A Group at the Battle Creek Sanitarium (Dr. Kellogg on the Right).
“So the treatment of a patient consists, first of all, in the exact regulation of all his habits of life, and the establishment of wholesome conditions. The simple life and return to Nature are the ideals constantly held up before him. He must work out his own salvation; he must ‘cease to do evil and learn to do well’; he must cease to sow seeds of disease, and by every means in his power cultivate health.”
XV
HEALTH REFORM AND THE COMMITTEE OF ONE HUNDRED
We have set forth the underlying principles of the new art of health; and we have shown how these principles may be applied by individuals, and how they have been formulated and taught at the great University of Health at Battle Creek. It remains to give an account of a great national movement which has for its aim the spreading of a knowledge of the new hygiene in a semi-political way, a circumstance which to our minds proves that not only this nation but the whole of modern civilization is on the eve of a great revolution in its habits of living, and that this revolution will have for its rallying cry the word “Knowledge.” And more especially, “Knowledge of Our Bodies, and of How to Care for Them.”
The state of ignorance of the majority of people concerning the workings of their own bodies and the way to take care of them is to-day one of the greatest barriers to human progress. Few people realize that they ought to care for their bodies; or that they ought to know about their bodies until they are actually broken down. Men use their intelligence more aptly elsewhere; but all progress in other directions, in the arts and crafts and the labors of modern industry, will go for nothing if we do not learn to apply our intelligence to the matter of health.
More and more does the need for knowledge press home upon us. It is impossible for the race to survive unless that knowledge is spread. Our ancestors, it is true, knew less of their bodily make-up and bodily care than we do, but our ancestors did not need it so much. They were country dwellers, and people of the open air; they were not slaves of machinery and of office routine.
Dr. J. Pease Norton, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Yale University, recently read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a paper which vividly summed up the situation which confronts us. He said:
“There are four great wastes to-day, the more lamentable because they are unnecessary. They are preventable death, preventable sickness, preventable conditions of low physical and mental efficiency, and preventable ignorance. The magnitude of these wastes is testified to by experts competent to judge. They fall like the shades of night over the whole human race, blotting out its fairest years of happiness.