July 23 — A New Law of Health
Louisa has become a raging Christian Scientist.
A distant memory returns to me. Once upon a time there was a little girl who, after the manner of her sex, feared greatly all and sundry of certain fierce beasts, among which were to be enumerated rats, mice, bumblebees, and more vividly and especially DOGS—whose culminating direfulness was only to be expressed in italicized capitals. On a day, being bidden to go across the village street to deliver a note to an opposite neighbour, she set out, radiating the pleasing results of soap, brushes, and a clean pinafore, but on reaching the gate came to a sudden pause. A specimen of the worst of enemies, who seemed to the perspective of an eye only three feet from the ground to easily rival an elephant in size, lay prone across the path, lolling an intimidating tongue, and rolling an eye which, though outwardly calm, might be guessed to conceal a horrid intent. There was a swish of short starched skirts, a twinkle of bare knees, and appeal was made to that infallible power and knowledge which Providence has so wisely placed in mothers. Being a person of nimble imagination this particular parent, realizing that a mastiff as large in proportion to her own inches as this one was to the normal height of five years might well daunt her own courage, forbore to remonstrate or use reason.
“Here,” she said placidly, “is a lump of sugar. Put it on your tongue and hold it there. Of course, no dog will touch a person who has sugar on her tongue.”
And so fortified, Five Years set forth with a conviction of immunity that carried her triumphantly past the source of terror. The incident is not in itself, perhaps, of historic importance, but is a particularly vivid example of the absolute divorce in the undeveloped mind between the laws of cause and effect, and in no department of human thought has that divorce continued so long as in the science of health. Every one of us can revive out of childhood a memory of the balm that overspread the injured temple when a sympathetic nurse bestowed the richly deserved spanking upon the offending chair corner that had caused the pain, or applied the clearly indicated plaster of a kiss; and medicine in its long career has followed the intelligent example of the nursery. But while medicine as a science has passed out of this stage with the general growth of knowledge, the bulk of mankind still continues to put sugar on the tongue as a protection against dogs, to castigate chair corners, and to apply remedies as unknown to the pharmacopœia as the feminine kiss. Perhaps the stolen potato carried in the pocket, or the bit of red flannel bound on the left wrist, are not so trusted a remedy for the pangs of rheumatism as they were fifty years ago, and the dried heart of a mouse worn in a bag about the neck seems to have lost its potency against epileptic seizures, yet the very large sums spent annually upon patent medicines—rivalling in amount what is known in temperance circles as the “Drink Bill”—and the rise and popularity of innumerable mushroom “cures” and systems, proves that the laws of health are still as heterogeneous from the intelligence of the majority of mankind as are the laws of the differential calculus.
It would be diverting, were it not so pathetic, to see the constant endeavour on the part of the multitude to lift itself by its own hygienic boot-straps in the form of barefoot cures, mind cures, prayer cures, cures by clairvoyance, by magnetism, red or blue lights, or by pilgrimages and relics. The child moving about in worlds unrealized is still the father and epitome of the man, and sees no reason why his own will, or that of some Power wishing him individually well, should not break through the immutable sequence of cause and effect, or upset the machinery of the universe in his behalf. His childish “Let’s pretend” sweeps away for the moment the dull persistency of facts and opens a world where it is possible to eat one’s cake and have it too, and after dancing escape the bill for the fiddling.
Speaking accurately there is, of course, no such thing as a new law of health—such laws being of their very nature eternal—but a consciousness of the hygienic code is as new as was the discovery not more than a century ago of the forces of electricity, which had, though the most powerful agent upon the earth, lain ready to our hands unrecognized throughout recorded time.
The unfortunate fact that the world of knowledge is not a globe is shown by this—that if, in setting out toward a fixed goal of truth, one’s face is turned in the wrong direction, no length of travel, no miracle of persistency, ever conducts to the haven where one would be. A truth of moral geography by no means universally accepted as yet, and indeed certain inherent tendencies of human nature, will forever prevent its unanimous acceptance, a chronic childishness of mind being so common that one would almost despair of the acceptance of any new truth, were it not that the adult intelligence of the few eventually imposes its conclusions upon the multitude, or enforces at least an outward concurrence. The immature-minded many are always lusting after a sign of the wonderful, and kicking against the pricks of plain truth. Bullied out of crediting the existence of ghosts and fairies, they earnestly engage in burning witches, and shamed out of such mistaken zeal fling themselves into the arms of spiritualist mediums, flirt with the theosophists, or die under the ministrations of Christian Scientists. The whole history of supernaturalism has been the history of travel in the wrong direction—a wrong turning that had its beginning in a childish impatience that would attain to its end by sudden leaps in lieu of dusty plodding along the highway that led by slow windings to the desired end.
Man found painful barriers of time, space, and physical decay fencing him out of his Eden of gratified desire, and like a child he straightway fell to dreaming of flying carpets, of magic lamps, of transmutable metals, of fountains of youth and elixirs of life. At first these miracles were thought to be the gifts of shadowy, higher powers, who were happily superior to the cruel limits of material existence, and might give their assistance according to their capricious elfin fancy. Later, man began to believe that in himself lay the powers which were to break the chains that bound him the unhappy slave of distance, of the need for labour, of the tyrannies of nature, with her resistless heat and cold, storm and flood, pain and age. A glimmering of the truth, this, at last, but only a faint reflection on the horizon of the rising sun, on which he had turned his back. There followed a period of fasts and macerations whose courage and persistency was to make the gods tremble in respectful terror—a triumph over material passions which should give an occult power over material limitations. The Buddhists stood moveless and speechless until the birds reared their young in their hair, and thereby were supposed to grow so mighty that the mountains rocked beneath the weight of their thoughts, and space and time were annihilated.
Superb energies, passionate patience and ardour, master intellects, were wasted in the long endeavour to find some means by which nature could be conquered and man made master of circumstance—all given fruitlessly; thrown into that bottomless pit of error never to be filled. And these earnest, misguided travellers—so blinded were they—when one of their number turned about in the other direction promptly fell upon him and beat him into submission, as one who would check the struggle towards light and knowledge. Even now that the fact is accepted that nature is to be conquered by her own natural means only, and that supernaturalism is a waste and quaking morass upon which no edifice of truth is to be reared, there are many—sadly many—descendants of Lot’s wife casting longing glances back to the Sodom of their intellectual sins. It is nothing to them that having once faced about in the right direction the same amount of effort, properly directed, has achieved that for which the supernaturalists had for ages striven in vain.
Eating his due amount of food and attaching no mystical significance to anything, man tore his way through the heart of mountains, flashed his thoughts under the wastes of ocean, sent his voice across a thousand miles, sailed into the teeth of the wind, devoured space with steam, reared palaces more lofty than Aladdin dreamed of, and—his own Kobold—dived into the darkness and fetched up gold and gems more than the fairy tales ever knew. He made himself lord of the visible earth, of time, of distance, of wave and wind. He laid his hands upon all the forces which had awed his childhood and forced them to work miracles beside which the fables of the Kabbalists seemed tame and feeble. And in spite of this there remain men and women who are more awed by a banjo flying through a dark room than by the telephone; who find the untying of knots in a cabinet, or the clutches of damp hands when the lights are turned down, more important than the automobile. It is the attitude of mind of a child, who is more interested by rabbits coming out of a conjurer’s hat than by wireless telegraphy.
There is as great an inequality in the inheritance of health as in the heirship of wealth or brains. Some are born with a fortune of vigour and soundness so large that not a lifetime of eager squandering will leave them poor, and others enter the world paupers of so dire a need that no charity of medicine will ever raise them to comfort; but most of us have just that mediocre legacy of vitality which makes us indistinguishable units in the mass. It lies in the hands of each to improve or waste that property as he chooses, for there are self-made men physically as well as financially, and spendthrifts of health come to as sorrowful an end as prodigals of gold. The body is a realm where a wise ruler brings happiness as surely as a foolish one ensures distress, and wisdom here, as elsewhere, lies in the observance of natural laws.
It is just these natural laws—simple, severe, inexorable—against which the majority chafe, for which some magic pill or potion is offered as a substitute. Temperance, cleanliness, activity, are the three cardinal virtues of the body, as faith, hope, and charity are of the soul. As tithes of mint, anise, and cumin are easier to render than the observance of law, justice, and judgment, so burnt-offerings of drugs are offered to the Goddess Hygeia in place of obedience to her regimen. After the excesses of the carnival came the brief rigours of the Lenten retreat, and after the Fat Tuesday of gluttony comes the short atonement of the “Cure” at some mineral spring, where the priests of health are yielded a complete but passing submission. It is easier to repeat incessant formulæ of prayer than persistently to keep one’s self unspotted from the world, and it is easier for fat old sinners to paddle about barefoot in the dew at a Kneippe cure than to abandon at once and forever their little darling sins of greediness or indolence. One hears a constant cry of “Lo, Here!” and “Lo, There!” and all the world rushes to sit hopefully under blue glass or swathe itself in pure wool in the ever-renewed belief that some substitute may be found for the fatiguing necessity of obedience to the three rules.
Even yet ill health is considered as a sort of supernatural visitation rather than a certain result of the infringement of plain laws. I remember reading once a clever book, less popular than it deserved to be, which told of a country in the heart of the Andes in which the intelligent inhabitants looked upon crime as the unfortunate result of congenital temperament; a disease demanding sympathy and treatment; but ill health aroused only condemnation as a wilful infringement of wise and well understood laws. A bronchial case caused arrest and imprisonment, and friends of the family considered it rude to cough in the presence of the criminal’s unfortunate family; but a severe attack of embezzlement was cause of polite condolence, and cards were left upon the invalid with kind inquiries as to whether he was receiving the best moral attention. An idea less whimsical than it may seem.
Paracelsus—who was accused of magic because his cures were effected by such simple means—always asserted that if he were allowed to absolutely direct a child’s diet from its birth he could build up a constitution which might without difficulty be made to last out a century in undiminished vigour; and there are those who are prepared to accept literally the age of the antediluvian patriarchs, on the ground that as at that time bread had not been discovered, digestions never called upon to struggle with starch found no difficulty in sustaining life to Methuselah’s term.
It is certain that the subtle but supremely important chemistry of nutrition has been shamefully neglected in favour of matters far less germane to happiness, and that the same skill which has developed the science of bacteriology and pursued the most elusive microbe to his most secret lair might have been more profitably applied. After the microbe has been found and named his dangerousness remains unattenuated. How much more valuable would be a knowledge—equally attainable—of exactly the amount and nature of the food for the best results of growth and health.
There is a farmer ant in the West Indies, who, in a carefully prepared soil, compounded of flowers and leaves, grows a tiny fungus on which he feeds. The eggs of this ant seem, when hatched, to produce creatures all alike, but through different feeding they develop into warriors, farmers, or queens, as may be needed. If through an accident the supply of warriors is dangerously lowered, larvæ being fed with the meat which nourishes farmers are transferred to the soldiers’ nursery, and change of diet produces change of nature.
Ah! could we too know upon what meat to feed our Cæsars, or Roosevelts, that they might grow so great. What a much more important achievement that would be than the naming of microbes which would be impotent to injure a perfectly nourished body.
To know the law, to practise it daily—there is the secret of the fountain of youth, the elixir of life. These Christian Scientists, who practise the latest abracadabra to conjure away the effects of fixed causes, who dream that pain arises from sin, and can be abolished by faith, childishly overlook the fact that pain in itself is no evil, but rather a good. It is simply a telegraphic message sent over the nerve-wires to the brain to inform it that some member of the physical commonwealth is in danger and requires help.
Not by magic is health to be obtained. Flying carpets will not reach it. Fasts and prayers will not call it down from heaven. Fixed, immortal, the laws continue. Always unchanged; always inexorable. The wages of the sin of disobedience are disease.