Health and Education | Page 5

school-course of every child, just as
necessary as reading, writing, and arithmetic; for it is after all the most

necessary branch of that "technical education" of which we hear so
much just now, namely, the technic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and
well.
But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition of
health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those diseases
specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of townsfolk,
exposed to an artificial mode of life. Surely young men and women
should be taught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of
scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and
such like. They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure
water, unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings. Is there one of
them, man or woman, who would not be the safer and happier, and the
more useful to his or her neighbours, if they had acquired some sound
notions about those questions of drainage on which their own lives and
the lives of their children may every day depend? I say--women as well
as men. I should have said women rather than men. For it is the women
who have the ordering of the household, the bringing up of the children;
the women who bide at home, while the men are away, it may be at the
other end of the earth.
And if any say, as they have a right to say--"But these are subjects
which can hardly be taught to young women in public lectures;" I
rejoin,--Of course not, unless they are taught by women,--by women, of
course, duly educated and legally qualified. Let such teach to women,
what every woman ought to know, and what her parents will very
properly object to her hearing from almost any man. This is one of the
main reasons why I have, for twenty years past, advocated the training
of women for the medical profession; and one which countervails, in
my mind, all possible objections to such a movement. And now, thank
God, I am seeing the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of
every civilised nation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to
me, when I first conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished
save in secret--the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred
office of healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from which
she was thrust out during the sixteenth century.

I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health Society,
{15} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my readers,
announces a "Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary Physiology
and Hygiene, by Miss Chessar," to which I am also most happy to see,
governesses are admitted at half-fees. Alas! how much misery, disease,
and even death, might have been prevented, had governesses been
taught such matters thirty years ago, I, for one, know too well. May the
day soon come when there will be educated women enough to give
such lectures throughout these realms, to rich as well as poor,--for the
rich, strange to say, need them often as much as the poor do,--and that
we may live to see, in every great town, health classes for women as
well as for men, sending forth year by year more young women and
young men taught, not only to take care of themselves and of their
families, but to exercise moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as
champions in the battle against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.
There may be those who would answer--or rather, there would certainly
have been those who would have so answered thirty years ago, before
the so-called materialism of advanced science had taught us some
practical wisdom about education, and reminded people that they have
bodies as well as minds and souls--"You say, we are likely to grow
weaklier, unhealthier. And if it were so, what matter? Mind makes the
man, not body. We do not want our children to be stupid giants and
bravos; but clever, able, highly educated, however weakly Providence
or the laws of nature may have chosen to make them. Let them
overstrain their brains a little; let them contract their chests, and injure
their digestion and their eyesight, by sitting at desks, poring over books.
Intellect is what we want. Intellect makes money. Intellect makes the
world. We would rather see our son a genius than an athlete." Well: and
so would I. But what if intellect alone does not even make money, save
as Messrs. Dodson & Fogg, Sampson Brass, and Montagu Tigg were
wont to make it, unless backed by an able, enduring, healthy physique,
such as I have seen, almost without exception, in those successful men
of business whom I