Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



and apparently final stage in the process we call 

 Civilisation ; at that stage it has always succumbed 

 or been arrested. 



Of. course it may at first sound extravagant 

 to use the word disease in connection with Civilisa- 

 tion at all, but a little thought should show that 

 the association is not ill-grounded. To take the 

 matter on its physical side first, I find that in 

 Mullhall's Dictionary of Statistics (1884) the number 

 of accredited doctors and surgeons in the United 

 Kingdom is put at over 23,000. If the extent 

 of the national sickness is such that we require 

 23,000 medical men to attend to us, it must surely 

 be rather serious ! And they do not cure us. 

 Wherever we look to-day, in mansion or in slum, 

 we see the features and hear the complaints of 

 ill-health ; the difficulty is really to find a healthy 

 person. The state of the modern civilised man in 

 this respect — our coughs, colds, mufflers, dread of 

 a waft of chill air, &c. — is anything but creditable, 

 and it seems to be the fact that, notwithstanding 

 all our libraries of medical science, our know- 

 ledges, arts, and appliances of life, we are actually 

 less capable of taking care of ourselves than the 

 animals are. Indeed, talking of animals, we are 

 — as Shelley I think points out — fast depraving 

 the domestic breeds. The cow, the horse, the sheep, 

 and even the confiding pussy-cat, are becoming 

 ever more and more subject to disease, and are 

 liable to ills which in their wilder state they knew 

 not of. And finally the savage races of the earth 

 do not escape the baneful influence. Wherever 



16 



