Chapter 59
What an insult to the Creator who fas.h.i.+oned them so wonderfully and fearfully in His own image, that the graduates from our high schools and even universities, and young women who "finish their education,"
become proficient in the languages, in music, in art, and have the culture of travel, but can not describe or locate the various organs or functions upon which their lives depend! "The time will come," says Frances Willard, "when it will be told as a relic of our primitive barbarism that children were taught the list of prepositions and the names of the rivers of Thibet, but were not taught the wonderful laws on which their own bodily happiness is based, and the humanities by which they could live in peace and goodwill with those about them."
Nothing else is so important to man as the study and knowledge of himself, and yet he knows less of himself than he does of the beasts about him.
The human body is the great poem of the Great Author. Not to learn how to read it, to spell out its meaning, to appreciate its beauties, or to attempt to fathom its mysteries, is a disgrace to our civilization.
What a price mortals pay for their ignorance, let a dwarfed, half-developed, one-sided, short-lived nation answer.
"A brilliant intellect in a sickly body is like gold in a spent swimmer's pocket."
Often, from lack of exercise, one side of the brain gradually becomes paralyzed and deteriorates into imbecility. How intimately the functions of the nervous organs are united! The whole man mourns for a felon. The least swelling presses a nerve against a bone and causes one intense agony, and even a Napoleon becomes a child. A corn on the toe, an affection of the kidneys or of the liver, a boil anywhere on the body, or a carbuncle, may seriously affect the eyes and even the brain. The whole system is a network of nerves, of organs, of functions, which are so intimately joined, and related in such close sympathy, that an injury to one part is immediately felt in every other.
Nature takes note of all our transactions, physical, mental, or moral, and places every item promptly to our debit or credit.
Let us take a look at a page in Nature's ledger:--
To damage to the heart in The "irritable heart," the youth by immoderate athletics, "tobacco heart," a life of tobacco chewing, cigarette promise impaired or blighted.
smoking, drinking strong tea or coffee, rowing, running to trains, overstudy, excitement, etc.
To one digestive apparatus Dyspepsia, melancholia, years ruined, by eating hurriedly, by of misery to self, anxiety to eating unsuitable or poorly one's family, pity and disgust cooked food, by drinking ice of friends.
water when one is heated, by swallowing scalding drinks, especially tea, which forms tannic acid on the delicate lining of the stomach; or by eating when tired or worried, or after receiving bad news, when the gastric juice can not be secreted, etc.
To one nervous system Years of weakness, disappointed shattered by dissipation, abuses, ambition, hopeless inefficiency, over-excitement, a fast life, _a burnt-out life_.
feverish haste to get riches or fame, hastening p.u.b.erty by stimulating food, exciting life, etc.
To damage by undue mental Impaired powers of mind, exertion by burning the softening of the brain, "midnight oil," exhausting the blighted hopes.
brain cells faster than they can be renewed.
To overstraining the brain A disappointed ambition, a trying to lead his cla.s.s in life of invalidism.
college, trying to take a prize, or to get ahead of somebody else.
To hardening the delicate A hardened brain, a hardened and sensitive gray matter of conscience, a ruined the brain and nerves, and home, Bright's disease, fatty ruining the lining membranes of degeneration, nervous the stomach and nervous degeneration, a short, system by alcohol, opium, etc. useless, wasted life.
By forced balances, here and Accounts closed. Physiological there. and moral bankruptcy.
Sometimes two or three such items are charged to a single account. To offset them, there is placed on the credit side a little feverish excitement, too fleeting for calm enjoyment, followed by regret, remorse, and shame. Be sure your sins will find you out. They are all recorded.
"The G.o.ds are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to scourge us."
It is a wonder that we live at all. We violate every law of our being, yet we expect to live to a ripe old age. What would you think of a man who, having an elegant watch delicately adjusted to heat and cold, should leave it on the sidewalk with cases open on a dusty or a rainy day, and yet expect it to keep good time? What would you think of a householder who should leave the doors and windows of his mansion open to thieves and tramps, to winds and dust and rain?
What are our bodies but timepieces made by an Infinite Hand, wound up to run a century, and so delicately adjusted to heat and cold that the temperature will not vary half a degree between the heat of summer and the cold of winter whether we live in the regions of eternal frost or under the burning sun of the tropics? A particle of dust or the slightest friction will throw this wonderful timepiece out of order, yet we often leave it exposed to all the corroding elements. We do not always keep open the twenty-five miles of
How careful we are to filter our water, air our beds, ventilate our sleeping-rooms, and a.n.a.lyze our milk! We shrink from contact with filth and disease. But we put paper colored with a.r.s.enic on our walls, and daily breathe its poisonous exhalations. We frequent theaters crowded with human beings, many of whom are uncleanly and diseased. We sit for hours and breathe in upon fourteen hundred square feet of lung tissue the heated, foul, and heavy air; carbonic acid gas from hundreds of gas burners, each consuming as much oxygen as six people; air filled with shreds of tissue expelled from diseased lungs; poisonous effluvia exhaled from the bodies of people who rarely bathe, from clothing seldom washed, fetid breaths, and skin disease in different stages of development. For hours we sit in this bath of poison, and wonder at our headache and la.s.situde next morning.
We pour a gla.s.s of ice water into a stomach busy in the delicate operation of digestion, ignorant or careless of the fact that it takes half an hour to recover from the shock and get the temperature back to ninety-eight degrees, so that the stomach can go on secreting gastric juice. Then down goes another gla.s.s of water with similar results.
We pour down alcohol which thickens the velvety lining of the stomach, and hardens the soft tissues, the thin sheaths of nerves, and the gray matter of the brain. We crowd meats, vegetables, pastry, confectionery, nuts, raisins, wines, fruits, etc., into one of the most delicately constructed organs of the body, and expect it to take care of its miscellaneous and incongruous load without a murmur.
After all these abuses we do not give the blood a chance to go to the stomach and help it out of its misery, but summon it to the brain and muscles, notwithstanding the fact that it is so important to have an extra supply to aid digestion that Nature has made the blood vessels of the alimentary ca.n.a.l large enough to contain several times the amount in the entire body.
Who ever saw a horse leave his oats and hay, when hungry, to wash them down with water? The dumb beasts can teach us some valuable lessons in eating and drinking. Nature mixes our gastric juice or pepsin and acids in just the right proportion to digest our food, and keep it at _exactly_ the right temperature. If we dilute it, or lower its temperature by ice water, we diminish its solvent or digestive power, and dyspepsia is the natural result.
English factory children have received the commiseration of the world because they were scourged to work fourteen hours out of the twenty-four. But there is many a theoretical republican who is a harsher taskmaster to his stomach than this; who allows it no more resting time than he does his watch; who gives it no Sunday, no holiday, no vacation in any sense, and who seeks to make his heart beat faster for the sake of the exhilaration he can thus produce.
Although the heart weighs a little over half a pound, yet it pumps eighteen pounds of blood from itself, forcing it into every nook and corner of the entire body, back to itself in less than two minutes.
This little organ, the most perfect engine in the world, does a daily work equal to lifting one hundred and twenty-four tons one foot high, and exerts one-third as much muscle power as does a stout man at hard labor. If the heart should expend its entire force lifting its own weight, it would raise itself nearly twenty thousand feet an hour, ten times as high as a pedestrian can lift himself in ascending a mountain.
What folly, then, to goad this willing, hard-working slave to greater exertions by stimulants!
We must pay the penalty of our vocations. Beware of work that kills the workman. Those who prize long life should avoid all occupations which compel them to breathe impure air or deleterious gases, and especially those in which they are obliged to inhale dust and filings from steel and bra.s.s and iron, the dust in coal mines, and dust from thres.h.i.+ng machines. Stone-cutters, miners, and steel grinders are short lived, the sharp particles of dust irritating and inflaming the tender lining of the lung cells. The knife and fork grinders in Manchester, England, rarely live beyond thirty-two years. Those who work in grain elevators and those who are compelled to breathe chemical poisons are short lived.
Deep breathing in dusty places sends the particles of dust into the upper and less used lobes of the lungs, and these become a constant irritant, until they finally excite an inflammation, which may end in consumption. All occupations in which a.r.s.enic is used shorten life.
Dr. William Ogle, who is authority upon this subject, says, "Of all the various influences that tend to produce differences of mortality in any community, none is more potent than the character of the prevailing occupations." Finding that clergymen and priests have the lowest death-rate, he represented it as one hundred, and by comparison found that the rate for inn and hotel servants was three hundred and ninety-seven; miners, three hundred and thirty-one; earthenware makers, three hundred and seventeen; file makers, three hundred; innkeepers, two hundred and seventy-four; gardeners, farmers, and agricultural laborers closely approximating the clerical standard. He gave as the causes of high mortality, first, working in a cramped or constrained att.i.tude; second, exposure to the action of poisonous or irritating substances; third, excessive work, mental or physical; fourth, working in confined or foul air; fifth, the use of strong drink; sixth, differences in liability to fatal accidents; seventh, exposure to the inhalation of dust. The deaths of those engaged in alcoholic industries were as one thousand five hundred and twenty-one to one thousand of the average of all trades.
It is very important that occupations should be congenial. Whenever our work galls us, whenever we feel it to be a drudgery and uncongenial, the friction grinds life away at a terrible rate.
Health can be acc.u.mulated, invested, and made to yield its compound interest, and thus be doubled and redoubled. The capital of health may, indeed, be forfeited by one misdemeanor, as a rich man may sink all his property in one bad speculation; but it is as capable of being increased as any other kind of capital.
One is inclined to think with a recent writer that it looks as if the rich men kept out of the kingdom of heaven were also excluded from the kingdom of brains. In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago are thousands of millionaires, some of them running through three or four generations of fortune; and yet, in all their ranks, there is seldom a man possessed of the higher intellectual qualities that flower in literature, eloquence, or statesmans.h.i.+p. Scarcely one of them has produced a book worth printing, a poem worth reading, or a speech worth listening to. They are struck with intellectual sterility. They go to college; they travel abroad; they hire the dearest masters; they keep libraries among their furniture; and some of them buy works of art.
But, for all that, their brains wither under luxury, often by their own vices or tomfooleries, and mental barrenness is the result. He who violates Nature's law must suffer the penalty, though he have millions.
The fruits of intellect do not grow among the indolent rich. They are usually out of the republic of brains. Work or starve is Nature's motto; starve mentally, starve morally, even if you are rich enough to prevent physical starvation.
How heavy a bill Nature collects of him in whom the s.e.xual instinct has been permitted to taint the whole life with illicit thoughts and deeds, stultifying the intellect, deadening the sensibilities, dwarfing the soul!
"I waive the quantum of the sin, The hazard of concealing; But och, it hardens all within, And petrifies the feeling."
The sense of fatigue is one of Nature's many signals of danger. All we accomplish by stimulating or crowding the body or mind when tired is worse than lost. Insomnia, and sometimes even insanity, is Nature's penalty for prolonged loss of sleep.
One of the worst tortures of the Inquisition was that of keeping victims from sleeping, often driving them to insanity or death.
Melancholy follows insomnia; insanity, both. To keep us in a healthy condition, Nature takes us back to herself, puts us under the ether of sleep, and keeps us there nearly one-third of our lives, while she overhauls and repairs in secret our wonderful mechanism. She takes us back each night wasted and dusty from the day's work, broken, scarred, and injured in the great struggle of life. Each cell of the brain is reburnished and refreshened; all the ashes or waste from the combustion of the tissues is washed out into the blood stream, pumped to the lungs, and thrown out in the breath; and the body is returned in the morning as fresh and good as new. The American honey does not always pay for the sting.
Labor is the eternal condition on which the rich man gains an appet.i.te for his dinner, and the poor man a dinner for his appet.i.te; but the habit of constant, perpetual industry often becomes a disease.
In the Norse legend, Allfader was not allowed to drink from Mirmir's Spring, the fount of wisdom, until he had left his eye as a pledge.