Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

Then there is all the long train of small ailments, which do not make us seriously ill, often do not even keep us from work, but which do take away from the pleasure and enjoyment of life, which render work a burden instead of a delight, and lessen our ability to work by many degrees.

Not only this, but they all have within them the possibility of developing into serious diseases. Such lesser troubles are colds, headache, catarrh, dyspepsia, nervousness, neuralgia, sore throat, skin eruptions, rheumatism, toothache, earache, affections of the eyes, lameness, sprains, bruises, cuts, and burns.

Civilization has brought us great blessings but it has also brought with it many dangers to health. Professor Irving Fisher of Yale says:

"The invention of houses has made it possible for mankind to spread all over the globe but it is responsible for tuberculosis or consumption. The invention of cooking has widened the variety of man's diet but has led to the decay of his teeth. The invention of the alphabet and printing has produced eye strain with all its attendant evils. The invention of chairs has led to spinal curvature, etc., etc. Yet it would be foolish even if it were possible to attempt to return to nature in the sense of abolishing civilization.

"The cure for eye strain is not in disregarding the invention of reading, but in introducing the invention of glasses. The cure for tuberculosis is not in the destruction of houses but in ventilation. It is a little knowledge that is dangerous. Civilization can, with fuller knowledge, bring its own cure, and make the 'kingdom of man' far larger than the 'nature' people can ever dream of."

Until within the last few years, sickness and death were regarded from a religious standpoint. All sickness was to be borne with patience and resignation because all our sufferings were sent by an all-wise Providence. But since science has clearly proved that typhoid fever is usually caused by an impure water supply, and that boiling the water would prevent the suffering, expense and possible death; that the dreaded yellow fever can be banished from communities that destroy the eggs of certain mosquitoes; and many other facts in regard to health have been learned, a great change has come over the popular belief. It is seen that, to a great extent, man holds his own fate and is responsible for his own suffering, and people are eager to learn more about their own bodies, how to cure them and how to keep them well.

This knowledge has already done much to prolong life. The average length of life in India, where no attempt is made to check disease, is twenty-five years. In England the length of life has doubled in a few generations. In Sweden, where the people live a sanitary life, the average is over fifty years, in this country, forty-five years.

Insurance companies and benefit societies keep close watch of their members and they report that a person ten years old may now count on living to be sixty years of age. That is the average age, whereas a hundred years ago the average expectation of life at that age was only fifty-three years.

And this is true in spite of the fact that people have been crowding into cities, that they are living on richer foods, taking less exercise in the open air, living in houses which shut out the fresh air, and doing dozens of other things that have tended to lower rather than to raise the average.

We can scarcely realize the possibilities of life if, with all the present scientific knowledge of disease and health, we could have a generation of people living according to nature's laws.