PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 597 



from their own symptoms, which, in fact, are so many alarm-signals, 

 but from the obstacle which has forced the vital process to deviate 

 from its normal course. Pain, in all its forms, is an appeal for help, 

 and the urgency of the appeal corresponds to the degree of the dis- 

 tress ; probably, also, to the possibility of relieving that distress. A 

 deadly blow stuns the vital forces yield without a struggle. The 

 last stage of pulmonary consumption is a comparatively painless deli- 

 quium when a conflagration grows uncontrollable, the alarm-bells 

 cease to ring. Yellow-fever doctors give up their patients for lost 

 when the burning headache changes into a lethargic stupor. The last 

 sensations of drowning, strangled, and freezing persons are said to be 

 rather pleasurable than otherwise. In certain cases the appeal for 

 help continues into an apparently hopeless stage of the disease. Ap- 

 parently, I say : Nature is too practical to waste her efforts on a for- 

 lorn hope ; her resistance yields to necessity ; and, when the art of 

 healing shall devote itself to the exegesis of disease rather than to the 

 exorcism of its symptoms, that rule will probably be found to apply to 

 pathology as well as to chemistry and ethics. 



All bodily ailments are more or less urgent appeals for help ; nor 

 can we doubt in what that help should consist. The more fully we 

 understand the nature of any disease, the more clearly we see that the 

 discovery of the cause means the discovery of the cure. Many sick- 

 nesses are caused by poisons, foisted upon the system under the name 

 of tonic beverages or remedial drugs ; the only cure is to eschew the 

 poison. Others, by habits more or less at variance with the health 

 laws of Nature ; to cure such we have to reform our habits. There is 

 nothing accidental, and rarely anything inevitable, about a disease ; we 

 can safely assume that nine out of ten complaints have been caused 

 and can be cured by the sufferers (or their nurses) themselves. " God 

 made man upright " ; every prostrating malady is a deviation from 

 the state of Nature. The infant, " mewling and puking in its nurse's 

 arms," is an abnormal phenomenon. Infancy should be a period of 

 exceptional health ; the young of other creatures are healthier, as well 

 as prettier, purer, and merrier, than the adults, yet the childhood years 

 of the human animal are the years of sorest sickliness ; statistics show 

 that among the Caucasian races men of thirty have more hope to reach 

 a good old age than a new-bom child has to reach the end of its second 

 year. The reason is this : the health theories of the average Christian 

 man and woman are so egregiously wrong, that only the opposition of 

 their better instincts helps them against their conscience, as it were 

 to maintain the struggle for a tolerable existence with anything like 

 success, while the helpless infant has to conform to those theories 

 with the above results. 



*' I have long ceased to doubt," says Dr. Schrodt, " that, apart 

 from the effects of wounds, the chances of health or disease are 

 in our own hands ; and, if people knew only half the facts point- 



