horse so you could get him on his feet again. Sometimes, unfortunately, some patients would suffer from exposure because we would be forced to take the blankets off them in the dead of winter.

But anyway, I wound up getting myself in the mail service in the Army. The Army used to do the flying for the post office, and I flew from here to Spartensburg, South Carolina. There was five of us pilots, and I'm the only one left out of all of them.

One of the first pilots we lost got tangled up in some high power lines. The planes carriage got caught in there and just wound up and burned. What they did with me is just push me into another plane and get me going, so I wouldn't get petrified. When I was flying during the winter months, the plane was near the ridge of mountains around Spartensburg, and I couldn't get up over it because of the ice on the wings. I crashed and laid up there for three days before they brought me back. After that I never wanted to fly again. Even now If I go down to the airport where they have those big 707's, It scares the hell out of me.

TM: That's right, but in homeopathy. It was an M.D. in homeopathy. The medical license was the same, only it was in homeopathy or allopathy. At that time, when the board gave you a license, it was an M.D. as an allopath, a homeopath or an electropath. There was supposed to be a chiropractic licence, but it was always drowned out. Also, I forgot, there was a licence as an osteopath. There were seven men on that board. They were supposed to have all the different types on it, but the joke of it was that when they finally got three allopaths on the board, they began to take control.

TM: About 1929 or 1930. The osteopathic and chiropractic degrees were separate from the M.D. degrees in allopathy or homeopathy, but the same board gave them. There was supposed to be an osteopath and a chiropractor on the board, but for a great many years there was none. But 1930 there were three M.D.'s on the board, none of them naturopaths, they started only electing allopathic M.D.'s to the board. It finally wound up being strictly an M.D. board. In 1931, Hahnemann started taking students in mostly regular allopathic medicine.

We had about 50 students at that time, and they told us that we could keep one class as long as we maintained the numbers. But we couldn't keep 50 students because if they wanted to study naturopathy or homeopathy, the board would talk them out of it, convince them to take allopathy."

TM: I realized what was going on. I tried to talk around to everyone, and they used to call me a big mouth because I would condemn these things. The president of the A.M.A. at this time was Morris Fishbein. He wasn't even a doctor. He tried to persecute anybody who didn't look his way. I was on the hop for quite a while."

TM: Right. Fishbein had gotten in a few years earlier, and he started tightening up. He started pressing for more time to get a medical degree. Instead of two or three years, it started to go to four, then five etc. Why, before that you could even go to night school become a doctor. They even began the two year premed before you could begin the five years medical school, making it seven years. That's why today the doctors are all over-trained. This is why they are having so much trouble in their diagnosing. What do they know? Penicillin . . . antibiotics.

Today its a hard proposition to break into medicine because they tell you that the old methods are passe, and that you need all this chemistry and so forth to know anything. They don't believe that you can learn medicine in a shorter time."

AT:Are you saying that the AMA model of medical science is unnecessarily obscure and complex?

TM: Yeah. Of course even back then you read Grey's anatomy in those days. It was a very dry subject, and you would fall asleep half the time. Gramps would teach you by telling you to watch him. If he took off a leg on the table, he showed you where he had to cut to evaluate the leg, where to saw the bone if he had to do that, how to leave the skin a certain way so you could use the skin to cover the stump. If you had a bullet hole in you he'd show you how to open the hole and reach in with little snippers to get the bullet and pull it out. You learn anatomy real quick that way, and you don't forget it.

The same with medicine. He would quiz me when I walked by him. He'd say, 'What's Chamomile for?' and so forth. He picked out the most important ones, the ones you would use, the ones that meant something."

TM: There are thousands of them. You have to know which ones met your purpose. That's why we have a list. You don't have to memorize everything. You have to know how to find out what you need to know, and you have to know when to go to your book. You have to know how to use your books. everything is listed by common name, botanical name and so forth.

Now, In the hospital, we started the same way. For four or five months they would have you observe. You'd follow the doctors around in groups. On the morning rounds they'd assign you to a doctor, and he would take you to the patients and show you how to diagnose for each different problem. It was right down to the body and the person. It wasn't like today where you get so much book work at the beginning. The book work can drive you out of your mind.

All this stuff was actual work where you learnt while you did it. There wasn't too much book work. Sure, you had to burn the midnight oil to read your books, all different ones. But you couldn't remember 7 or 8 thousand herbs from all over the world. You would pick the main ones, like chamomile for women who are nervous and upset. But this one only works for a light complected women, or children. It doesn't help men that much. If the woman is dark complected, you have to give something different. This is why you need your book, to find out what is compatible with your patient."

Not everything agrees with everybody. For instance, I can't eat liver, not because of anything organic, but because I had bad experiences several times with liver. Once when I was only a child, about eleven years old, I heard this screaming and grinding. I went outside the hotel, and there under the wheels of a car was this little girl. She had been running, and got under the wheels of the car. They had jacked the car up so they could get the body out from under there, and I was standing there near a piece of her, and it was her liver. They were putting everything in a basket. This big burly man said, 'Pick that up, kid, and put it in the basket.' So I got a handful of liver. Then that night we went in, and had liver for supper."

I was a kid then. I wouldn't eat it. But after a time I did start eating it. Then I had an experience of a man who walked into the blade of a propeller. It chopped him up like hamburger. I helped to gather him up, and I struck the liver again. Now, it didn't bother me too bad, but then a couple nights later we had liver, and the smell of it gave me a psychological block."

So that's how people develop their likes and dislikes . . . we all do. There's also a certain amount of things we're born with that don't agree with us. Now, Lima beans are another one. When I was in Africa, during the second World War, we were stuck between the Germans and the Americans at our hospital. Every time they would hit our hospital, they would clean us out of everything but the dried beans. So we took them and ground them up., and put them in the spout of the armored truck. Then we'd race the engine until it got real hot, and then we'd open the petcock—sometimes we'd have to use a wire and what run out we'd use for coffee. We also ground it up and made bread out of it; we made soup out of it. The patients would have starved to death if we didn't do something. We kept them alive until the Americans pushed the Germans back. But now, I can't stand those beans.

We had a bunch of the German soldiers in the different wards preaching about how bad the Jews were, so, to get back at them, we'd send this Yiddish boy who spoke German in to talk to them. He'd ask them what was wrong, what they needed and so forth, and write it down. After a while we told them that this boy was Jewish, and they shut up like clams. They didn't want to talk to him anymore. They even throw things at him, This young man didn't do anything to them, but they were so brainwashed about how bad the Jews were. finally we made them come around by just letting them go and starve. If they wanted something, they would have to politely request it from the young Jewish boy in their own language.

Let's get back to medicine. Now, in the hospital, all us students would help each other out. To learn to listen to the heart, we'd take a pillow and put It against the chest. You put your head on the pillow and you can hear. But they were feather pillows, not rubber pillows.

We had more concrete talks about lots of things than they do now, it seems. We'd get sick people with nerve conditions and have them sit at the head of the class while we'd pop questions at them. They would sit maybe only ten or fifteen minutes, and the rest of that hour would be taking what was said and ripping it up and down. The Professor would see what we knew, make us write and collect the papers and so forth. The book work was clearly secondary, while you spent your days with the patients and the professors?"

We used to have a boy who would do shorthand. He would charge us 10 cents a week to make up the copies. He had one of these roller printer machines."

AT: I smile and say, "You don't have any of those copies left, do you?"

TM: They would be something. I had a lot of things. Right before we went overseas I was sent down to Walter Reed hospital in Washington, and I came out of there with books of writings--You'll have to close your ears on this one--about my teacher in X-ray. This man had been in on the X-ray business from the very beginning. He had several children, but his penis was withered up like my little finger. He had one hand with one finger on one side, and one hand with one finger on the other side. The rest was eaten off by X-rays. His bones were practically showing." He finally died from it. He started before we knew too much about them.

Now, his name was Fuch, and you called him that. We tried to put an s at the end of it, and call him Mr. Fukes or something, but he'd make you say it the way you didn't dare to every time. You'd be in the little room doing the X-ray's , and he'd put his hand up between the view box and say, 'Move it, not enough A.M. and so forth." You had to do each print over and over until it was right. Some of us boys got smart after a little while, you see, and we'd try to change prints with each other, but he'd look and say, 'This one I saw a few days ago,' and catch us every time. You'd get a demerit for it.

We also had red lights In the hall, and if one of them went on, you got a demerit. It indicated that you had turned the machine on with the door open. 10 demerits and you were out of the program.

We also carried a little tape in your pocket. Every night that had to be taken out and measured, and he had ways worked out to figure out how much radiation you had gotten. If you had too much dosage, you didn't work for four or five days.

You see, we were learning from his early mistakes. We learned all the details, and all the insights he had come up with at the expense of his life. Not too much paperwork. you actually did the work. I gobbled it up, because that was my way of learning. To me that was everything.

TM: Then, years later, when I taught microbiology at Hahnemann, I met my wife-to-be. She was a student. This was about 1934 or 35.

TM: India was in 1932. This man named Armour had a big home on North Broad street in Philadelphia. It was beautiful. It had a big solarium where you grow plants— I guess you'd call it a greenhouse now. They had waterfalls in there, beautiful orchids and flowers. I'd love to be able to get a place where I could raise orchids. I've always wanted to do that. I sometimes say they're like me. They have to live on some tree bark, or bushes or something like that, and I live off my patients. When I'm not busy, I get stiff, tired and hard. When I'm busy, it's great.

Those are my dreams. They don't really meant anything. Anyhow, we used to go up there because he had a daughter who was suffering from something they couldn't figure out. She had many different symptoms, and sometimes she'd black out and be out for days. Some of the students were allowed to come up there and voice opinions. I used to go up with a buddy of mine who is now passed away.

Finally, Mr. Armour brought over from India this Sikh doctor who worked with Mahatma Ghandi. He was one of Ghandi's right hand men. How this came about was that when Ghandi was here in this country, Mr. Armour had talked with him and told him the trouble. Before he left, Mr. Armour gave him his address and asked him to see if he could do anything about getting this herb doctor here. So he had him brought over.

The A.M.A. found out about it, and they raised cain. They didn't want him to have a visa to be let in. They tried everything to stop him. But finally, Mr. Armour got him in. But somehow they got police around the house who wouldn't let that man go out on the street. They watched the house.

TM: Oh yes they were. Something like this was the kind of thing Morris Fishbein, the head of the A.M.A., would go after. He even made the statement that he'd have this man by the neck.

TM: Yes. The F.D.A wasn't anything in those days, but he had the government working for him. Fishbein was working out of New York, and he had power all over the country. Anyhow, the girl was doing very well on the Indian therapies, and we were in there one day talking about how we could get this man out of the house without being arrested.

What they probably would have done is grabbed him and put him on a slow boat and let him ride in the cargo hole going home. So we got kidding, and I mentioned that I had a car called an Auburn which looked like a canoe on four wheels. In back of your seat, it came to a point, and you could keep things there. So I said, 'I can get him out of here. Mr. Armour,' and he said, 'You're crazy. These guys are watching everyone going in and out.' But I said that first we had to establish that I would pull it into the solarium every day and park it because I was afraid to park it on the street. After they got used to this, they wouldn't be so strict in watching me. Behind the seat was built so that you had to remove the seat to look in there, and we could say it was just solid if they searched. To get him in there, we'd have to pull the seat out and let him crawl in.

We did this for about a week, and they got so they'd see us going in and out in this yellow roadster all the time. We were just a couple of kids, and they got careless. This one day, out of the clear blue sky, it was near time for this certain ship to sail from New York, and they asked us if we could get him up there in time. We said sure, and the next day after we pulled into the solarium, we got him up in this space. We had to arrange his head so he wouldn't die from the exhaust. We came out of the house like we usually did, and waved to the guys guarding. We drove down to Broad street and 1st, turned around and started for the port.

Somehow they found out about us. They had cars out looking for us near the Holland tunnel, but we went across on the ferry. We got across, and pulled up by the ship where we saw they had a guard posted. So we parked nearby, and I went up and started talking to him and got him moved around. My friend got the guy out and sneaked him up on the ship. After that they couldn't do anything. He was free, and he got good accommodations home. He sobbed and gave us all his blessings and so forth, and he wrote a note on some paper saying, 'When you get a chance, you come to my country, you're so broadminded, we'd like to show you some things.'

So, a few months later, when we got out of school, we went over to India, the two of us. It didn't cost us a dime. We worked stroking the ship for passage for awhile, but they wouldn't allow it.

TM: About 19 or 20.

TM: Sure. It was only two years. In those days most of your doctors came out of high school, and if you came from a family of doctors like me, you went right in to medical school.

Now, our ship stopped off in England, went to France, and from there we went across the continent. We went with Ghandi's people; they drove us around and fed us. When we went into India , we stopped at several towns, and at one of them we were introduced to Ghandi. He talked to us in English. He was very nice, and he told us we had to sit outside where he had a platform with several steps around it. Very seldom did they bother with women in those days. There were just a bunch of us males there, sitting outside with him. Every once in a while a woman would come and wipe our brows off or moisten our lips, but we weren't allowed to drink water while we were there. Some of the men would pass out from heat, and they would carry them in.

Ghandi would sit up there silently day after day. To break it down, we would come in to the ashram at night and he would talk to us. There were four or five of us in a group. He'd ask us what we got that day. You see, during the day there would be hardly a word spoken. It was all mental. Then he would tell us if what we got was right, and what it was he was communicating with his mind to us. He was teaching by telepathy.

TM: Yes, he wanted to see if you could receive with your mind, and how much you could give out. Now sometimes we did this with the Sikh doctor also.

TM:Yes. The students came from all over the world. I came because I was always into everything. I went to Germany and saw Benjamin Lust. I saw Bernard McFadden in New York and used to walk with him on Sunday mornings. We spent the whole day outside walking and talking, usually carrying a bag of oranges. At eighty years of age he jumped out of an airplane and his parachute didn't open.

Bernard McFadden was quite a well known healer, one of the most famous naturopaths in the United States."

TM: How to read auras, how to touch heal, all the ancient healing arts. We were given healing beads, sets of beads that you use just like a rosary. You would say your different prayers on them. I also have some Ganges water sealed in copper, reputed to have healing power.

My wife Eleanor at first didn't believe Ghandi did any healing. They didn't talk about it much in the books. He was trained as a lawyer. But all the different books give different versions of him. He went deeply into healing because of his wife's sickness.

Ghandi was the type of man who covered everything. He knew the so-called legitimate medical arts as well as the others. He was a universal man. He would even argue with Kings and Queens if he didn't believe in what they were doing.

My wife is fond of pointing out that the only thing in his life he regretted is that he didn't treat his wife as well as he could. It caused him a great deal of sadness. He travelled all over the world, and his wife would stay put. When he would come home, he would even accuse her of looking at another man, that sort of thing. This was his only fallacy."

These personal and cultural things are why healing someone close to you is so hard to do. All through history, if you look, many healers have not been able to heal their own families as well as they could heal others

TM: About two months. They didn't let you stay there too long.

TM: No. You had to practice it afterwards. The mind needs time or it will close down.

TM: Yes, ever since I was young. When I joined the Army and quit medicine, you remember, I cracked up my plane. I was laying there in the snow, one area of the snow became entirely blue. I laid there injured for days. And the Spirit said to me that I had to get back to healing. Now, I tell that to people and they don't believe it. Ask Eleanor what happened to her, when I almost lost her and brought her back. She saw the blue light, like daylight, but she didn't go through the gate. For me there was no gate, because I suppose I wasn't supposed to die. It just told me to go back. Once you go through the gate you don't come back.

It happened twice. When I was in the second World War, the same thing happened to me when I was injured. I wouldn't dare tell anybody, except my first wife, Hanna. My belly was injured. Instead of being laid up for months and months, I got better pretty fast, and was able to come home. In about six months I was able to take patients.

You see, people experience going through a gate when they die.

Its some sort of division. I've had several patients with this experience, telling me as they lay there. The ones who live have been up to the gate, hollering and holding on to the gate and crying and so forth, but none of then went through. The ones who go through . . . well, like I said, once you go through the gate you don't come back.

After my experience in the Army Air Force, I came back home here. I worked around here, and saw a lot of my grandfathers patients. He pestered me about going back into practice, because as a child I had worked around the office, and most people knew me. So I started out again, and I built up a practice with him. You know he lived to be 94, and his brother lived to be 93. Once they called me back to Hahnemann to lecture around 1934.

TM: They didn't. I only lasted one semester there. They still had a few classes, until about 1939. After that I opened an office in Philadelphia, on 16th and Sansom street, on the corner. It was in the Horn and Hardart building. I took care of Mr. Hardart, and my whole family knew him. I think I was paying about 15 dollars a month for rent and electricity on the second floor where I had four rooms set up. I worked with an old homeopath, Dr. Shute. We both stayed there for a couple of years, but the pressure was on me to get out of there and come back up here to Sellersville. We finally split up, and he moved his office to Chestnut street."

One important thing happened to my when I was lecturing on microbiology at Hahnemann. I met my wife, Hanna. She was a student there. I didn't know her from a bag of beans, but one night I heard this commotion up in the gallery. I stopped to listen for a few minutes, until it quieted down, and went on lecturing. After the session was over, a couple of the boys came to me and said, 'Hey. You know Hanna Bender?' I said, 'No, is she a student? I seem to remember her name on the roster.' They said, 'She says she's going to marry you.' I said, 'That's the first I knew about it.'

Soon after that she came up to the podium where I was talking, and she started asking questions. These guys went away snickering. Of course she didn't say anything. I don't think she knew what they had told me. She asked me some damn fool questions."

"After class was out, I went over to the restaurant and sat down to have something to eat. She came over and sat next to me

We started talking, and this became a daily occurrence after a while. One day I approached her. I said, 'I understand you're going to marry me.' She got red, got up and walked away. About six months later we were married."

TM: That's right. this was in '34 or '35. She finished school, but she wasn't able to take her examination, because they were still fighting it then. They told her if she went back to school and studied more she could have it and be an allopath. But she wanted to be a homeopath. Her father was a doctor in Russia. He came to this country and couldn't get his license, so he became a manufacturer of ladies footwear. I wasn't welcome at their house because they were Jewish and I was Gentile. So I brought her home. You want to hear that part of it too?"

TM: Well, we decided we were going to get married. One of the doctors in the hospital was Jewish--Goldfein was his name. I was talking to him, because in Philadelphia you had to have an examination before marriage. I got asking him about other places, like Wilmington, Del. where they weren't so strict. When I told him I was going to marry a Jewish girl, he got all excited and said 'Oh, that's a different story. Her family won't accept you, 1 guess. I'll make arrangements in Wilmington. When do you have some spare time?'

I said, 'The only time I have is on Saturday.' So the next day he got ahold of me and told me he had a Rabbi who who would marry us. The next day he took us to the train station, got us to the license bureau in Wilmington, and then down we went to the synagogue. The Rabbi took us into the back and he asked her if she was sure she wanted to marry a gentile, and after she said yes, he turned to me and said, 'You know your wife has the say in what religion the children are. Are you sure you want to marry her?' This and that . . . you know. To make a long story short, we got married."

"We got the train back to Philadelphia. I took her back to grandpop's. We walked in, and grandpop was walking down the hallway. He grumbled because I was so late, and he said you got work here to do. I said, 'Pops, I want you to meet my wife. He looked at her , and he looked at me, and said, 'You had to go to Philadelphia to marry a #@*$# Jew. Of course she burst out crying. He said, 'You're no grandson of mine.' I said, 'Fine.'

"In the meantime, my grandmother and my mother came out of the kitchen. They saw her and they heard part of it. She was getting ready to run out of the house, when they grabbed her and took her into the kitchen to calm her. I said to my grandfather, 'Look, I want some money from you. I've worked for you all these years, and I'm entitled to it. I'm not going to work for you any more.' He just handed me a list of people and said, ~These are the ones you've got to go and see now. I said, I'm not going anywhere. He said, ~You'll go and see them now. You'll do it because you're a doctor. That's how much faith he had in doctoring. The consequence was that I went and kissed my wife--I still hadn't eaten since morning--and I went out to work.

I didn't get back until one o'clock in the morning, because I had a couple of tough cases. I was so dog tired that I couldn't walk upstairs. I crawled up them on my hands and knees to the third floor. I pushed open the door, and my wife sat up and laughed at me, cause I was on my hands and knees."

"After that my grandfather wouldn't recognize my wife. He wouldn't let her in the office. He told her she belonged in the kitchen, and not in the office.

This went on until the birth of our first child, which was about a year and a half later, which proved I didn't have to marry her because she was pregnant. Hanna insisted on telling grandpop herself. She got dressed, went downstairs and said, 'I'm pregnant.' He said,'Good for you. She said ,'Its going to be a boy, and I'm going to name him Thomas, the same as you. He said, 'Your fathers name was Thomas, and your husbands name is Thomas, so you're not naming him after me.' She said, 'Yes I am. I'm going to put it down on paper that its named after you,you stubborn Dutchman.'

They carried on like kids after that, and when the baby was born, he was tossing it around. It was a complete reconciliation.

A month or two later we lost the child, and he took it really hard. We had another one, and that one died too. Right before she went into the change of life, years later, we had Tommy. Of course, she was a Jewish mother, and she idolized him and took care him more that twenty years today. I had no say in how he was raised. We went along during this time, and she built up her own practice.

Dr. Thomas Marsteller: In the early 1940's Mr Dirkir came to Philadelphia and brought some of his colonic machines with him. We went down to see what he was doing, and I fell in love with what he was doing. It was doing a lot of good for a lot of people. He came from out in Oregon or California, and he was a master plumber. He couldn't introduce this machine on the market, because he wasn't an M.D. He was looking for recognition. He had written to the college, and Hahnemann decided they would look into it. Up to this time they had never done anything like this, only enemas.

When I saw that they were giving talks about it, I went down that day. He told us and showed us diagrams; I threw a lot of questions to him. After the meeting I told him how much I liked it, and what I thought I could do with it. He told me he had to see what the hospital would do first. They were going to buy the four machines he brought with him. Actually, they never used them, and just put them in the basement. Anyway, to make a long story short, Dirkir stayed here about a month and showed me all about it. We brought a machine back to Quakertown and set it up. Hanna did the women, and I did the men."

TM: Yeah.

TM: That's right, more than forty years, but these newcomers don't know what they're doing. Just the other day we got a call from a fellow who wanted a colonic for two hours. My wife said absolutely not. We never give colonics for more than one hour. He told us he had been somewhere where they did it that long. Eleanor had to tell her that this could cause problems.

TM: The right way is 15 minutes on the left side, 15 minutes on the back, and 15 minutes on the side again. The whole procedure on the table is 45 minutes. Beyond that your rectum begins to squeeze, and its annoying and irritating. It can cause a lot of trouble.

Right now these new machines they're putting out are causing a lot of trouble. People could be dying from them because they introduce oxygen into the water going into your intestines. This shrinks up the membranes. This can paralyze the intestines. That oxygen can go through tissue, and maybe penetrate further. Just like gas pains. People don't realize just how far gas can travel in the body.

TM: I don't know where they got the idea from. Somebody out on the West coast developed them. But the Dirkir machine does not do this. Like I said, Dirkir was a master plumber. You can't have too much pressure and so forth. This is a very delicate thing. I've had cases where people are stopped up for weeks, with bad intestines, liver and so forth, and this machine cleans them right up. Its done wonders for our patients over the years.

TM: It just gets rid of your debris, the toxins that get trapped up in the colon. Your intestines is where your digestion takes place not your stomach, which is more or less just a grinder. Your small intestines mixes the chyme, and the blood goes in and gets a fresh supply of food through osmosis, and takes it back along its channels to wherever it came from. Blood is like a truck. But it only lives for a short time. It would be like you driving across country a couple of times and that was it.

TM: Yes. That's where your body heat goes. The blood comes in and around all the small venials that go up against the colon, That's why if you get hit in the colon, you can go out like a light, or even die if it gets ruptured. If the venials can't absorb anything because of the shock, that's what can happen."

Now, by the time you reach the large intestine, there's nothing left to go into the blood. You have two sphincter valves , one in the rectum, and one that is up about four inches. When a certain amount of pressure gets on that inner valve, it opens and fills up that space in front of the second valve, which you can control with your mind. You hold it until you can get to the bathroom. Urination is the same; you can control it, unless the pressure gets to be too much.

Now, nobody eats perfect food. Its just not in the cards. Every one of us will snitch or cheat. Low quality foods get through your system, and the colon picks it up, and this is where you get your problems. Just take a look at the chart I have over my colonic machine and you can see some sorry pictures of so-called normal colons.

We don't always get immediate results from the colonics. Nothing in healing is immediate. These people that do this fast healing—like those preachers who go around and heal people on the head and tells them they are cured— are only kidding the public. Nature does not work that way. She takes her good old time. I would say that nature is a she; nature is a woman. She can get very stubborn at times, like with cancers. They won't heal because there is no air, no oxygen in there. If you don't take your time and encourage her, you'll have troubles."

TM: It should. We just had a man in here who hasn't gone for two weeks. We'll have to have him in here every day. This guy is in bad condition. You sit near him and he smells, because the toxins are going out through his pores. Your body gets rid of it one way or the other. That's what we're talking about. This is why breath smells. That isn't usually from the teeth, it's from down lower. Nothing gives you gas unless it all stops moving. The digestion has to keep moving.

Dr. Thomas Marsteller: Well., I would have to go back to my great grandfathers brothers. They were supposed to have had it, the whole seven of them. When I was a small boy, I didn't know about all of these things. It wasn't told to me. But when going out to the animals, the horses we had, I could walk up to any of them and sort of take care of them. I knew what was wrong with them."

TM: Without being trained. Then there were my playmates. I remember one time when a boy hurt his arm pretty badly. He broke it. I set it for him, and got whipped for it. Even my people couldn't under stand how I could do it without being trained.

I saw things often. About a week before my grandfather dropped dead in his office, I saw this white light over him. He just looked like he WAS just a substance, like his soul had already left his body. I didn't tell him that, didn't want to upset him. When he died, it was no surprise to me.

With many of my early patients, right after I went to school, I could just see what was wring with them. Earlier yet, when I used to make up the pills and drive the buggy for my grandfather, I just knew what to do. There were no veterinarians, and we had to take care of the animals along with the people. Many times I would go out to a sick animal and just put my hands on it. Of course, I couldn't put my hands on a sick farmer's wife."

I remember once, only once, I told a woman that they were going to have a baby, and it would be dead. I got my backside wailed good and proper by my grandfather. This was when I was eight or nine years old. "

TM: That's right. Now, a week or so after the baby I just told you about died, my grandfather asked me how I knew about it. I said, 'I don't know. Is that being a doctor?' He laughed and said yes.

ATM: He had it. But that was all he said to me at that time. In the Army--let me jump ahead here--our X-ray machine broke one time, and the men were being brought in on litters with bullet holes and so forth. Now, the bullets don't always go straight in; they can strike a bone and zig-zag. I had the ability to stand by the patients and mark where the bullet was with some lipstick from the nurses. Most of the time I was right. I could just tell where that bullet was at.

Its been through my whole life that I could do these things. I've never bragged about it. I don't believe it's my place to brag. I don't go around; I don't want to be on television. Its really not honest, and this is why some of these things happen where they predict things after they have already happened, like that gal who predicted Reagan would be shot. I predicted he would get into trouble when he was first elected, and also in July. Why do these things come to me? I don't know. There is no logical explanation.for it.

TM: I have all of it. There are others, like going out of body. I just use it as I go along. I don't tell anyone about it. People will come in here and say, 'What is my aura today?' I say, 'I don't know.' Then they say, 'But somebody told me you could do it.' I just look at them and say, 'Well, I don't make a practice of it, and I don't say it will be 100%.' I prefer to belittle myself rather than boast about it, because I think its something that is very sacred, and shouldn't be used except to heal--not for the stage.

TM: Its been the same way all my life. I've always used it. I don't know when I didn't use it."

TM: Well it was unusual how I got over there. But he wasn't the only one, or the first one. I'd been to Benjamin Lust and a couple of others before him. But Ghandi was really sort of akin to it all. But, he was also one who minimized it. He never bragged about his accomplishments. Even some of the books that have been written about him don't give the true story as I know it. But I'm not going to go and argue about it with them.

I don't know how else to tell you to explain my ability. When I was a child I had a puppy dog. who dislocated his leg. My grandfather said, 'You're so smart. What are you going to do for your dog?' We called him Shep. So I took ahold of his leg and shook it like you do a whip. He cried a bit, but he didn't limp any more.

Now these days, when somebody finds out that a doctor is reading auras and using healing energy and all that, it would be considered very strange to most people.

TM: It was considered normal. We've changed our way of living now. People were much healthier in those days. Today look how many people they lose because of one word— cancer. Cancer is an ambiguous word. It covers a hundred different diseases.

TM: Not exactly, but it was allowed that some people has these things. Also, don't forget that the homeopath is trained to use his eyes, his nose and his hands. So if they walked into a house, they would say 'Who's upstairs sick?' They could smell the odor.

I can smell when a person is going to die. We had one die the other day, a woman. She wouldn't eat, she was so depressed. She was imagining that everybody was after her money and so forth. I predicted it a couple of weeks earleier. I didn't want to treat her. She was bent on self destruction. Her aura was very dirty and very black.

From my own experience I know that different people see auras at different levels. My ability is different than yours. I not sure if I had it as a child. I might have had it and forgot it, because we all have a tendency to see things that aren't there. Some people will see a flash of light on your chest or leg , while others will see it running around you like a race track. You read across from the outside going in.

TM: Its always there, but you have to turn it off or you'll go crazy. It's a drain to use it all the time. It makes you real tired if you do it too long.

TM: Theres a lot of green and some dark red. There's also some orange, green, and dark blue

TM: You must be getting hungry. You're energy is at a low level right now. The red is dull and dark, and the blue.

TM: Yeah. Its circling all around you. The heat spots on the body are also important. I've had patients ask me whats what with the red spots on their bodies, meaning the heat spots.

TM: Right, the heat from feeling. As far as the aura goes, some will have three or four colors, and some will have ten. It all depends on what your condition is. You can't set it like a cash register, and decide what you want. Another thing. Auras change twenty times in an hour. Your body picks up litttle things and throws them away.

But if a person has an aura out only about two inches, he's not going to fluctuate too far from that. The person whose aura is out a foot might fluctuate between, say, nine and fifteen inches.

Of course, if its that only two inches he's not going to be alive. If it goes down close to nothing, he's going to die. Sometimes too much aura might means death too. Each color has its own interpretation. I've seen all kinds of books by people who interpret the different colors, and their colors and my colors don't agree a lot of times. Its just the same as people coming in here who have gone to a different homeopath who gave them one set of herbs , and when they come here they complain that I gave em a different set. It all depends upon what your vision is, and what comes out. No two people are the same."

TM: I was just looking. She has very flat colors, mostly in the browns. She doesn't have a red in there."

TM: She's down. But it can change at any time As I told you before, a storm can change it, hunger will change it. See, its nothing stationary. It's constantly on the move. The only time its stationary is when you're dead.

TM: Yeah. It may show up a lot or a litttle at that particular time. Sort of like a blemish.

TM: Not that I ever knew. But of course I'm in the type of business where you won't see many of 'em.

As I told you, there are no two people who have the same aura for ten minutes; theres that much variety. Each person's aura is as different as their personality. Its like a record. You have your waves in there, but only a good needle can pick up exactly what its saying. This isn't new. It goes back to the ancients. The ancient healers didn't call themselves doctors, but they were healers. In Europe today some of them are still called healers. In the past times the women were usually the healers. In foreign countries, its still like that some places.

Women hollering for rights, its good. But woman by herself won't get along any better than man by himself. If a man gets divorced to go to another woman, most likely he'll find that she's the same as the one he's divorcing. Like attracts like.

I very seldom talk with a patient about these things. Its the same as smelling death."

TM: There are three flowers that, if I get their odor, any one of the three, It means death"

TM: Carnation is the biggest one. With that you usually die within a day or two. Lilac and Gardenia are the other two. I don't know why. I couldn't give you an answer."

TM: Might have been the same flowers. I've talked with people who are psychic, and most of them only get a musky odor or something like that. With me its different. The carnation is 24 hours or so, the lilac is four or five days, and the gardenia is about a week.

I'm not just saying this. I've walked into the houses and had it happen. The first experience I remember happened when I was about 18 or 19 years old, going around for grandpop. I walked into this old farmhouse and there was this terrible smell of carnations coming from the second floor. When I went up the stairs I seen how bad she was, and gave her something to make her feel good, but by the time I got back to the office, they had sent for someone to come and pronounce her dead. In those days they buried you out in the back lot.

Don't forget that one thing ties in with the other. Everything in the universe is double. It takes two to tango. That goes for everything. Marriage is the same way. If one don't work in the marriage, the marriage don't last. If the wife denies the man and doesn't give him that little bit of love he needs, she'll get health problems. The same with the man. If he keeps to himself, and doesn't accept the love or doesn't give love, he has troubles. There is nothing in this world without a reason or a rhythm. People wonder where I get these little sayings. They just come out of my mouth.

TM: Not two many. I was once asked to come to the United Brethren church and preach there. I told them I wouldn't know what to preach. I went to one of the meetings, though, where they had this famous evangelist woman there. She was in a robe up on the podium talking. When I walked in the door, I got a slap across the face by a hand. Not physical, you see, but otherwise. I almost went back on my ear to the floor.

The people around me grabbed me and said, 'What's the matter?' I said, 'I can't go in there! I'm forbidden to go in there.' They couldn't understand that. I walked outside, and someone came up to see me and asked what happened. I said, 'She doesn't want me in there.' He said, 'She's never met you.' I said, 'I know that, but she slapped me across the face.' He answered, 'I saw her there. She didn't move her hand.' I said, 'You don't understand, buddy.' It was cold, but it was like a real hand. It stunned me. That was one of the funniest things that ever happened to me.

After the meeting was over they asked me to go and speak to her. I went up there, but I could feel a push. They introduced us, and she looked at me, and said, 'I don't know what to say. I feel as though you are pushing me in the face. I said, 'That's what happened to me. I was out there and somebody slapped me. She said, 'There was nobody near you. I saw you come in. I said, 'Didn't you feel yourself twist a bit?' She said, 'A little bit, yeah, but it was nothing.' I walked away from her and never saw her again.

TM: Evidently she wasn't all she cracked up to be. She didn't want me in there to hear her. It was a defensive action, but done at a psychic level.

TM: In Hahnemann the classes lingered on because they had some refresher courses and things like that. It was around 1940 that we came in on the Dierker machine I told you about earlier. At that time they were still doing it, but by that time most of your teachers were allopaths. The other men were being weeded out.

TM: Don't you kid yourself. They were not. According to the M.D.'s they were wiped out, but there was still some of it going on yet. The Women's Medical College of Philadelphia was in existence until about ten years ago. Hershey is still supposed to be doing homeopathic, but they only recently switched over to allopathic. Hershey isn't too old, but it left for the homeopathic society.

TM: But they don't teach it yet. We've got a few new schools: one in Florida, one in Arizona, one in Oregon, and one in California. There might be one in Tennessee by now; they were talking about starting one. There are about six states now in the process of trying to get it back. They didn't fire all the homeopathic teachers out of Hahnemann even as late as 1935, 1936, and 1937. I taught one semester in about 1935.

TM: Yeah. 1 guess that's what I was supposed to do. I met her there, and she later went off to the Philadelphia Naturopathic School. She also had a degree from the Pennsylvania Chiropractic College.

TM: About 1930 or 1931.

TM: Both were the same then.

TM: After I left Hahnemann I applied for my certificate to practice. I had to go clear out to Harrisburg to take the test. We stayed overnight there, because it was quite a long test. We had oral exams, written exams, and demonstrations. Then we went before the medical board. They tried to get me to go back and take the straight medical, which would have been another six months at Hahnemann. But I wouldn't do it. Everyone said I was a stubborn Dutch, but I got my license.

When I came back from the service, they had decided to cancel my licence again. This was the second World War after I had been injured. I went to see governor Martin. I was in the American Legion, and they told me I should go see him, and talk to him about it, because I now had no license to practice. They were still trying to get me to go back to school. It wound up I went to see him, and he agreed to take it before the legislators.

What they finally did was to set up the Chiropractic schools, and I was instrumental in that. There were no Chiropractic licenses either by that time. There was another fellow by the name of Alfred Smith who went with me to see the Governor, and we went up several times, and then finally they passed a law that the Chiropractors would have to go to school . They already had about three or four schools in Pennsylvania, like to one at Beaver College, and they then told me I had to go. So I went.

When I showed up at Beaver to register, the dean was Mrs. Harkins. It was a girls college. When I went in for my interview with her and some of the medical board, they told me they didn't have enough professors to take care of all these new people who wanted to come, They said that in order to have classes, I would have to teach. Then they let me teach microbiology. I stayed there and taught for about two years until they could come up with some local fellows to teach. My life is so complicated, but I ended up practicing with a chiropractors license.

It wasn't just me. A lot of the naturopathic doctors became chiropractic. Those of us that didn't were the bastards of the profession because they wouldn't give in to them. All of us were a thorn in the medical side. They disowned us all the time. You had to be very careful.in treating. They tried to take everything away from you, such as your ability to sign a death certificate. You had to go to the coroner to get him to make it out for you . . . all extra work. The regular M.D's were always given a few sheets to make out their own. The chiropractors were different. If they had someone die on them, they went to jail a lot of times.

TM: No. I fought them every step of the way, though. I was president of the Chiropractors Association for a few terms at the beginning.

At that time and before, they would send a medical inspector around, and after you treated him and put your hand out for pay, they would nail you. They would give you a citation and haul you into court. You'd pay your fine and go back and open your office again. That was a common thing. They did it to anyone who had any kind of practice. But with me, I never listened to them no matter what they said. I was my own master.

TM: I've always been a homeopath and a naturopath. Homeopath and naturopath are so close together its hard to separate them. The homeopath/naturopath believes in giving you the least amount of any drug, while the allopath gives you the most he can give you. The chiropractor believes that the nerves are the king of the body, and the osteopath believes that blood is king of the body. The osteopath and the chiropractor adjust differently as a result. What I use here is a cross breed between the two.

TM: No. They usually wouldn't do that because we had too much training and so forth. A lot of the older men switched over to regular medicine. They would go back and study some more, come out M.D.'s then not use it. Years ago they said that homeopathic was the back door to medicine. "

TM: Absolutely. We had the first hospital in the country, too. It was up in Allentown. It wasn't the University hospital, It was Philadelphia General. Then your Pennsylvania teaching college came along

AT: It looks to me that you lived through forty years when the whole society around you was saying that what you were doing was not right. But now its come full tern around, and the younger generation is beginning to believe in the same ways you always have.

TM: Its only been about ten years.

TM: Well, we both had our own individual patients. We both took the patients as they came. Very early in my life, when I was with grandpop, they used to say that ours was the court of last resort, meaning that after the patients had been all over, they would come to me. We would adjust, give body massage, colonics, herbs, take care of wounds---anything. We were general practitioners, country doctors. Hanna took mostly women, although she had a few men. If a patient started with her, they stayed with her.

TM: Well, we had a round table with other homeopaths, where we would get together with a number of doctors to go over patients. Being out here, there weren't many though. We had to move around so much between one place and another, that we would carry all our pills with us. Hot water, sheets and bandages you generally carted with you. You would have a separate bag with surgical tools, and when you got to the house you would lay them on the table and do what you had to do.

AT: What happened when World War II broke out?

TM: I went around first and tried to join. I went to the Army first and tried to reinstate myself in flying, but they told me my discharge said that I wasn't allowed to fly again. Then they told me to wait a couple of months and they wouldn't be able to touch me, because I would then be over-age. They didn't want me because I only had two or three months to go to be 38. But lo and behold, about a month before I turned 38 they nailed me. They sent me down to Maryland to basic training. But they didn't recognize that I was a doctor. I kept telling them I wanted to go and do medicine, but to them I was just a plain G.I. So when they turned out the lights in the barracks I took off. I hopped the train, got back here, and started taking care of people; I had a couple of bad cases. I was home about a week when two M.P.'s came to the door and arrested me. I told them I was a doctor and could they wait until I finished with my patients.

They were fairly nice fellows, and they waited. My wife pleaded with them, but they said they had to do their orders. They took me back down their and put me in prison. In the morning they took me up before the judge advocate. He was another soldier, and I told him I had been in the service, and I only had two months to go to be ineligible. He said, you should have taken care of that at the examining station. He told me to go back to work until they figured out what they were going to do with me. "

So I went back to the barracks with this guard, and got my things straightened out, and then, for duty, they put me out digging ditches. My hands started blistering, and I quit.

The sergeant got after me, but I asked him if he would work with hands like that. He said, 'Oh my God , no,' and he took me up to the dispensary. At the dispensary they didn't know what to do with my hands, So I told them what I wanted , but they wouldn't give it to me. Instead they put me back in the cell again.

A couple of days later they let me out, and they took me to the kitchen to wash pots and pans. They said that that wouldn't hurt my hands. So I refused to do it. This second lieutenant came over and asked me why, and I showed him my hands. He said he didn't blame me, and he sent me back to the barracks. First thing you know they had an M.P. after me again, and they took me in, looked at my papers and finally let me go. When it came time for payroll, I answered as a private. On the isle across from us the officers were answering payroll. While I was waiting, I heard my name called out as Lieutenant Marsteller. I walked over, and when they saw me in the privates suit, they wanted to know how come. They got the fellows from the other table, and found my name over there also. They wanted to know how come I was drawing two pays. It turned out I was listed a second time as a doctor.

Well, they had quite a time getting it straight. It took them a couple of months. When I was overseas, they finally put me to work in a hospital in England. I finally got back to what I was supposed to be doing.

When we got into Africa, you see, I was hit with an 88. 1 was cutting a mans arm off, which was wedged between a tank and a track. He had tried to jump out of the tank— it was moving—-and he hit a slick spot and fell down. I put the tourniquet on and started cutting, and I don't remember what happened after. I don't know if the man survived or what.

I had seven operations before I was discharged. I only have half a stomach and port of my intestines. That's my story there. It was months before I got back . Hanna was practicing, and I started to take a couple of patients.

About every three months they would call me to the Veterans hospital and want the stick a scope down me to see how much healing I had done. Finally I refused to go, and they cut my disability in half. Originally I was getting 100% disability."

TM: Once in a while I get a little pain in there, especially if I get upset. My nurse and ward doctor had a bet going over whether I would pull through or not. She was going to buy him a new uniform cap if I didn't make it, and he was going to buy her one if I did. Of course, she won her cap. I had another nurse, her name was Miss Slaughter. I heard after that Miss Slaughter married the officer who lost the hat bet. She used to write to us, but I haven't heard from her in years.

TM: I worked longshore, I worked scrubbing cars, and like I told you before, I worked in in wool mill for a bit. There was a chemical company in Phily where they made allopathic drugs, and I went in there and asked for a job. I told them I was a homeopath, which was all right with them. We got talking, and I talked myself into the job. I had never driven a car before, and they had a model T Ford. So I drove this thing down to the port onto the wharf, and couldn't get the damn thing turned around. So I left the car sitting there, and went over and called them up and told them there car was there. They told me they would pick it up. The next day they called me up and wanted to hire me again. Can you believe it. I was afraid to go out of the house. That was the only job where I got into trouble. Another time I was going to New York for some thing, and the bus driver got a heart attack. It was night and nobody knew what to do with him. So, finally, I laid him out in the isle, and then drove the bus into Newark until we came to a bus stop. They took him away in an ambulance.

In the depression, things were very bad. My practice was slow, and I had to go out and work other jobs. You did anything you could. One time I got a job in New York at Bellvue mental hospital. I still didn't make enough money, so I went and got another job at Knickerbocker Ice Company. I was working with an engineer making ice. All I had to do was watch the ice when it came out and store it and load it onto to the ice trucks.

But then they got into a price war with Ruble Ice Company and a couple of other outfits. So one day the boss came to me and told me that if we didn't get more ice through, and stop those other guys from delivering to our customers, there was going to be trouble. He said he was going to hire a hatchet gang.

I asked what that was, and he told me I'd find out. The job was to drive these four Latin guys around--two from South America and two from Portugul--to where the other ice trucks were. We would drive up beside them, and these guys would jump out and put their ice picks in their tires. By the time they got new tires, the ice was melted. We were usually chased, and mostly I went as a guard for our own trucks.

TM: Yeah . . . a lot of times. And then get sick again and come back again. That must be because of the way the mind works. If they don't believe that you can really do it, they'll find a way to attribute whatever happens, good or bad to something else, even if a ten year problem goes away.

You have a lot of people that don't believe in what we do here. A lot of people come because they have a friend or family member who has been here, and they come to find out. On the other hand, I'm always getting letters from people or from new homeopathic or naturopathic colleges out West asking me to come where they are and work or become a dean or something. I've always said to everyone that what I've put into it is what I've gotten out of it. I've put my whole life into it, and not for money.

Years ago, I played the stock market for awhile, and I made a lot more money on that than from my practice.

TM: Yeah, picking up on which stocks to buy. I had people coming in here after I made a few thousand bucks on a horse trainer trying to find out what was happening. It got so the bookies wouldn't take my money any more. I only played to win.

TM: No. After they refused to take my bets I stopped. They were accusing me of having connections at the track.

I have another young veterinarian student who is trying acupuncture on racing horses. He calls me up all the time for advice about his horses, asking for homeopathic remedies. He had one that I diagnosed as liver trouble and diabetes. At first he didn't want to believe that a horse could have diabetes. I'll find out more about it on Tuesday after he has some tests done. But I told him it was liver trouble.

TM: Not quite. You have to examine first. Sometimes I can do it directly; through the years I've done it with cows, pigs and all sorts of animals. But I always examine them first. That's better.

TM: I never said I don't believe in germs. I just look at it differently. There are good germs and bad germs of course. And they can be transmitted from one place to another. But I don't catch anything because I'm healthy.

We always say dis-ease. It can come from injury, from hereditary weaknesses, from germs or poisons transmitted in the air and water, from poor nutrition and so forth.

TM: First thing we look at is the diet. This is a major offender most of the time. White sugar, and too much grease all contribute. Then we may wrap wax on the joints. You put it on for about fifteen minutes— being careful not to put it on too hot— and then you take it off. This is something we picked up from the Arabians. It has a very beneficial effect.

Then we have a tea , containing about six herbs. We may also give different herbs, depending on the patient. Not too much at one time. Arthritis patients generally have bad posture, bad circulation and bad eating habits. I think you'll find that posture and eating habits are about 80% of why they get sick.

TM: Stress would be altogether different. That wouldn't be a disease, although it can cause a certain amount of susceptibility to different things. But normally I consider stress to be in a category by itself. It has to do with the nerves. Stress is nerves. It makes you tight, uncomfortable--but that's not yet disease. You might feel like you are going to die, but its not disease. Real disease is anything which festers, has pus, infects the blood and so forth.

TM: I still don't consider nervous conditions to be disease. Even neuritis, inflammation of the nerves, is separate. We separate nerve conditions from blood diseases.

Mental state can happen in coordination with these things. Fright which has nothing to do with health can cause problems. Another thing I'll tell you . . . a lot of mentally deficient people are the result of the way they deliver babies.?

TM: Look at the way they get ahold of the head and pull. Most of my work over the years on mentally deficient babies of all kinds tells me that most of them are instrument babies. Better than nine out of ten.

TM: We don't have any hospitals like that any more. We used to have quite a few of them. The 7th day Adventists had one in Reading and one in Philadelphia. They were small little places, but they did wonderful work. I used to write articles for them about medicine.

TM: . . . that most people don't have their heads on straight? That's right! I've been preaching that for years. Using forceps and grabbing the baby by the head can cause mental deficiency.

These days it is normal for people to have their heads way out of alignment. There has always been a certain amount of it, but there's a lot more nowadays. You can also develop it through tension and bad listening habits. This is where the chiropractor can do a lot of good. But they shouldn't go rip and snort like they do. We lost a lot when we let them take everything away from us except the ability to adjust. A lot of the newer ones are learning about herbs and so forth, but they're a little afraid of the allopaths. Drugless healing is what my old license used to say. That's what it should be about.