I take it that all are agreed as to the desirability of good health, although it is often said of a certain class of chronic invalids, that if they were to be deprived of the pleasure of croning over and detailing their symptoms, life would have no charms for them.
But this is a provision of nature to prevent the meanest life from becoming altogether an unmitigated burden: when a person becomes so disordered physically that he has nothing else to enjoy, a certain depraved condition of mind is induced which enables him to extract a little satisfaction from dwelling upon and recounting his miseries! In contrast to such cases how gloriously shines out the example of the old lady who, on being interviewed by the minister, thus related her experiences: her husband had been long dead, leaving her with eight children, whom, through her own labor, she reared and educated. One after another all had died after lingering illnesses—the last, a son, the only support of her old age, had been recently buried; and, to crown all, the remnant of the little property left by her husband, had just passed from her possession—the uninsured buildings by fire, and the land by the foreclosure of the mortgage. “But,” concluded the dear old soul, while her brow lightened and her eye kindled with enthusiasm, “thank the Lord, I have two teeth left, and praise and bless His holy name, they are opposite each other!” I pause to note an important lesson—the influence upon health, of prevalent good nature, and the habit, which may be cultivated, of looking on the bright side of things. “People ask me,” says Old Sojourner Truth, “how I came to live so long and keep my mind, and I tell them that it is ‘because I think of the great things of God, not little things.’ I don’t fritter my mind away in caring for trifles.”
It has been elsewhere noted—the propensity of
people in general for preferring medicine to advice. If the world were convinced that the writer possessed an unfailing remedy—a “medicine” that would cure every physical ailment and prevent disease, it would be demanded faster than it could be manufactured, though every gin-mill in the land were transformed into a laboratory for its production. No price would be deemed exorbitant, and, though the mixture were black as ink, and more nauseating than the vilest drug in our vile Materia Medica, it would still be gulped down as a child demolishes bon-bons, if it never failed in its efficacy.
We have only to look over the newspaper advertising columns to find scores of articles claiming to accomplish this, at the very reasonable price of 50 cents to $1.00 per bottle, “large bottles cheapest,” and very agreeable to the taste; and evidence abounds in the shape of letters purporting to have been written by such as have, although given up by the doctors, been withdrawn from the grave (regardless of the rights of the heirs and undertakers)—restored to the busy walks of life—“and no change of diet necessary.” Thousands upon thousands of otherwise sensible people are gulled into the belief that a few bottles of somebody’s pretended “discovery,” advertised in a yellow-covered almanac, will cure whatever ails them. There is something so fascinating about such literature that I would almost as soon place a package of Paris-green within reach of a baby as to put, say, a medical almanac, and more particularly a cookery-book with fancy dishes and medical lies alternating, in the hands
of the average adult. There isn’t one in fifty proof against them. Let the most robust Congressman spend one half-hour reading one of these “messages”, with the endless variety of symptoms therein given, and the hundreds of letters of the blest—fabricated in the proprietor’s office, or, at best, written by his victims during a temporary suppression of the symptoms—and, comparing his own feelings with those described, the chances are that he would soon be pouring down the medicine—convinced that it hit his case exactly. Why is this possible? Why, indeed, do we have a drug-store on every other corner, with shelves packed with the infamous “regular” and irregular remedies, simple and compound? Simply because ninety-five in the hundred men, women, and children so treat themselves that they do have, from day to day, or week to week, various symptoms more or less severe, all indicative of derangement of the bodily functions. And because of this the medicine-makers know that he who is the keenest and boldest in prostituting the art of printing, will reap the richest harvest, by reason of the ignorance and disease-producing habits of the people.
I will conclude these introductory remarks with the beautiful and impressive language of Professor Maudsley, the eminent English physician, especially celebrated in connection with the treatment of mental disorders, and who, as shown by the paragraph already quoted, emphasizes in the strongest manner, not only the intimate connection between the mind and the body—their interdependence the one with
the other—but, also, the moral obligation of the man to learn and obey the laws which tend to exalt both:
“Notably the best rules for the conduct of life are the fruits of the best observations of men and things; the achievements of science are no more than the organized gains—orderly and methodically arranged—of an exact and systematic observation of the various departments of Nature; the noblest products of the arts are Nature ennobled through human means, the art itself being Nature. There are not two worlds—a world of Nature and a world of human nature—standing over against one another, in a sort of antagonism, but one world of Nature, in the orderly evolution of which human nature has its subordinate part. Disease, hallucinations, idiosyncrasies of whatever sort, are the product of disobedience to law—discordant notes in the Divine harmony, which result from an unskillful or careless touch. It should, then, be every man’s steadfast aim, as a part of Nature, his patient work, to cultivate such entire sincerity of relations with it, so to think, feel, and act, always in intimate unison with it, that when the summons comes to surrender his mortal part to absorption into it, he does so, not fearfully, as to an enemy who has vanquished him, but trustfully, as to a mother who, when the day’s task is done, bids him lie down to sleep.”