How to Live - Eugene Lyman Fisk (top 100 novels of all time .txt) 📗
- Author: Eugene Lyman Fisk
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Conversely, an observance of the laws of hygiene affords wonderful results in producing vitality and endurance. Insurance companies are discovering that even weak and sick people, will, if they take good care of themselves, outlive those with robust constitutions who abuse them.
To those unfamiliar with the subject in its larger aspects, the possibilities seem almost beyond belief. As an example of the wonderful gains which can be secured by obeying the laws of hygiene may be cited the case of a young man who a few years ago was scarcely able to drag himself into the sun in Colorado, where he was endeavoring to rid himself of tuberculosis. He not only succeeded, but subsequently, by dint of following substantially all of the rules of hygiene here laid down, became an athlete and capable of running twenty-five miles for sheer love of sport and apparently without the overstrain experienced by “Marathon” runners. Kant and Humboldt are cases typical in different fields of achievement of many of the world’s most vital men who have actually made over their constitutions from weakness to strength. Cornaro says that it was the neglect of hygienic laws which made him all but a dead man at thirty-seven, and that the thoroughgoing reform of his habits which he then effected made him a centenarian. His rules, drawn up four hundred years ago and described in his interesting work “The Temperate Life,” are, so far as they are explained, almost identical with those given in this book. It is difficult to assign a limit to the good which can be accomplished by practising these rules and so minimizing the poisons which usually narrow and shorten our lives.
So far as science can reveal, there seems to be no principle limiting life. There are many good and bad reasons why men die, but no underlying necessary reason why they must die. The brilliant Carrel has kept tissue cells of animals alive outside of the body for the past three years. These cells are multiplying and growing, apparently unchanged by time, to all appearances immortal so long as they are periodically washed of poison and nourished in a proper medium. If we could at intervals thoroughly wash man free of his poisons and nourish him, there seems to be no reason why he should not live indefinitely.
Section V—Hygiene and CivilizationIn view of the vast extent of human misery from ill health, the question naturally arises, How does it happen that the world is burdened with so colossal a load? Is it no more than is biologically normal? Is it true that in other organisms, animals and plants, ill health is the rule rather than the exception? Are all races of men subject to the same heavy load?
These questions have not yet received sufficient attention. The answer seems to be that man is suffering from his own mistakes made unconsciously and in ignorance. He has upset the equilibrium which Nature had established among the various powers and activities of his body, and between himself and the outside world. Man has done mischief for his own body similar to what he has done for the natural resources on which he lives. In Professor Shaler’s epoch-making little book, “Man and the Earth,” he shows, for instance, that the little layer of soil on the surface of the earth from which plants and animals derive their nutriment was, before the advent of man, replenished quite as fast as it was washed away, but that after man had put his plow into it and had taken off the protective mat of vegetation, he unconsciously despoiled the accumulation of ages. “In a plowed field, an hour’s torrential rain may wash off to the sea more than would pass off in a thousand years in the slow process of erosion which the natural state of the earth permits.” He also shows that the constant croppings of the soil rob it of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements faster than Nature restores them. The problem of conservation is to reestablish the balance which has been lost through the depredations of man, for instance, to lessen soil-wash by terracing, and to restore to the soil the lost elements by supplying nitrates and phosphates and by other methods of scientific farming.
In the same way man has upset his pristine animal mode of living and needs to find scientific ways to restore the equilibrium. Most of the present-day problems of hygiene arise from introducing, uncompensated, the effects of certain devices of civilization. The inventions of civilization have done so much for man that he is apt to unduly glorify them and to overlook the injurious by-products. These by-products are often of prodigious significance to the race. The invention of houses introduced the problem of house hygiene; the invention of clothing, the problem of clothing hygiene; that of cooking, the problem of food hygiene; that of division of labor, the problem of industrial hygiene; and so on. To make these statements more concrete, we may consider some of them in more detail.
The invention of houses has made it possible for men to live in all climates, yet this indoor living is responsible for much disease. The houses give comfortable shelter and warmth and protect us from the elements and from wild animals. But the protection has been overdone. Like his cousin, the anthropoid ape, man is biologically an outdoor animal. His attempt at indoor living has worked him woe, but so gradually and subtly has it done so that only recently have we come to realize the fact. At first, dwellings were really outdoor affairs, caves, lean-tos, tents, huts with holes in the roof and the walls. These holes served to ventilate, though they were not intended for that purpose. The hole in the roof was to let out the smoke and the holes in the walls to let in the light. Gradually the roof-hole developed into a chimney with an open fireplace, which, in turn, gradually changed into a small flue for stoves whereupon it almost ceased to serve any ventilating function. The stove in turn has largely gone and is replaced in many cases by the hot-water or steam radiator, without any attempt at ventilation. The holes in the wall gave way, after the invention of glass, to windows which let in the light without letting in the air. Weather-strips, double windows, vestibule-doors, interior rooms, completed the process of depriving man of his outdoor air, shutting him into a cell in which he now lives—a sickened but complaisant prisoner—often twenty hours of the twenty-four. Tuberculosis, one of the worst scourges of mankind, is primarily a house disease. It is prevalent as indoor living is prevalent, and reaches its maximum in the tenement quarter of a great city.
Only by generations of natural selection could we expect to make man immune to the evils of bad air. The robust Indian and the Negro, whose races, until the last generation or two, roamed in the open, fell easy prey to tuberculosis as soon as they adopted the white man’s houses and clothes. The Anglo-Saxons who have withstood the influence of indoor living for several generations have, probably by the survival of the fittest, become a little better able to endure it, while the Jews, a race which has lived indoors longer than any other existing race, are now, probably by the same law of survival, the least liable to tuberculosis, except when exposed to especially unfavorable conditions of life.
But we, of this generation, can not afford to wait for natural selection to fit the race to an indoor environment; hence the supreme importance to us of air hygiene. We must compensate for the construction of our houses by insisting on open windows, or forced drafts, or electric fans, or open-air outings, or sleeping porches, or the practise of deep breathing, or all of these things.
In the same way, clothing has protected our bodies from the cold but enervated or constricted them as well. The aboriginal tribes, even in cold climates, seldom used clothing. The Eskimo is an exception. The tribes toward the South Pole in similarly cold climates often have little more clothing than a blanket which they hang over their shoulders toward the wind. The weak, pale skin—to whose lack of adaptability we owe the chilling preceding a cold—the bald head, the distorted foot, the corns upon it, the cramped waist, are among the results of clothing ourselves wrongly. Hence we are discovering the need of restoring, as far as we can, the original conditions by making our clothes more light, more loose, and more porous, and, when possible, by taking the “barefoot cure,” or the air bath.
We come next to foods, and note that civilization has invented cooking and artificial foods. These inventions have greatly widened the variety of man’s diet, but the foods of civilization are largely responsible for the decay of our teeth and the abuse of our digestive and eliminating organs.
Judging from man’s teeth and digestive apparatus as well as his general kinship to the anthropoid ape, it is reasonable to believe that, before fire was discovered, man was primarily a frugivorous animal, whose ordinary diet consisted of fruits, nuts, and tender shoots. While man still uses these fruits, nuts, and salads, his chief reliance is on prepared food, bread, butter, meat, and cooked vegetables. The diet of our progenitors must have been largely one requiring chewing, consisting, as it did, of hard fruits and stalks and perhaps also grains and flesh. Observation of manlike apes shows that they chew their food more thoroughly than man. Doubtless nuts constituted a considerable part of primitive food and required cracking by the teeth. The work we now do in flour-mills or the kitchen or with the knife and fork, was then done with the teeth. We even have our cook mash our potatoes and make puddings and pap of our food after it reaches the kitchen. Having already shirked most of the task of mastication by softening and cutting our food before it reaches our mouths, we shirk the rest of it by washing it down with water, or worse. An Italian dentist, who has had a wide range of observation, says that the knife and fork have committed “unpardonable crimes” by robbing the front teeth of their work of cutting. He sometimes prescribes for loose teeth the task of cutting a pound of bread daily. Whether any of it is swallowed or not is not important, but he insists that it must be cut by the teeth.
The deplorable lack of residue in modern food is one of the consequences of civilized life, for the bulky foods have been crowded out by concentrated foods, and, in many cases, the concentrated foods have been formed by getting rid of residue. Instead of chewing the sugar-cane, we use sugar, a concentrated extract which leaves no residue. We crush the juices from our fruits and throw away the pulp. We take the bran out of our grain and with it
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