Emil Bjarnason used to tell a story about a man named Stanford Kingsley Claunch. Claunch was best known for pioneering his own idea of medicine. His theory was that disease was a person’s best friend. The purpose of germs he argued was not to cause ill health, but to produce the diseases that cured illness. He was especially fond of malaria which he claimed was ‘guaranteed to burn up all the poisons that make people sick’ provided that an ignorant doctor didn’t prescribe medicines that would interrupt the fever before it had done its job.

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