THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH

Whether the British race is improving or degenerating?  What, if it seem probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil?  How they can be, if not destroyed, at least arrested?—These are questions worthy the attention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father and mother in these isles.  I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay; and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers and mothers of every class, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of convincing some of them at least that the science of health, now so utterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be taught—the rudiments of it at least—in every school, college, and university.

We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly.  But they were hardy, just as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived.  They may have been able to say of themselves—as they do in a state paper of 1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude—“What comyn folk of all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity?  What comyn folk is so mighty, and so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?”  They may have been fed on “great shins of beef,” till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini calls them, “the English wild beasts.”  But they increased in numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries.  Those terrible laws of natural selection, which issue in “the survival of the fittest,” cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and enterprising race.

At last came a sudden and unprecedented change.  In the first years of the century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in the population.  Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married, brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt to live more or less civilised lives.  An event, doubtless, for which God is to be thanked.  A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices and new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new noblenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that duty should be done.  It is childish to regret the old times, when our soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms.  To murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at the will of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.

 
“The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
 

Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care of the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise.  And it may do so thus:—

The rapid increase of population during the first half of this century began at a moment when the British stock was specially exhausted; namely, about the end of the long French war.  There may have been periods of exhaustion, at least in England, before that.  There may have been one here, as there seems to have been on the Continent, after the Crusades; and another after the Wars of the Roses.  There was certainly a period of severe exhaustion at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, due both to the long Spanish and Irish wars and to the terrible endemics introduced from abroad; an exhaustion which may have caused, in part, the national weakness which hung upon us during the reign of the Stuarts.  But after none of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly become more easy; or the discovery of steam power, and the acquisition of a colonial empire, create at once a fresh demand for human beings and a fresh supply of food for them.  Britain, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was in an altogether new social situation.

At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since the beginning of the war with Spain in 1739—often snubbed as the “war about Jenkins’s ear”—but which was, as I hold, one of the most just, as it was one of the most popular, of all our wars; after, too, the once famous “forty fine harvests” of the eighteenth century, the British people, from the gentleman who led to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one of the mightiest and most capable races which the world has ever seen, comparable best to the old Roman, at his mightiest and most capable period.  That, at least, their works testify.  They created—as far as man can be said to create anything—the British Empire.  They won for us our colonies, our commerce, the mastery of the seas of all the world.  But at what a cost—

 
“Their bones are scattered far and wide,
By mount, and stream, and sea.”
 

Year after year, till the final triumph of Waterloo, not battle only, but worse destroyers than shot and shell—fatigue and disease—had been carrying off our stoutest, ablest, healthiest young men, each of whom represented, alas! a maiden left unmarried at home, or married, in default, to a less able man.  The strongest went to the war; each who fell left a weaklier man to continue the race; while of those who did not fall, too many returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, to injure, it may be, generations yet unborn.  The middle classes, being mostly engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to this very day.  One cannot walk the streets of any of our great commercial cities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle-aged, whose whole bearing and stature shows that the manly vigour of our middle class is anything but exhausted.  In Liverpool, especially, I have been much struck not only with the vigorous countenance, but with the bodily size of the mercantile men on ’Change.  But it must be remembered always, first, that these men are the very élite of their class; the cleverest men; the men capable of doing most work; and next, that they are, almost all of them, from the great merchant who has his villa out of town, and perhaps his moor in the Highlands, down to the sturdy young volunteer who serves in the haberdasher’s shop, country-bred men; and that the question is, not what they are like now, but what their children and grand-children, especially the fine young volunteer’s, will be like?  And a very serious question I hold that to be; and for this reason:

War is, without doubt, the most hideous physical curse which fallen man inflicts upon himself; and for this simple reason, that it reverses the very laws of nature, and is more cruel even than pestilence.  For instead of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn.  And yet a peace such as we now enjoy, prosperous, civilised, humane, is fraught, though to a less degree, with the very same ill effect.

In the first place, tens of thousands—Who knows it not?—lead sedentary and unwholesome lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small a fraction of their bodies as of their minds.  And all this in dwellings, workshops, what not?—the influences, the very atmosphere of which tend not to health, but to unhealth, and to drunkenness as a solace under the feeling of unhealth and depression.  And that such a life must tell upon their offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similar circumstances, upon their offspring’s offspring, till a whole population may become permanently degraded, who does not know?  For who that walks through the by-streets of any great city does not see?  Moreover, and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation has to deal—we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself.  If war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who—looking at them from a merely physical point of view—are most fit to die.  Everything which makes it more easy to live; every sanatory reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which has—so I am told—increased the average length of life in these islands, by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of least resisting power; who are thus preserved to produce in time a still less powerful progeny.

Do I say that we ought not to save these people, if we can?  God forbid.  The weakly, the diseased, whether infant or adult, is here on earth; a British citizen; no more responsible for his own weakness than for his own existence.  Society, that is, in plain English, we and our ancestors, are responsible for both; and we must fulfil the duty, and keep him in life; and, if we can, heal, strengthen, develop him to the utmost; and make the best of that which “fate and our own deservings” have given us to deal with.  I do not speak of higher motives still; motives which to every minister of religion must be paramount and awful.  I speak merely of physical and social motives, such as appeal to the conscience of every man—the instinct which bids every human-hearted man or woman to save life, alleviate pain, like Him who causes His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust.

But it is palpable, that in so doing we must, year by year, preserve a large percentage of weakly persons, who, marrying freely in their own class, must produce weaklier children, and they weaklier children still.  Must, did I say?  There are those who are of opinion—and I, after watching and comparing the histories of many families, indeed, of every one with whom I have come in contact for now five-and-thirty years, in town and country, can only fear that their opinion is but too well founded on fact—that in the great majority of cases, in all classes whatsoever, the children are not equal to their parents, nor they, again, to their grandparents of the beginning of the century; and that this degrading process goes on most surely, and most rapidly, in our large towns, and in proportion to the antiquity of those towns, and therefore in proportion to the number of generations during which the degrading influences have been at work.

This and cognate dangers have been felt more and more deeply, as the years have rolled on, by students of human society.  To ward them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I fear, still less for their common-sense.  For the theorist in his closet is certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those broad facts of human nature which every active parish priest, medical man, or poor-law guardian has to face every day of his life.

Society and British human nature are what they have become by the indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the one than we can change the other.  We can no more mend men by theories than we can by coercion—to which, by the by, almost all these theorists look longingly as their final hope and mainstay.  We must teach men to mend their own matters, of their own reason, and their own free-will.  We must teach them that they are the arbiters of their own destinies; and, to a fearfully great degree, of their children’s destinies after them.  We must teach them not merely that they ought to be free, but that they are free, whether they know it or not, for good and for evil.  And we must do that in this case, by teaching them sound practical science; the science of physiology, as applied to health.  So, and so only, can we check—I do not say stop entirely—though I believe even that to be ideally possible; but at least check the process of degradation which I believe to be surely going on, not merely in these islands, but in every civilised country in the world, in proportion to its civilisation.

It is still a question whether science has fully discovered those laws of hereditary health, the disregard of which causes so many marriages disastrous to generations yet unborn.  But much valuable light has been thrown on this most mysterious and most important subject during the last few years.  That light—and I thank God for it—is widening and deepening rapidly.  And I doubt not that, in a generation or two more, enough will be known to be thrown into the shape of practical and proveable rules; and that, if not a public opinion, yet at least, what is more useful far, a wide-spread private opinion, will grow up, especially among educated women, which will prevent many a tragedy and save many a life.

But, as to the laws of personal health: enough, and more than enough, is known already, to be applied safely and easily by any adults, however unlearned, to the preservation not only of their own health, but of that of their children.

The value of healthy habitations, of personal cleanliness, of pure air and pure water, of various kinds of food, according as each tends to make bone, fat, or muscle, provided only—provided only—that the food be unadulterated; the value of various kinds of clothing, and physical exercise, of a free and equal development of the brain-power, without undue overstrain in any one direction; in one word, the method of producing, as far as possible, the mentem sanam in corpore sano, and the wonderful and blessed effects of such obedience to those laws of nature, which are nothing but the good will of God expressed in facts—their wonderful and blessed tendency, I say, to eliminate the germs of hereditary disease, and to actually regenerate the human system—all this is known; known as fully and clearly as any human knowledge need be known; it is written in dozens of popular books and pamphlets.  And why should this divine voice, which cries to man, tending to sink into effeminate barbarism through his own hasty and partial civilisation,—“It is not too late.  For your bodies, as for your spirits, there is an upward, as well as a downward path.  You, or if not you, at least the children whom you have brought into the world, for whom you toil, for whom you hoard, for whom you pray, for whom you would give your lives,—they still may be healthy, strong, it may be beautiful, and have all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical advantages, which health, strength, and beauty give.”—Ah, why is this divine voice now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets, and no man regarding her?  I appeal to women, who are initiated, as we men can never be, into the stern mysteries of pain, and sorrow, and self-sacrifice;—they who bring forth children, weep over children, slave for children, and, if they have none of their own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the sexless bee, for the children of others—Let them say, shall this thing be?

Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly.  That I speak neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man knows full well.  Not only as a very humble student of physiology, but as a parish priest of thirty years’ standing, I have seen so much unnecessary misery; and I have in other cases seen similar misery so simply avoided; that the sense of the vastness of the evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness of the cure.