cannot escape, they are, of course, more rarely met with among savage or half policied communities than in civilized societies, where every thing is done for their comfort and maintenance and restoration. It is also difficult to conceive a life similar to that which we are wont to regard as having been led by man in his earliest estate, as either peculiarly pleasant in itself or advantageous to health; and when the olden poets tell us that the first races of men knew nothing of disease, this is to be taken in the same sense as the assertion that before the fall the earth was without poisonous plants, and the rose without thorns.+ From a much deeper insight into the truth, we find another of the great poets of antiquity‡ ranking it among the benefits which Prometheus, besides the light and warmth of fire, conferred on the first of men, that he taught them physic: "When prostrate with disease, And means were none of cure,-no quickening drink, To place the influence of civilization on the physical state of man in a true light, however, it is not * Hesiod, for example (Opera et Dies, v. 90):- For once there dwelt on earth a race of men + Etmüller, in Ephem. Natur. Curios. Cent.7 et 8, App.p.209. Eschylus, in the Prometheus Vinctus, v. 475-481. INCREASE OF EUROPEAN POPULATION. 9 enough to show that the increase of disease which is presumed to have followed in her train is apparent only; it is easy to do more than this; to prove that a large proportion of the causes of disease with which she has been charged, and which, indeed, are necessarily connected with her, are, nevertheless, diminished in their influence, neutralized, and in many cases made altogether inoperative. The Grecian fable tells us of a lance whose point could wound, indeed, but whose shaft had virtue to heal the wound inflicted*. One of these causes, which has not, perhaps, always been acknowledged, but which must nevertheless be taken as of great importance, is the remarkable fact, that the population of the countries of Europe has long been progressively on the increase, whilst the relative mortality is as continually on the declinet. But it is obvious, that if the present race of men *The lance of Achilles; whence the proverb or adage & τpúσas ἰάσεται. Vide O. Jahn's Telephos and Troilos. Kiel, 1841. † See Sir Gilbert Blane's Select Dissertations, Lond. 1822. He observes that in the year 1822 the population of England had increased sevenfold what it was between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, threefold from the end of the sixteenth century, and that it had nearly doubled in the course of the last twenty years. The mortality in England, again, appears, from Dr. Hawkins' Medical Statistics (Lond. 1829), to have been 1: 40 in 1780, and 1 : 58 in 1821; it had, therefore, become about one-third smaller in the course of forty years. In the year 1697 the number of deaths in London amounted to 21,000; a century later, in 1797, despite the vast increase of population, they were but 17,000. A corresponding ratio is also obvious in other countries, of 10 INFLUENCE OF ARTS, INDUSTRY, &c. lives longer than that which has passed away*, and the dangerous periods of infancy and early youth are more happily got over now than formerly, there is, as it were, a larger theatre for disease in general to display itself upon, and particularly for that to which the riper, and even the declining, years of man is liable+. One, and that an almost inevitable, consequence of the progress of man in the improvement of the mechanical powers, in the extension of the manufacturing system, is the continually increasing multitude of poor labourers, by which the gulph between comfort with respectability and utter destitution is rendered ever the more apparent. Shall not this destitution, this pauperism, of the labouring classes, for which the Saint-Simonians, the Socialists, the which somewhat accurately compiled statistical tables exist. In the city of Stuttgart, for instance, according to Dr. Stimmel (On the Population of Stuttgart, Tubing. 1834, in German), the population had increased fourfold in the course of the last two centuries. The number of the births has long considerably surpassed that of the deaths; but this has been the case more particularly in the course of the last twenty-two years. * Casper informs us that there are accurate bills of mortality extant for the city of Berlin for more than a century, from which it appears, that forty-eight per thousand fewer now die in infancy than used to perish eighty years ago, and that twentyseven per thousand more now reach extreme old age than formerly. See his Probable Duration of the Life of Man, Berlin, 1835; and his Lectures on the same subject, ib. 1843 (both in German). + In Stuttgart, for example, of one hundred born alive, fortyseven more than formerly now attain their fifteenth year. (See Stemmler on the Change in the Laws of Mortality induced by Vaccination, Diss. Inaug. Tubing. 1827 (in German). INFLUENCE OF HIGH MENTAL CULTURE. 11 Communists, &c. look around them in vain for some remedy, turn out a powerful and finally unmitigable cause of disease? Shall not the habitual use of spirits, which only became common about the beginning of the sixteenth century, the article till then having been reckoned among medicaments, and which is now so frequently abused, not turn out of itself a potent cause, increasing the number of sick in contrast with former times? However certainly this question must be answered in the affirmative, with no less certainty may it be maintained that, along with the apparently inevitable and prejudicial influences of our present social state, the means of meeting and confining them within narrow bounds are developed in like and even in greater proportion. We even encounter in the higher development of the understanding and moral nature of man, what appears to be a new and powerful cause of disease. The more this is cultivated, the more that is exalted, the more, it seems, are causes accumulated which lead to derangement and disease of the higher organization*. As an assurance that this is so, the fact of * Esquirol, who certainly ought to have a voice in such a question, maintains (Ann. d'Hygiène, Dec. 1830) that advances in civilization increase the frequency of insanity. Idiocy, he holds, may depend on soil, situation, and material influences; but insanity, he says, is frequently in the direct ratio of civilization-it is an effect of social relations, of intellectual and moral influences. In the paper in which he discusses the question: Whether or not there were more maniacs forty years ago than at present (Mém. de l'Acad. Royal de Médecine, t. 1, 1828), 12 INFLUENCE OF HIGH MENTAL CULTURE. the general increase in the number and extent of houses destined for the reception of the unfortunate sufferer under idiocy, delusion, and insanity, might be, and indeed has been, quoted. A remark of the Stagirite* appears to accord with this, viz. that men who have been distinguished for their talents in philosophy, in politics, in poetry, and other arts, are disposed to melancholy; and also the conclusion of a late Belgian statist†, that mankind are more disposed to insanity between forty and fifty years of age, when intellectual works of the highest mark and likelihood are generally produced, than at any other period of life. A more careful examination of the question shews, however, how insecure and one-sided such conclusions are, and how greatly they who draw them are exposed to error. Much even depends on the meaning attached to words in the inquiry. When the ancients spoke of any one as melancholic, they no more meant to say that he was mentally diseased than we do in ordinary parlance when we make use of the same expression; they rather implied that the individual was disposed to live in self-communion, and abstraction from ordinary affairs, or that he was under the in The he declares that the increase is no more than apparent. interest taken in this class of sufferers is now greater than it was formerly. Very poor persons have frequently simulated insanity; and individuals addicted to drinking, who disturb the public tranquillity, are sometimes sent to mad-honses. * Aristoteles, Problem xxx. + Quetelet, De l'Homme, &c. |