Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER VI.

HEALTH WITHOUT DRUGS.

"And the body, let us not neglect it. Bad health, a feeble body, is often a great obstacle to the accomplishment of our work before God. We ought to accept it when God sends it. But it is our duty before God to observe the regimen needful even for the body, and to take the precautions necessary to strengthen it for the service and for the glory of God; this thought exalts and sanctifies everything."-ADOLPHE MONOD, Regrets of a Dying Man.

A FRIEND of ours, who enjoys excellent health, not far from the fourscore years, and whose worldly affairs are in excellent order, has often told us, that one of his rules of life has been to try to keep his body out of the hands of the doctors, and his affairs out of the hands of the lawyers. We mean no slight to these two professions, which in their proper spheres do so much for our benefit, when we pronounce the rule an excellent one, and worthy, wherever the circumstances admit, of all imitation. The sum and substance of what we are now going to urge is, to do all you can to keep your bodies out of the hands of the doctors. Or, if this way of putting it sounds somewhat ungracious to those who discharge among us an office so difficult and important, let us express it differently. Our object is to

urge you to do your utmost to preserve unimpaired the stock of good health with which it has pleased your Maker to bless you. Good health is a commodity of which most of us have a fair share when we begin life. Sickness, for the most part, is a foreigner, who insinuates himself, unsought and unwelcome, into our constitution. It is easier, according to the proverb, to keep out than to put out. This is true emphatically of sickness. Our counsel is to try to keep it out; this is easier, cheaper, and better every way; it is what commonly we may do without the doctors; but if it comes in spite of all, then the doctor's aid must be sought to enable us to put it out. We are not forgetful of the good old rule, "Ne sutor ultra crepidam;" we are not intruding on the doctor's province; our desire is to get the masses to understand and observe those God-given laws on which, to a very large degree, good health depends. There are few sights more sad than a sickly workman, toiling away at the anvil or the bench, unless it be a workman's sickly wife, toiling at the wash-tub. Look at their languid eyes, and long, dejected faces! What a priceless blessing health and strength would be to them! How differently would they live and work if they had the conscious vigour and elastic spirits of the strong man, rejoicing to run a race! How cheerily they

would leap forward to exertions, the thought of which is often despair!

Few things are more distressing, more heartbreaking, than the amount of sickness, and even of death, that is due to causes now ascertained to be preventable. We all lament bitterly the slaughter of war; but nothing is more certain than that the number of soldiers who are slain by preventable disease is immensely greater than the number who fall in battle. In the late Russian war, no fewer than 20,800 of our countrymen lost their lives. But of these only 5000 fell in the field or died of their wounds; no fewer than 15,800, mostly men in the prime of life, died of diseases, of which, humanly speaking, far the greater part might have been prevented, had proper means been taken. Even in times of peace, the proportion of deaths in the army has till lately been far greater than elsewhere. One of the chief causes of this mortality has been ascertained to be the want of sufficient ventilation in the soldiers' barracks. Where due arrangements have been made of late years for giving the soldiers fresh air, the death-rate has been very considerably diminished.

But out of the army, too, and especially among the working classes, there is an amount of preventable sickness and death, which is very terrible.

In a General Sanitary Report published some years ago by the Poor-Law Commissioners, it was stated that in Manchester the average age at death of professional men, gentry, and their families, is 38 years; tradesmen, 20; mechanics and labourers, 17. In Liverpool, gentry 35, tradesmen 22, workmen 15. In the rural districts of Rutlandshire the corresponding ages are 52, 41, and 38 respectively. In the district of Bethnal Green, London, gentry 45, tradesmen 26, workmen 16. The low average in the case of tradesmen and workmen, is chiefly owing to the number of deaths among children of a tender age. Among the gentry, on an average only one death out of five occurs among children under five years; among tradespeople the proportion is one in two and a quarter; and among working men one in two. That is, among the working classes of such districts, there is the same number of deaths below the age of five as above it. It is difficult to state with any approach to precision, how many lives are lost in this country through causes that might have been prevented. We have seen the number estimated variously at from 50,000 to 100,000. We believe that the larger number is no exaggeration. It is very singular that so little horror is felt at this prodigious slaughter. For the most part, human life is very properly regarded with great sanctity in

our country. We are indignant at any needless sacrifice of life. We cry shame when a crew is drowned because a miserly shipowner sent them to sea in a rotten craft. When an explosion occurs in an ill-ventilated mine, we can hardly refrain from regretting that the reckless proprietor was not himself shattered by the catastrophe. Yet for the most part little horror is felt at the far more extensive and frightful loss of life that takes place above ground from similar causes. We all remember the horror that thrilled every bosom in the land, when 200 imprisoned colliers were believed to be suffering the agonies of suffocation, and the intense anxiety that prevailed to learn their fate. Yet we can be told that ten times that number of lives are lost weekly in Great Britain through preventable causes, and fold our hands in indifference. What would be the feeling of the community if some Nana Sahib were roaming through the country, and if every week brought the revolting news of a fresh massacre of 2000? It was no palliation, but a hideous aggravation of that fiend's barbarity, that a large proportion of his victims were children. It should be no palliation of the evil which filth, bad air, and similar agents are causing, that probably one-half of their murders are those of little children. Infanticide has usually been counted the crowning barbarity of

« AnteriorContinuar »