HYGIENE AS A WAR MEASURE.
Those Volunteers who intend not only to try to speak for the cause during the next four years, but have determined to fight for the continuation of our Republic in spite of all obstacles, should learn how independent the body really can be of what are usually termed the necessaries of life.
As an invalid child I attended a course of lectures delivered by one Dr. O'Leary. This distinguished gentleman, with the theatre stage, which he used as his platform covered over with polished skeletons, manikins, human heads in chloroform and colored pictures of the various parts of the human frame, impressed my young mind deeply. At that time, I remember I had been "given up" by my parents and the doctor, as a child who could not possibly be raised. I was accustomed to thoughts of death and for years constantly expected a visit from the dreaded monster. No memory is more distinctly engraven on my mind than the nights when, with eager eyes fastened on this wonderful man and his mysterious skulls and manikins, my heart throbbing, my face aglow, I listened in rapt attention, that possibly I might catch some secret that would help me defeat death and add strength to my frail body sufficient to do battle with life's hardships.
After describing a boy who died at about my own age because his nervous system had been deprived of the proper life-giving elements which had been taken from his food by modern processes, the Professor took up a handful of wheat letting it fall repeatedly through his fingers, stating that each grain of wheat contains in it all of the elements required to sustain human life. He said that civilization, by taking away the outside, the most nutritious part of the wheat, had struck a blow at the physical development of our race. He declared that man can live for years on whole wheat requiring no other article of diet, and that the outside of the wheat especially, now thrown aside as bran and fed to the cattle, contains the elements of bone and nerve fibre, that, while the lady who eats only the choicest white bread, made of the finest flour, has to substitute gold for parts of her teeth, the teeth of the cattle that eat the bran are perfect. He gave as an illustration the march of Caesar and his legions through Gallia, when Caesar's soldiers often for weeks at a time were without provisions and were compelled to feed on whole wheat alone which they would snatch in handfuls from the fields as they marched, thresh in the palms of their hands and grind with their molars. The crushing of the hard wheat grain gave the teeth exercise while the crushed bran and surface of the grain supplied those elements required in the construction of bone and teeth. "At the present time, nineteen centuries after," so this doctor said, "there are numerous skulls of these same soldiers of the great Caesar to be seen in the London Museum and as a result of their wheat mastication, every tooth is as sound in these skulls, as whole and free from decay as when heathen Rome was Mistress of the World and Caesar was King."