THE 2I0HAL ASD SOCIAL ASPECTS OF HEALTH. 



143 



the aloe existing and growing apart from its leaf 

 and root. If any one should bring himself to 

 doubt that increased civilization means increased 

 dependence of human beings on one another, let 

 him simply read the city articles in the Times. 

 Let him see there how an earthquake in Peru 

 brings desolation into an English parsonage. Let 

 him think how other widows than Bulgarian and 

 Bosnian have been ruined by Russian and Turk- 

 ish wars. Let him remember how Lancashire 

 starved because three hundred years ago Colum- 

 bus took Africans across the Atlantic. The fact 

 is, that the whole science of sociology, by far the 

 greatest and most momentous of the many acqui- 

 sitions of science in our century, consists in the 

 Study of this consensus — how it has grown, how 

 it works, how it can be modified. 



But we are here now to think of its effect on 

 health. Let us, then, compare the savage and 

 the civilized man in this respect. It is quite 

 clear at the outset that there is a balance of ad- 

 vantages which is not easy to strike. On the side 

 of the savage there is the open-air life ; the con- 

 stant muscular exercise ; there is the ignorance, 

 in most cases, of alcohol in all its forms from gin 

 to sherry; there is the weeding out, either by 

 direct infanticide or by rigorous climate, of un- 

 healthy elements in infancy ; there is the absence 

 of certain fearful hereditary blood-poisonings ; 

 there is the absence of harassing business and 

 harassing pleasures ; the fever of speculation, 

 mercantile, philosophical, or religious, is not 

 there — all these well-known causes of disease are 

 absent. And you find, as the result of it, that 

 the minute processes of growth go on differently 

 in the savage and in the dwellers in cities. I 

 well remember Livingstone, after his first journey 

 to Africa, telling me of his surgical operations, 

 removal of tumors, and so on. The two edges 

 of the cut skin grew together, he said, with ex- 

 traordinary rapidity. If you read Cook's voyages 

 you will find the same thing. We need not travel 

 so far as Africa and Polynesia to see this. A 

 savage, of course, approaches the state of a horse 

 or a dog. Wounds in horses or dogs heal with 

 the same rapidity. I do not mention this as an 

 excuse for vivisection either in the one case or in 

 the other. 



There are many obvious and weighty things, 

 no doubt, to be placed in the opposite scale of 

 the balance. The want of shelter, the want of 

 clothing, the want of warmth, the long intervals 

 of insufficient food, the absence of all those aids 

 and appliances of life which depend on helpful 

 intercourse of man with man— all these wei^h 



heavily on the other side. The brain, too, though 

 less easily goaded to dangerous excitement, is 

 more easily stupefied by paralyzing fear or de- 

 spondency. Perhaps it is from this reason that 

 epidemics are so fearfully fatal. Perhaps it is 

 also from this reason that at the sight of civilized 

 man, with his magic instruments of death and the 

 resistless appliances of his industry, hope and 

 energy are struck down. The wish to live, the 

 wish to reproduce their kind, ceases ; the race 

 dies out. Wise, enlightened, persevering sym- 

 pathy might possibly preserve them, and slowly 

 render back their strength. But that agency is 

 rarely at hand. 



I have touched, in passing, on many points 

 which it would be interesting to examine. But as 

 we are not proposing to go back, like Rousseau, 

 to the savage state, it interests us mainly from the 

 light it throws on the contrasted state of civilized 

 man. And, out of many aspects of the subject 

 that might be dwelt on, I would draw attention 

 specially to the two ways in which health is af- 

 fected by civilization, namely, first, that the body 

 is acted upon by a more active, more excitable, 

 and more complicated brain ; secondly, that there 

 is a more complicated and more stimulating social 

 environment. All this comes to the same thing 

 as saying that there is more life ; for life consists 

 in the adjustment of the interactions of organism 

 and environment. Where there are more of these 

 interactions, there is more life. Where the ad- 

 justment of these interactions goes on harmoni- 

 ously and without shock, there is health. And 

 since a complicated system is more difficult to 

 maintain in working than a simple system—since, 

 for instance, a watch or a steam-engine is more 

 difficult to keep in order than a windlass or a 

 plough— we may infer that, though health in 

 civilization may be more perfect, it most assured- 

 ly is more difficult, than health in savagery. 



Let us again compare some simple social states 

 with others that are less simple. If we are tired 

 of the savage, let us look at a peasant proprietor 

 in a French village, or at a wealthy squatter far 

 away among the gum-trees in Australia. The 

 contrast between their life and that of the dwell- 

 ers in large towns might, for many purposes, be 

 summed up in two epithets borrowed from geom- 

 etry (and you know modem mathematics are 

 capable of explaining everything). It might be 

 spoken of as the vertical state as opposed to the 

 horizontal. Remark that to the colonist it is of 

 comparatively — I need not say I lay great stress 

 on the word — little importance what his neighbor 

 or the rest of the world do. His food comes to a 



