A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind | Page 5

duty of a nurse with a great deal less trouble, than the
females of many other animals, who are obliged to be constantly going and coming with
no small labour and fatigue, one way to look out for their own subsistence, and another to
suckle and feed their young ones. True it is that, if the woman happens to perish, her
child is exposed to the greatest danger of perishing with her; but this danger is common
to a hundred other species, whose young ones require a great deal of time to be able to
provide for themselves; and if our infancy is longer than theirs, our life is longer likewise;
so that, in this respect too, all things are in a manner equal; not but that there are other
rules concerning the duration of the first age of life, and the number of the young of man
and other animals, but they do not belong to my subject. With old men, who stir and
perspire but little, the demand for food diminishes with their abilities to provide it; and as
a savage life would exempt them from the gout and the rheumatism, and old age is of all
ills that which human assistance is least capable of alleviating, they would at last go off,
without its being perceived by others that they ceased to exist, and almost without
perceiving it themselves.
In regard to sickness, I shall not repeat the vain and false declamations made use of to
discredit medicine by most men, while they enjoy their health; I shall only ask if there are
any solid observations from which we may conclude that in those countries where the
healing art is most neglected, the mean duration of man's life is shorter than in those
where it is most cultivated? And how is it possible this should be the case, if we inflict
more diseases upon ourselves than medicine can supply us with remedies! The extreme
inequalities in the manner of living of the several classes of mankind, the excess of
idleness in some, and of labour in others, the facility of irritating and satisfying our
sensuality and our appetites, the too exquisite and out of the way aliments of the rich,
which fill them with fiery juices, and bring on indigestions, the unwholesome food of the
poor, of which even, bad as it is, they very often fall short, and the want of which tempts
them, every opportunity that offers, to eat greedily and overload their stomachs;

watchings, excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of all the passions, fatigues,
waste of spirits, in a word, the numberless pains and anxieties annexed to every condition,
and which the mind of man is constantly a prey to; these are the fatal proofs that most of
our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided them all by adhering to
the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature. Allowing that
nature intended we should always enjoy good health, I dare almost affirm that a state of
reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.
We need only call to mind the good constitution of savages, of those at least whom we
have not destroyed by our strong liquors; we need only reflect, that they are strangers to
almost every disease, except those occasioned by wounds and old age, to be in a manner
convinced that the history of human diseases might be easily composed by pursuing that
of civil societies. Such at least was the opinion of Plato, who concluded from certain
remedies made use of or approved by Podalyrus and Macaon at the Siege of Troy, that
several disorders, which these remedies were found to bring on in his days, were not
known among men at that remote period.
Man therefore, in a state of nature where there are so few sources of sickness, can have
no great occasion for physic, and still less for physicians; neither is the human species
more to be pitied in this respect, than any other species of animals. Ask those who make
hunting their recreation or business, if in their excursions they meet with many sick or
feeble animals. They meet with many carrying the marks of considerable wounds, that
have been perfectly well healed and closed up; with many, whose bones formerly broken,
and whose limbs almost torn off, have completely knit and united, without any other
surgeon but time, any other regimen but their usual way of living, and whose cures were
not the less perfect for their not having been tortured with incisions, poisoned with drugs,
or worn out by diet and abstinence. In a word, however useful medicine well
administered may be to us