no more go down, nor her moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be her everlasting light, and the days of her mourning shall be ended.

ART. V.-HEALTH AND DISEASE.

The Use of the Body in relation to the Mind. By GEORGE MOORE, M.D. New York: Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff Street. 1848.

Health, Disease and Remedy, familiarly and practically considered. By GEORGE MOORE, M.D. Harper & Brothers, 82

Cliff Street.

1850.

Dr. Howe's Reports upon the Training and Teaching of Idiots. 1847 and 8, and 1850.

Treatise on Insanity. By PRICHARD. London. 1835.

Constitution of Man. By GEORGE COMBE. Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon. 1833.

THOSE who are in the habit of saying the Lord's prayer are quite certain that the common is not necessarily commonplace; such persons will surely excuse things in this present writing which may seem to them old and stale, provided they are true; because their hope and ours rests upon that which is or is to be common and patent to all mankind. The views which it is proposed to reassert with regard to the body, some of its uses and abuses, cannot claim the merit of novelty, but they may nevertheless be true, and of course of service to every one living. It may safely be assumed that to the rising and reading generation, many facts and views respecting the physical life will be new, which are, to those who have passed the culminating point in our journey here, as familiar as household words; to each generation therefore, old truths must be presented with such new light as advancing time more and more supplies. In this age of bustle particularly, when mind is at work upon matter with its sleepless energy, and "the mind" is everywhere talked about and written about, till one's own is lost in a metaphysical mäelstrom, it becomes us to assert with what voice we have, the DIGNITY of the BODY; to say that there are laws too respecting it, which cannot be transgressed with impunity: and further to affirm in the most serious manner that so far as this world and its duties are in question, a perfectly sane mind is impossible with

out a sane body, and that just in so far as we wrong our bodies, so far we unfit our minds for full and healthy exercise, and it be sow the seeds of sorrow and suffering for those who shall follow us.

may

When we read of the Moor, who, enjoying the sunshine in the street of Seville, refuses to move his legs from the wheel track, because if it is "God's will" that his legs should be broken he is willing to bear it patiently, we are apt to smile at or to pity his fatalistic belief. But let us look at home, and how is the fact presented? The student enjoys his dinner and eats-but he sits in his chair and works not;-when dyspepsia comes, and in its train the hordes of thieves and vagabonds who rob him of peace and rest, stripping the mind down to its very nerves, does he not say, "How am I afflicted! Oh God, I pray for help"? He forgets that God's help is toward those who keep themselves by searching to know his will-his law-and to do it. Who among us has not heard from time to time when some man has fallen in his prime, or some woman has been reaped in the fullness of her womanhood, "How mysterious are the ways of God!" Yet it may be worth while for every person to ask himself or herself seriously what this means-whether this may not be fatalism more disastrous than that of Islam. For surely the abridgment of life has not been arbitrary in these cases; it is only an ordinary result of the operation of natural laws. Every physician knows, and every reflecting man knows or may know, that a person who is born healthy, and has been left to grow up healthfully; who controls his appetites, and inquires honestly and continually of his own nature and constitution, listening to the warnings and heeding them, may enjoy almost uninterrupted good health. If it be true, then, that HEALTH is the law, and DISEASE the consequence of the violation of law, it is a matter of the first importance for every man and woman to know it. And will any one seriously question this, that a healthy child, well brought up, by good (not great) attention to exercise (work), diet, cleanliness, and cheerfulness, will avoid nearly all (nearly, because at the present, perfect life is not attainable) the diseases now so common, and all except those which come from malaria and contagion, perhaps even these? Will any seriously deny that a little careful observation, begun with manhood, of himself and those about him, will enable a man to learn what are the great fundamental laws upon which sanity rests? which he cannot disobey without paying the penalty to the utmost farthing? These natural laws are universal and as rigid as iron, effect following upon cause as surely as the cause is :-" If you prick us, says the seer, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh! if you poi

son us, do we not die?" Jew and Christian alike!-The headache follows the debauch, indigestion is the shadow of indolence, nausea warns us from tobacco, the blister tells us that fire burnsthere is no escape from these things! Everywhere, and always, the angel of God stands with a drawn sword to turn us back, and how is the man equal to the ass if he heed him not!--Many will believe upon testimony what their own sense will not teach; listen then to the witness.

"There is no example of men in any country enjoying the mild and generous internal joys, and the outward esteem and love that attend obedience to the moral law while they give themselves up to the dominion of brutal propensities. There is no example in any latitude or longitude, or in any age, of men who entered life with a constitution in perfect harmony with the organic laws, and who continued to obey these laws throughout, being in consequence of this obedience visited with pains and disease; and there are no instances of men who were born with constitutions at variance with the organic laws, and who lived in habitual disobedience to them, enjoying that sound health, and vigor of body, that are the rewards of obedience."-Const. of Man, p. 25.

It is true that multitudes live on from day to day, many in ignorance of, many in direct opposition to, the known requirements of a sane body, without experiencing any remarkable punishment; and if their ails and aches are charged upon their selfindulgence or self-neglect, nearly all are ready to slip from under the weight, thankful they are not so bad as this or that other one. Some know that a good constitution may distribute these penalties (of sickness) over a long life :-see the hypocondriacs and invalids-but they also know that nature may bear up against ill usage till it can bear no longer, and the crisis, always unexpected, comes; the glass of life is broken, its sands scattered, and then the shortness and uncertainty of this life are brought home to men, too often without the lesson which they should teach.-Let us ask here why it is that animals, guided by instinct, always reject what is noxious, always resort to exercise in proportion as they eat, while the contrary so commonly prevails among men? Perhaps we may find an answer in Kidd's Bridgewater Treatise (p. 20). "Probably, however, it would be nearer the truth, were we to say that man if divested of his intellectual powers, and endued merely with his animal nature, would be inferior to the brutes; for possessing, as is the case, very few of the prospective or preservative instincts, he would be unable, without the aid of his intellectual powers, to provide for some of his most important wants."

Constituted as man is of body and soul, the animal and the spiritual, the human and the divine, the purpose of his life here seems to be to overcome the lower by the higher, to control and subdue all fleshly lusts, which war against the high, the true element of 15

VOL. IX.

his nature, and thus to bring himself into harmony with the divine law, and work out in himself the problem of humanity. Just so far as a man does this, does he fulfill the purposes of his existence, and just so far as he neglects to do this, does he sink in the scale of being, and approach, till in some cases we may fear he reaches, that worse than animal existence, spoken of in the extract. Having these nobler faculties of observation and reflection of Reason-we are called upon daily and hourly to use them; to find out the qualities and relations of things by their exercise; to inquire of our own souls, of nature, and of history and revelation, what are these laws by which we are to regulate ourselves, body as well as soul, the temporal as well as the spiritual?-to find exquisite gratification in their discovery, and health and holiness in obedience to them, or, else, to pay the penalty of our ignorance or wickedness.

And let it not be supposed that a man need be wise in the craft of the leech, or mysterious in the virtues of pills, but every one should be and must be willing to learn, and honest to apply such knowledge. If indulgence brings disease, he will try to show his manhood-not in smoking, not in drinking-but by cleansing some mental or moral waste, rather than by fouling the home of his own soul: if he finds that stuffing and gormandizing produce repletion and discomfort, he will learn the folly of dig ging his grave with his teeth. If he finds that excessive bodily toil, resulting in exhaustion and lethargy to soul and intellect, is necessary to secure the prizes of this world-luxuries and gold -he will turn his face from these.

With sensual temptations on every hand, the young person (man and woman) will be fain to learn from individual experience wherein the secret of the fascination lies; and the difference between the wise one and the fool lies mainly in this: that the one having tasted of the Sodom fruit ever afterward refuses it: while the other fiercely feeds and is not satisfied. The one finds, from one experiment or more, that the words of the wise are true, and himself learns wisdom; while the other will try each vice and each indulgence, and life wears itself away whilst his folly does not abate.

But besides the duties the individual owes himself, there are still more important duties which he owes to others. And we think the time has come to speak again of the duties of parents to their children, for fearful does their responsibility become if these be overlooked or abused. That affection stronger than death is for what? Certainly, not to be shown in pampering, in weak and foolish indulgence, not to be made a jackall to feed their own vanity, too often to the injury of the body and soul

of the child; but that they may be led by it to guard the innocent and helpless young being against the breath, the suspicion of harm: let parents remember that, humanly speaking, the body is from them, though the spirit is from God, and then ask themselves what are their duties as to that beautiful home which is to be furnished from above? How has the parental heart been wrung with anguish at the misfortunes of a deformed, a weakly, an imbecile or idiotic child? Let those who have known, answer, and let those who have not, watch and pray that they may be spared. Cases unquestionably occur of persons who marry and become the parents of such children, who might have known that in all probability it would be so; but let us hope that it is in ignorance, and not from any willful indulgence of affection or appetite. The importance of the subject presses upon us now, when we see the habits of city life, radiating by every railway into the country, and sentiment and muslin usurping the domain of health and sense; so that young women are becoming politely_pale, and a healthy woman would be a prize for the showman. Effete and diseased nations were once recuperated by the hordes of wild health which came out from that birth-place of life, the Caucasus and India; but where shall we look for strength, if what we now have, is wantonly or ignorantly lost? We must learn and we must obey. Let us introduce our readers to the pages of Dr. Moore (Health, Disease and Remedy, p. 193):The excessively refined are nearly on a par with the most depraved and ill-conditioned in respect to the propagation of deformity and disease. Insanity, rickets, scrofula, gout and consumption are apt to be hereditary; but an unhappy pair whose habits of body and mind are not those of obedience to order, and to Heaven, may yet, though untainted by these maladies, be the means of introducing these and other disorders of conformation and of temper among their offspring. And on the contrary, it is possible for persons predisposed to such diseases, so completely to improve the whole economy of their bodies by proper attention to their habits, and by training themselves in the right use of diet, air and exercise, and by the practice of all that is understood by temperance and virtue, that their children shall be entirely free from inherited diseases." Again, "During a prolonged period mother and child form together but one living system, and whatever injures the mother's constitution also involves that of her progeny in the mischief, not only while they are in the fullest sense vitally united, but also when the infant is to absorb the breath of life itself." But to enforce this view, let us turn to p. 16 of Dr. Howe's report, for 1850, to the Massachusetts Legislature, as to Idiocy, its causes, &c., &c. :