"Why, Uncle Duncan! I am sure I always thought that sickness and uselessness were one and the same thing. Mrs. Wheelwright, who was our matron at Round Springs for a time, used to say that health was everybody's first duty, and that sick people were only cumberers of the ground."
"Mrs. Wheelwright was a goose, or more probably a parrot," answered the doctor, with some heat. "I suppose she repeated what she had heard from somebody else. It is undoubtedly true that nobody has the right recklessly or needlessly to expose his health; but as to its preservation being one's first duty in all cases, that is simple nonsense. Health, like other things, must be 'kept on the altar,' as Father Hollenbeck says, you know—that is, it must be held ready for sacrifice, like everything else, at the call of duty. What would Mrs. Wheelwright say of a soldier, for instance, who made it his first duty to take care of his own health?"
"Or a mother with a sick child?" said Marion.
"Or a minister or doctor in time of pestilence, or an army-surgeon, or any one else who is anxious and determined to do his duty in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call him? It is your duty to keep well if you can, but to hold your health, your time and money, and all your other gifts at the command of your Master."
"Mr. Hausen and Mrs. Wheelwright had an argument about that very thing," said Marion. "He said just what you do—that it was sometimes a duty to disregard one's health. But Mrs. Wheelwright said it could be nobody's duty to be sick."
"That was not the point. Nobody ever said it was a duty to be sick, that I know of."
"And she said habitual invalids were useless cumberers of the ground—good for nothing themselves and selfish hinderers of other people. Do you think that is true?"
"No, Marion, not necessarily. I must say that I have seen more selfishness among well people than I have ever met with among invalids. Some invalids are selfish and exacting, no doubt, and so are many who have not their excuse. As to their being useless cumberers of the ground, do you call Miss Nightingale such a cumberer?"
"No, indeed."
"And yet she has been more or less an invalid all her life. So was Robert Hall, the preacher and Doctor Dalton, the famous chemist; Stephenson and Watt, the great engineers, were both subject to dreadful headaches, and Mr. Watt to such fits of hypochondria that his friends feared he would destroy himself. Both the great princes of Orange were sickly men. The one who was king of England suffered so from asthma that he was often unable to lie down for days together. John Knox was never strong; neither was Melanchthon, nor Tyndale, nor Henry Martyn; Thierry, the historian, never stood on his own feet, nor did the least thing for himself for twenty years and more. Your favourite King Alfred was always a great sufferer."