PUBLIC HEALTH OP THE SKIN. 353 



terms between itself and nature; a part of the privileges of life is 

 ceded, and the various maladies appear. This is the history of one 

 class of physical evils, engendered by the neglected cleanliness, not 

 of years alone, but of generations. 



The private health of the skin subsists in the public health, pri- 

 vate cleanliness also in public, as a man in his society. There may 

 be excellent citizens in a debased community, and cleanly persons 

 in a dirty town; but the surrounding influences arc against them; 

 and they are good and clean in spite of example, by mere manhood 

 and as it were miracle. The labors of cleanliness, though cheerfully 

 undertaken, are Herculean and incessant. Often too they are un- 

 successful, for the laws of nature work in masses, and public neglect 

 is visited not unfrequently upon the just as well as upon the unjust. 

 Hence the necessity of treating these questions from the public side. 

 A clean house in a sooty town ; a well ventilated room with an ad- 

 jacent swamp or churchyard ; a chastened appetite with unwhole- 

 some provisions — these are the impossibilities which the prudent 

 ones are laboring to establish in the city and in the country. It is 

 plain, however, that things move all at once; that house and town, 

 room and sky, dietetics and food, are the same essence in different 

 quantities ; that the large is the continuation of the little, and vice 

 versa — the little the pensioner of the large; in short, that health 

 has two ends — the health of the man, and the health of the people; 

 which must be treated as one by doctors and clergy, because they 

 are tied into one by the Great Physician. 



But if a clean skin supposes in postscript a clean habitation, and 

 this a cleanly location; and if the skin functions preach to us to 

 cultivate purity in every field ; they also enjoin another lesson, of 

 warmth and clothing. The skin, as we have observed, is the gar- 

 ment of the organs (p. 278.) It has wonderful powers of keeping 

 us warm, and of moderating temperature (p. 270). Nakedly, how- 

 ever, it cannot stand against the extremes of heat and cold, but it 

 beseeches to be fenced with coats of other skins, derived by textile 

 skill from plant, worm, and fleecy animal. These too must con- 

 tinue the skin, have pores like the skin's, and be clean as the skin. 

 The duties of cleanliness recur in the clothes; the necessity of 

 warmth — in a word other clothes, is also broadly stated. The clothes 



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