Health and Education | Page 4

opinion, will grow up, especially

among educated women, which will prevent many a tragedy and save
many a life.
But, as to the laws of personal health: enough, and more than enough,
is known already, to be applied safely and easily by any adults,
however unlearned, to the preservation not only of their own health, but
of that of their children.
The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure air
and pure water, of various kinds of food, according as each tends to
make bone, fat, or muscle, provided only--provided only--that the food
be unadulterated; the value of various kinds of clothing, and physical
exercise, of a free and equal development of the brain-power, without
undue overstrain in any one direction; in one word, the method of
producing, as far as possible, the mentem sanam in corpore sano, and
the wonderful and blessed effects of such obedience to those laws of
nature, which are nothing but the good will of God expressed in
facts--their wonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the
germs of hereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human
system--all this is known; known as fully and clearly as any human
knowledge need be known; it is written in dozens of popular books and
pamphlets. And why should this divine voice, which cries to man,
tending to sink into effeminate barbarism through his own hasty and
partial civilisation,--"It is not too late. For your bodies, as for your
spirits, there is an upward, as well as a downward path. You, or if not
you, at least the children whom you have brought into the world, for
whom you toil, for whom you hoard, for whom you pray, for whom
you would give your lives,--they still may be healthy, strong, it may be
beautiful, and have all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical
advantages, which health, strength, and beauty give."--Ah, why is this
divine voice now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets, and no man
regarding her? I appeal to women, who are initiated, as we men can
never be, into the stern mysteries of pain, and sorrow, and
self-sacrifice;--they who bring forth children, weep over children, slave
for children, and, if they have none of their own, then slave, with the
holy instinct of the sexless bee, for the children of others--Let them say,
shall this thing be?

Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly. That I speak
neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man knows full well.
Not only as a very humble student of physiology, but as a parish priest
of thirty years' standing, I have seen so much unnecessary misery; and I
have in other cases seen similar misery so simply avoided; that the
sense of the vastness of the evil is intensified by my sense of the
easiness of the cure.
Why, then--to come to practical suggestions--should there not be
opened in every great town in these realms a public school of health? It
might connect itself with--I hold that it should form an integral part
of--some existing educational institute. But it should at least give
practical lectures, for fees small enough to put them within the reach of
any respectable man or woman, however poor. I cannot but hope that
such schools of health, if opened in the great manufacturing towns of
England and Scotland, and, indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast,
would obtain pupils in plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit
by what they hear. The people of these towns are, most of them,
specially accustomed by their own trades to the application of scientific
laws. To them, therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a
fresh set of facts, would have nothing strange in it. They have already
something of that inductive habit of mind which is the groundwork of
all rational understanding or action. They would not turn the deaf and
contemptuous ear with which the savage and the superstitious receive
the revelation of nature's mysteries. Why should not, with so hopeful an
audience, the experiment be tried far and wide, of giving lectures on
health, as supplementary to those lectures on animal physiology which
are, I am happy to say, becoming more and more common? Why
should not people be taught--they are already being taught at
Birmingham--something about the tissues of the body, their structure
and uses, the circulation of the blood, respiration, chemical changes in
the air respired, amount breathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption,
secretion, structure of the nervous system,--in fact, be taught something
of how their own bodies are made and how they work? Teaching of this
kind ought to, and will, in some more civilised age and country, be held
a necessary element in the