President of the Theosophy Society, 1907

“It (Theosophy) declares that all inoculations of disease into the healthy body are illegitimate, and it condemns all such. It declares that all those foul injections of modern medicine which use animal fluids to restore the exhausted vitality of man are ruinous to the body into which they are put” pg 173, London Lectures of 1907 by Annie Besant. Book sold on Amazon

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EXCERPT: But as I have touched upon medicine, let me say—for[173] I ought here to say it—that there are some methods of modern medicine which Theosophy emphatically condemns. It declares that no knowledge which is gained from a tortured, a vivisected creature, is legitimate, even if it were as useful as it has been proved to be useless. It declares that all inoculations of disease into the healthy body are illegitimate, and it condemns all such. It declares that all those foul injections of modern medicine which use animal fluids to restore the exhausted vitality of man are ruinous to the body into which they are put. Here again France, by the very excess of its methods, is beginning to recoil before the results which have come about. Only two years ago I was told by a leading physician of Paris that many of the doctors had met together to look at the results which had grown out of the methods that for years they had been following without hesitation and without scruple, and that they feared that they had caused more diseases than they cured. Why are these things condemned as illegitimate? Because the building up of the human body is the building by a living Spirit of a temple for himself, and it is moulded by that Spirit for his own purposes. The higher powers of intelligence have made the human body what it is, different from the animal bodies out of which, physically, in ages long gone by, it has grown. Your delicacy of touch, the exquisite beauty and delicacy of your nervous system, these things are the outcome of the higher powers of the Spirit expressing themselves in the human body, where they cannot express themselves in the animal form. And if you ignore this, if you forget it, if you forget that this[174] splendid human temple built up by the Spirit of man through ages of toil and of suffering, to express his own higher qualities—compassion, tenderness, love, pity for the weak and the helpless, protection of the helpless against the strong—if you forget the whole of that, and act as a brute even would not act, in cruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the body you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are trying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagery which is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the inheritance of the civilised races.