Characteristics 



when it is properly sustained and used. And chemicals, 

 even in sickness, are of less importance than fresh air, 

 light and proper food. He ridiculed, too, the notion of 

 unhealthy places. ''It is like," he wrote to Mr. Birch, 

 *' the old idea that every child must have measles, and 

 the sooner the better." To the same correspondent, who 

 was contemplating going into virgin forests and who ex- 

 pressed his fear of malaria, he replied : '' There is no 

 special danger of malaria or other diseases in a dense 

 forest region. I am sure this is a delusion, and the dense 

 virgin forests, even when swampy, are, in a state of nature, 

 perfectly healthy to live in. It is man's tampering with 

 them, and man's own bad habits of living, that render them 

 unhealthy. Having now gone over all Spruce's journals 

 and letters during his twelve years' life in and about the 

 Amazonian forests, I am sure this is so. And even where 

 a place is said to be notoriously ' malarious,' it is mostly 

 due not to infection only but to predisposition due to mal- 

 nutrition or some bad mode of living. A person living 

 healthily may, for the most part, laugh at such terrors. 

 Neither I nor Spruce ever got fevers when we lived in the 

 forests and were able to get wholesome food." '^Health,'* 

 he said to the present writer, " is the best resistant to disease, 

 and not the artificial giving of a mild form of a disea-se in 

 order to render the body immune to it for a season. Vaccina- 

 tion is not only condemned upon the statistics which are 

 used to uphold it, but it is a false principle — unscientific, 

 and therefore doomed to fail in the end." Besides which, 

 he believed in mental healing, and had recorded definite 

 and certain benefit from spiritual " healers." And he re- 

 minded himself that amongst doctors (witness the blind 

 opposition encountered by Lister's discoveries) were found 

 from time to time not a few enemies of the true healing art, 

 and obstinate defenders of many forms of quackery. 

 Q 241 



