In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted. [[24]]
But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of [[25]]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.
The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.
Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are [[26]]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of a king’s touch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still [[27]]current term of a sovereign remedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.
The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the [[28]]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “If any man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” “And the prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”
Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties, [[29]]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.
The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions, [[30]]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.