Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 8, Vol. I, February 23, 1884

No. 8.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1884.
BY DR ANDREW WILSON, HEALTH-LECTURER.
A broad and scientific view of life is that which regards it as being composed, in its physical aspects at least, of a series of actions or functions more or less defined in their nature. These functions, as the physiologist terms them, are discharged, each, by a special organ or series of organs; and health may therefore be viewed as the result of the harmonious working of all the organs of which the body is composed.
Disturbances of health arise whenever the natural equilibrium maintained between the functions of the body is disturbed. For example, a broken bone being an infringement of the functions of a limb, is a disturbance of health equally with the fever which runs riot through the blood, and produces a general disturbance of the whole system. An aching tooth equally with brain disorder constitutes a disturbance of health. We may therefore define health as the perfect pleasurable or painless discharge of all the functions through which life is maintained.
Doubtless this bodily equilibrium of which we have spoken is subject to many and varied causes of disturbance. Life is after all a highly complex series of actions, involving equally complicated conditions for their due performance. Like all other living beings, man is dependent upon his surroundings for the necessities of life. These surroundings, whilst ministering to his wants, may under certain circumstances become sources of disease. Thus we are dependent, like all other animal forms, upon a supply of pure air, and this condition of our lives may through impurities prove a source of serious disease. The water we drink, equally a necessity of life with air, is likewise liable to cause disease, when either as regards quantity or quality it is not supplied in the requisite conditions. Man is likewise in the matter of foods dependent upon his surroundings, and numerous diseases are traceable both to a lack of necessary foods and to over-indulgence in special kinds of nourishment. The diseases known to physicians as those of over-nutrition belong to the latter class; and there are likewise many ailments due to under-nutrition which also receive the attention of medical science.