V
As a very interested reader of this discussion I should be very glad to know exactly what “M.D.” means by each pound of bone and muscle in the body weight? What proportion (approximately) is it to total body weight? I have been trying to keep up to Dr Haig's 9 grains per lb. of “body weight” and find that it is too much for my digestive powers, which are very weak owing to chronic nervous dyspepsia. If I take 15 per cent. or 20 per cent. less proteid my troubles are so greatly lessened that I feel that to continue to take the lower amount would mean perpetual relief. But there have been so many warnings, including M.D.'s, of the dangers of under-nutrition, that I am in a quandary; and others of your readers too.
If M.D. means grains per lb. of something less than total body weight, a lesser amount of proteid than I try to take may have his sanction, and be safe for me.
Jno. A. Cookson.
There appears to be a sincere attempt in “M.D.'s” article to prove that a physiologist is the best guide in diet. But, as one can get the degree of M.D. without any scientific knowledge of dietetics, the inference that one would be likely to make from such an alarming article is erroneous. I say “alarming” because vague statements are made as to patients who were rescued just in time to be stimulated by over-feeding into a semblance of health, and we are treated to a list of very alarming symptoms in the last paragraph on [p. 443].
“M.D.” says, “Suppose that the animal fed for years on unnatural food has become so pathological that it can no longer take or digest its natural food.” How grateful to M.D. for this statement will be those who long for an excuse to cling to the spoiled, boiled and unnatural dishes of which the popular diet mainly consists! And how they will continue to overeat themselves, content to avoid the truth regarding food quantities.
Living on a right and natural diet, a man or woman will correct the effects of wrong living. This will bring crises, and unless they know that this is Nature's attempt to rid the body of unwanted and effete matter they may be duped into returning to their high feeding, either by those whom “M.D.” calls diet quacks or by qualified quacks.
I do not believe it possible for anyone to die for lack of indication that they were eating too little.
The opposite is what people die of. If we carefully read Dr Rabagliati's article in the same issue we shall rightly ask what would be the results of analyses and measurements in such a case.
About a year ago we had a young woman under our care who had suffered with deafness and other troubles for years. She had tried dietetic treatments, “uric-acid-free” and otherwise, and had at last been told that her deafness was incurable, being due to heredity and deficiency in the organs of hearing. She was extremely thin when she came to us, but we did not measure her, nor analyse unclean excreta, nor weigh her.
She saw an M.D. who was in sympathy with the philosophy of fasting, and she fasted (taking water only) for 28 days. She then had four days of fruit juice, and was so disappointed at having broken her fast prematurely that she continued it for another 12 days, making 44 in all—40 days actual fasting.
[During this period she was living an almost complete out-door life.—Eds.]
During the fast many interesting phenomena were witnessed, chief among which was the discharge from ears and nose—significant indeed to all who study Nature's ways. Result: normal hearing restored. This was nearly twelve months ago; and, having heard of her recently, we find that, though she had had a cold, there has been no recurrence of deafness. I wonder what assistance measurements would have been in this true cure. The patient (an adult) weighed 4st. 8 lbs. at the end of her fast and could then walk short distances.
The way in which “M.D.” dismisses “a little gout” in his last paragraph but one almost leads one to think that he is unaware of the failure of the natural defences of the body that must have gone on in a very serious degree before the manifestation of gout became possible.
I respectfully submit this problem to “M.D.”:—If a very thin patient can go without food entirely for 40 days, with only benefit accruing, how many centuries will it take for a fairly fat person to die through slightly under-eating?
As Dr Haddon has said, the proteid myth will die hard, but there are physiologists who, with their faces to the light, are finding the truth of man's requirements in food and who know that absolute purity and simplicity are the ideals to be sought and that all food we eat more than is absolutely necessary is a diversion of energy to carnal channels.
Ernest Starr.
A DOCTOR'S REASONS FOR OPPOSING VACCINATION.
In opposing vaccination I am aware that it is a thankless task to brave the abuse and antagonism which everyone who attempts to move forward in the work of medical progress is sure to encounter.
In order that I may not be regarded as prejudiced against the dogma of vaccination, I will preface my remarks with the confession that I was at one time myself a confiding dupe of the “tradition of the dairymaids.” While attending medical college I was told that inoculation with cow pox virus was a certain preventive of small-pox, and like most other medical students I accepted with childlike faith and credulity the dictum of my teachers as so much infallible wisdom. After an experience derived from treating a number of cases of post-vaccinal small-pox in patients who gave evidence of having been recently and successfully vaccinated, I awoke to a realisation of the unpleasant fact that “protective vaccination” was not all that was claimed for it. I thereupon began a study of the vaccination problem in all its bearings. After several years of reading, observation and experience I became fully convinced that “successful” vaccination not only fails to protect its subjects from small-pox, but that, in reality, it renders them more susceptible to this disease by impairing their health and vitality, and by diminishing their power of resistance.
Personally, I have known of recently vaccinated patients dying from small-pox while having the plainest foveated vaccine marks upon their bodies, and I have seen other individuals who had never submitted to vaccine inoculation have variola in its mildest and most benign type.
In view of such experience I refused to ignore the evidence of my own senses, and determined to follow the dictates of reason instead of the dogmas of faith, and have, consequently, for the past fifteen years refused to pollute the blood of a single person with vaccine virus.
I oppose vaccination because I believe that health is always preferable to disease. The principle and practice of vaccination involves the introduction of the contagion of disease at least twice, and, according to numerous authorities, many times, into the human organism. The disease conveyed by vaccination causes an undeniable impairment of health and vitality, it being a distinctly vaccine “lymph,” is taken from a lesion on the body of a diseased beast, and inserted by the vaccinator into the circulation of healthy children. The performance of such an insanitary operation, in the very nature of the case, is a violation of the cardinal principles of hygiene and of sanitary science.... Moreover, this operation is in direct controversion of the basic principles of aseptic surgery, the legitimate aim of which is to remove from the organism the products of disease, but never to introduce them.
The prime aim of the modern surgeon is to make every wound aseptic and to keep it so. The careful operator employs every means at his command to clear the field of operations of all bacteria. He utilises every particle of the marvellously minute and intricate technique of asepsis to prevent the entrance through the wounded tissues of any disease elements before, during or after the operation. He fears sepsis equally with death, and yet, under the blighting and blinding influence of an ancient and venerated myth inherited from his ignorant and superstitious forbears of a pre-scientific age, he will deliberately inoculate the virulent infective products of diseased animal tissues into the circulation of a healthy person. And as if to cap the climax of his stupidity and inconsistency, he performs the operation under “aseptic precautions.”
The poisonous matter which nature wisely eliminates from the body of a diseased calf in an effort to save its life and restore it to health is seized upon by the vaccinator and implanted into the wholesome body of a helpless child. Think of the unparalleled absurdity of purposely infecting the body of a healthy person in this era of sanitary science with the poison from a diseased beast, under the senseless pretext of protecting the victim of the ingrafted disease from the contagion of another disease! Can inconsistency go further?
I oppose the practice of vaccination because it is not known what vaccine virus is, except that it is a mixed contagion of disease. We hear much these days about “pure” virus and “pure calf lymph.” Nothing could be more absurd and meaningless than the flippant talk indulged in by vaccinators and the purveyors of vaccine virus about “pure calf lymph,” a hybrid product of diseased animal tissues. “Pure virus” translated into plain English is pure “animal poison.” The phrase “pure calf lymph” is applied to an brand of vaccine virus now in use is a misnomer for two reasons. It is not “pure” and it is not “calf lymph.”
Calf lymph is the normal nutrient fluid which circulates in the lymphatic vessels of the calf. Lymph is described by physiologists as a “transparent, colourless, nutrient alkaline fluid which circulates in the lymphatic vessels and thoracic ducts of animal bodies.” Lymph is a physiological product, while the so-called “pure calf lymph” used by vaccinators is a pathological product, derived from a lesion on a diseased calf. The difference between calf lymph and so-called “pure calf lymph” is as great as is the difference between a food and a poison. The vaccine mixture now most generally used by the medical profession is known under the name of “glycerinized vaccine lymph,” but it is not lymph at all. It is made by utilising practically the entire lesion or pock on the heifer when it is in the vesicular stage. Such a lesion is broken open and scraped with a Volkmann spoon until the whole of the tissue is forcibly and roughly curetted away, consisting of pus, morbid serum, epithelium, fibrous tissue of the skin, and any foreign matter on or in it, constituting what is called “pulp.” This pulp is then passed between glass rollers for trituration and afterwards mixed with a definite amount of glycerine and distilled water. This complex pathologic product of unknown origin is injected into the wholesome bodies of helpless children under the false but plausible name of “pure calf lymph.” ...
I oppose the practice of vaccination because under whatever pretext performed the implantation of disease elements into the healthy human organism is irrational and injurious. It is subversive of the fundamental principles of sanitary science, while the attainment of health as a prophylactic measure is rational and in harmony with the ascertained laws of hygiene and consistent with the canons of common-sense. I am firmly convinced that the absurd and unreasonable dogma which assumes to conserve health by propagating disease should receive the open condemnation of every scientific sanitarian. That this health-blighting delusion conceived in the ignorance of a past generation should find lodgment in the minds of intelligent people enjoying the light of the world's highest civilisation is to my mind inexplicable....
Sanitation and isolation of the infected offer the only rational and effective antidote for these disorders. Away, then, with the abominable and filthy subterfuge! Give us health instead of disease. Health is the great prophylactic.
No man in perfect health can be truly said to be susceptible to the infection of small-pox, nor to that of any other zymotic disease. Vigorous health confers immunity from disease-producing agents as nothing else can. It is usually after the vital functions have become impaired by the effects of vaccination or some other injurious cause that individuals become susceptible to small-pox infection.
J.W. Hodge, M.D.
[The above article can be obtained in pamphlet form from the publisher. Wm. J. Furnival, Stone. Staffs.—Eds.]
THE NEW RACE.
(Specially written for The Healthy Life.)
A new race on the ruins of the old
Build we: a temple of the human form
Fairer than marble, since with life-blood warm,
Well crowned with its appointed crown of gold,
Russet or ebony; lines clear and bold
Beneath—a citadel no ills can storm,
Buttressed with health; a type to be the norm
In that great age the world shall yet behold.
For now the laws of Health and Heaven are seen
In their identity, life's body and soul;
Though, like divorce, disease may come between
What God hath joined; but at the human goal,
Where the New Race rules, splendid and serene,
Sit Health and Holiness, made one and whole.
S. Gertrude Ford.
THE PLAY SPIRIT.
We all long for reality. Most of the amusements in the world are imitations of the reality for which we long. They promise a satisfaction they are unable to give. Drink, mechanical love-making, all snatched gratification of the senses, religious excitement, revivalist meetings, and so forth, most theatre-going and sports, all simulate the real glory of life. They bring an illusion of well-being. They produce a glow in the nervous system. They cause the outlines of everyday life as we know it to grow suffused. They give us a momentary sense of heightened power and freedom. We float easily in a happy world. A sort of relaxation has been achieved. The less common forms of amusement bring us nearer to the gateway of reality. For some, they have been the rivers leading to the ocean of truth itself.
Art, for instance, the interpretation of life in terms of beauty; the “artist,” the man in whom sensuous perception is supreme, offers us a sublime aspect of reality. He dwells in the universe constructed for him by his senses and tells us of its glories. He achieves “freedom.” The veil covering reality is woven for him far thinner than for common men. He sees life moving eternally behind the forms he separates and “creates.” And to those of us who are akin to him, who are temperamentally artistic, he offers freedom of a kind. The contemplation of a work of art releases the tension of the nerves. To use the language of psychology it “arrests” us, suspends the functions of our everyday surface personality, abolishes for a moment time and space, allows the “free,” generally suppressed subconscious self to come up and flood the surface intelligence, allows us for a moment to be ourselves. But, still, this momentary relaxation, this momentary “play,” this holiday from the surface “I,” remains an affair dependent upon suggestive symbols coming from “without.” The supreme artist achieves freedom. We, who in matters of art are the imitative mass, can only have “change,” a new heaven and earth, a fresh “culture.”
Then there is love. That promises, at the outset, complete escape into freedom and reality. And supreme lovers, both of individuals and of “Humanity,” have indeed found freedom and the pathway to reality in love. But ordinary everyday people rushing idolatrously out to find themselves in others find in the end only another I. The religions perhaps work best and longest. But even here average humanity, where the mystical sense is feeble, are thrown back in the end upon ethics—and go somewhat grimly through life doing their duty, living upon the husks of doctrine, the notions and reports of other men.
If the play spirit within us, that longing for the real joy of life, for real relaxation and re-creation, fares so poorly for most of us in the amusements large and small that life offers to our leisure moments, is it any better in the “games” the individual chooses for himself—hobbies, for instance? Can these generally “instructive” and “useful,” generally also solitary, occupations be called play? Are they not merely a reversal of life's engine, rather than an unmaking and a remaking. They are merely a variant of life. They are very truly called a “change of occupation.” They are led and dominated, commonly, by the intelligence. They contain no element of freedom. The same defect is found in all organised “games.”
Real play, like every other reality, comes from what our mechanical and practical intelligences have called “within.”
Real play arises when the “I” is in direct contact with the myself, with Life, with God, with the actuality moving beneath all symbolic representations.
It is only when “I,” the practical, intelligent, abstract-making, idealising, generalising, clever, separated “I,” the “I” which has a past, a present and a future, renounces its usurpation of the steering apparatus, that play can be. “I,” to play or to pray or to love, must be born again. “I” must relinquish all. “I” must have neither experience nor knowledge, neither loves nor hates, neither “thought” nor “feeling” nor “will”—nor anything that can arrest the action of the inner life. When this complete relaxation, which has its physical as well as its mental aspect, is achieved, then and then only can “I” rise up and play. Then “I” shall rediscover all the plays in the world in their origin. “I” shall understand the war-dance of the “savage.” “I” shall know something about the physical convulsions of primitive “conversion.” The arts may begin to be open doors to me. “I” shall have stood “under,” understood my universe, in the brief moment when “I” abandoned myself to the inner reality. The words of the great “teachers” will grow full of meaning. My own “experiences” will be re-read. I shall see more clearly with my surface intelligence what I must do. I shall be personal in everything, personal in my play. Surface self-consciousness which holds me back from all spontaneous activity will disappear in proportion as “I” am immersed in the greater “me.”
Look at that woman walking primly down the lane to the sea with her bathing-dress. She is a worker on a holiday. But she cannot play. She goes down every day to bathe in the Cornish sea, the sea that on a calm sunny day is like liquid Venetian glass and flings at you, under the least breeze, long, green, foam-crested billows that carry you off our feet if you stand even waist-high. She potters in the shallows and splashes herself to avoid taking cold. Her intelligent “I” is uppermost. Her world of every day never leaves her. She will go back to it as she came, unchanged. Her wistful face betrays the seeker lost amidst unrealities. If the “I” were a little more intelligent, she might try to defy the surrounding ocean, to pit her powers against it, to swim. She would learn a most practical and useful and withal invigorating accomplishment. If her busy, watchful “I” could be arrested she might “see” the billows, the sky and the headlands reared on either side of her bay. She might dance into the water, and see her world dance back. She would fling herself amongst the wavelets where she stands and splashes. She might give herself up and know nothing but the beauty and strength around her. It would not teach her to swim, but she would have taken a step towards the great game of walking upon the waters.
D.M. Richardson.
TRAVELS IN TWO COLOURS.
One is often tempted to suspect that in some schools there is a deep-laid plot to destroy in the bud any love for poetry which children may possess. Otherwise how is it that little boys and girls are made to commit to memory William Blake at his highest reach of mystical fire, as in Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, or William Wordsworth at his lowest ebb of uninspired simplicity, as in We are seven? These are very popular, apparently, as poems for children to recite; yet in the one case it is beyond any teacher's power to show children the unearthly flaming beauty which alone gives the poem its peculiar quality and undefinable power; and in the other the maudlin sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively dangerous to the child's health of mind. Both types of recitation work out in the end to this—that when the child attains adolescence, and the great world of literature dawns on the hungry mind, an evil association of ideas has been established—the association of poetry, the highest of all arts, either with the saying of lines without meaning, or with the learning of “poems” devoid of what wholesome youth really desires or enjoys.
People may wrangle all night as to whether the normal healthy child is at heart a mystic or a realist; whether he likes fairy tales because they show him a magical world where flowers can talk and umbrellas are turned into black geese, or because they tell of strange romantic things happening to a real human boy like himself; but there can be no shadow of doubt that much of the verse intended for children is either too clever in its humour to make them laugh, or too bald in its matter or tone to stir the romance that is never quite asleep in their hearts. There are really surprisingly few versifiers who have altogether avoided these errors. Some of George Macdonald's Poems for Children are almost perfect, both as regards lyrical form, simplicity of language and in the unobtrusiveness of the inner truth they convey. For example,
“The lightning and thunder
They go and they come;
But the stars and the stillness
Are always at home.”
But others come perilously near mere versified moralising. Lewis Carroll's nonsense verses in the two famous Alice books are supreme among their kind; but are they not sometimes just a shade too ingenious, or too adult in wit? Probably Stevenson, in those seemingly artless poems in A Child's Book of Verse, comes nearest to a level perfection. Who has ever approached him in his power to understand and express the small child's world, desires and delights, without a trace of the grown-up's condescension or self-consciousness?
Well, these great ones are no longer in the world; yet, with the recognition of their genius, there is the usual danger of bemoaning the lack of worthy successors. Not but what there is some excuse for such lamentation; for this reason that every Christmas there is a veritable flood of children's verse, a great deal of which is either painfully didactic, painfully sentimental, painfully funny or painfully foolish.
What I wish to do at the moment is to call attention to the fact that there is one man alive in England—one of many, I do not doubt: but one at a time!—who is doing “nonsense verses” for children which are guiltless of all the faults I have indicated above.
Jack Goring is known among some of his friends as “The Jolly Rhymster.” He writes his verses first for his own children, and then publishes them from time to time for the pleasure of other children. The secret of his success is partly that he knows that even small children like a story to be an adventure; partly that he understands how their own romances, the things they picture or hum to themselves when well-meaning adults are not worrying them, or rather, trying to amuse them, begin—wherever they may end!—with a perfectly tangible object, such as a pillar-box, a rag-doll or a toy locomotive. One of “The Jolly Rhymster's” best things begins—
“Finger-post, finger-post, why do you stand
Pointing all day with your silly flat hand?”
—which is exactly the sort of question that a very small child in all probability does really ask itself when it has seen a finger-post day after day at a cross-roads. How the poem continues and where it ends you must find out for yourself. It's all in a book called The Ballad of Lake Laloo.
In the recently published volume[15] that now lies before me, this telling of a tale of wonder which begins with an ordinary thing is again evident. Nip and Flip, aged six and four respectively, are the adventurers; and they make three voyages in this little book. In the first, The Fourpenny-Ha'penny Ship, they circumnavigate the world. Now please note how Mr Goring strikes the right note at the very outset:
“Nip and Flip
Took a holiday trip
On a beautiful fourpenny-ha'penny ship
With a dear little handkerchief sail;
And they sang, ‘Yo ho!
We shall certainly go
To the end of the world and back, you know,
And capture the great Seakale.’”
[15] Nip and Flip. By Jack Goring. Illustrated by Caterina Patricchio. 1s. net (postage 1½d.). C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 3 Tudor Street, London, E.C.
And there follows a picture (in black and gold) of this strange monster, just to make sure that no one will suppose they were out after a vegetable.
The tale moves along, as such stories should, very rapidly. Thus—
“And when they came to the end of the world,
Their dear little handkerchief sail they furled
And put on the kettle for tea.”
But you have only just time to look at the tea things when—
“But alas! and alack
About six o'clock
The good ship strack
On the Almond Rock
And split like a little split pea.”
So the story goes on, through divers adventures,
“From Timbuctoo to Timbucthree”
and so at last home again.
The next voyage is to the land of Make-Believe on a Christmas Eve, “in a long, long train of thought.” In the course of this tale we are given a little picture of Flip herself, and here it is for you to look at.
Only, in the book her shoes and stockings, the inside of her skirt, and the squiggly things on the top of her head are a bright golden colour.
The third voyage is all the fault of a toy monkey—“six three-farthings and cheap at the price”—and takes them among whales, mermaids, sea-serpents and other deep-sea creatures.
Here, then, are delightful little pictures on every page, which even a two-year-old will enjoy. And here are verses which most boys and girls under seven or eight will like to learn. And the best of it is that it doesn't matter a bit if they do “sing-song” them, for they are the kind of verses which only sound right from the lips of quite small children who have never been taught elocution.
Edgar J. Saxon
PICKLED PEPPERCORNS.
SOUP.—Oxtail from 10 a.m.—From a Restaurant Menu.
What it was in the early morning it would be indiscreet to inquire.
I learn that a serum for mumps is now being made at the Pasteur Institute. “A number of monkeys were inoculated with the serum,” says The Times (30th July), “and a mild form of the disease was produced.” It is an age of scientific progress, so we may expect news shortly of sera for toothache, hiccough, and the hump. It will not be necessary to inoculate camels for the last.
You will say—with Mr Arnold Bennett, the distinguished playwright and novelist—“the tonic effect of ********* on me is simply wonderful.”—From an advt. in Punch.
You may join in the chorus if you like, but you mustn't all expect to be simply wonderful playwrights and testimonialists.
A Strange Shampoo.... “I make my chemist get the stallax for me,” said she. “It comes only in sealed packages, enough to make up twenty-five or thirty individual shampoos, and it smells so good I could almost eat it.”—Secrets of Beauty column in The Daily Sketch.
Which only shows how careful one has to be.
In the days to come every army will fight on bloodless food.—Herald of the Golden Age.
When every army fights on bloodless food, we may be just as far from the Golden Age as we are now.
I am told that an obscure practitioner who sent up an account of some interesting discoveries, addressed to
MEDICAL CONGRESS,
DIETETICS SECTION,
LONDON.
has had his communication returned by the Post Office, marked Not Known.
There is no truth, it is said, in the rumour that a secret meeting was held during the Congress to discuss the proposed raising of the rate of commission payable by surgeons to physicians.
Peter Piper.