CHAPTER XXVII 



THE MEANING OF HEALTH 



Questions. 1. Why is it important to know how different diseases are 

 caused ? 2. What is the best cure for disease ? 3. What kinds of disease 

 can be caused by the "evil eye" or by malicious wishing? 4. What dis- 

 ease can be cured by purely mental methods of healing ? 5. Which is 

 more powerful, the mind or the body ? 6. Why do doctors prescribe 

 drugs less than they used to ? 



214. Different notions about health and disease. There have 

 always been people who suffered from some ailment or other. 

 Perhaps nobody is perfectly well, although some people "ail" 

 much more than others. The first step toward curing sick 

 people is to know just what ails them, and the first step toward 

 preventing illness is to know what causes illness. 



People have thought that illness was caused by evil spirits 

 getting into the body— perhaps imps or devils. In such cases 

 the common-sense thing to do was to drive out the evil spirits 

 or devils by making it uncomfortable for them in the body of 

 the patient. So they would make loud, hideous sounds, or create 

 a disagreeable odor by burning various materials, or perhaps 

 give the patient something very bitter or nasty to take inside 

 (see frontispiece). 



Among other people the cause of disease was thought to be in 



a disproportion of the various juices, or "humors," of the body. 



Too much or too little of one juice made a person bilious or 



melancholy. The way to treat a person having too much juice 



of one kind or another was, of course, to remove the surplus. So 



they used to draw off some of the blood, either by cutting a vein 



or by means of a leech— a wormlike animal that attaches itself 



to the skin and sucks blood. The physician may be spoken of as 



a leech in some of the books that you will read. So probably 



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