Hitman Physiology. 



would alter its action, by a hairbreadth, to save you from your 

 folly or ignorance. So is it with sanitary laws. Swift, stern, 

 inexorable, and invariable in their action, they punish all viola- 

 tions. Yet man was not born into the world that he might 

 pine and die, but that he might grow in vigour, and live his 

 allotted period. Health is the normal state of obedience to 

 law, disease the penalty of its infringement. In consequence 

 of this disobedience, our kingdom has 110,000 lives ruthlessly 

 sacrificed every year, while 220,000 people are needlessly sick 

 all the year round. And why? Because neither our rulers 

 nor our people will become acquainted with and obey simple 

 sanitary laws. No epidemic can resist thorough cleanliness 

 and ventilation. There was a period of a thousand years, 

 during the dark middle ages, when not a man or woman in 

 Europe ever took a bath, and during a century of that time it 

 lost forty millions of its population by plague, the disease of 

 excessive filth. Now plenty of good air, good water, and the 

 removal of all garbage from the interior and exterior of dwell- 

 ings, forms the conditions of public as well as of private health 

 in one word, cleanliness in our towns and in our persons. 

 It is a law simple to learn and simple to apply, but our pride 

 revolts against it, as did the leper of old, when he was told to 

 'wash himself in the Jordan. 'If a prophet had bid us do 

 some great thing, would we not have done it ; how much rather, 

 when he saith unto us, Wash and be clean.' " 



It has long seemed to me that one of the most important 

 measures for the prevention of disease would be an entire 

 change in the status of the medical profession. Doctors may 

 be the best of men, but they are still men, and they are 

 directly interested in the prevalence and spread of diseases. 

 Glaziers do not, as a rule, go about breaking windows; but 

 can we reasonably expect the average glazier to hope that no 

 windows will be broken, or that he will enter very heartily into 

 any extensive scheme for the prevention of such accidents? 



