How to Live by Eugene Lyman Fisk (adult books to read txt) đź“•
[Sidenote: Card-playing]
Card-playing and similar games afford wholesome mental recreation for some persons. However, they, too, are liable to be associated with late hours, and other disadvantages even when they do not degenerate into gambling. Card-playing, dancing, and many other popular forms of amusement often border on dissipation.
[Sidenote: Suicidal Amusement]
Amusements which weaken and degrade are not hygienic.
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The hurry habit, another unfortunate by-product of civilized life, is one of the chief promoters of indigestion. In civilization we live by the clock. We schedule our trains and crowd our meal-time to catch them. We make engagements in neglect of the requirements of digestion. We have, in consequence, as one of the institutions of civilization, the “quick-lunch counter.” At first we bolted a meal purposely and consciously. Later we formed the habit of food-bolting, and it now seems quite natural.
To the door of the hurry habit may also be laid the excessive use of flesh foods. Carnivorous animals bolt their food. Frugivorous animals, to which class the human race properly belongs, eat slowly. But when, through the perversions of civilized life, frugivorous man is forced to eat as fast as the carnivores, he instinctively adopts a similar diet. As someone has expressed it “when we eat as fast as a dog, we naturally crave the food of a dog.” Our apelike progenitors had few, if any, flesh foods and only those which they could catch with the hand and eat raw. Our eliminating organs, the liver and the kidneys, have been framed to meet the demands of man’s natural diet, but not adapted to handle the diet of civilized men in the excessive use of flesh foods and the use of alcohol. These organs are, fortunately or unfortunately, provided with a large factor of safety and can stand a great deal of abuse, but the cumulative effect of this abuse, especially when combined with an unhygienic life in general, sooner or later leads to disaster. Our tastes have also been perverted. The appetite is very likely to be innocently misled by the delicacies which civilization has invented, as well as by the tricks of cooking, seasoning, and preparing. For this reason, we can not trust, as thoroughly as we would like, the ordinary leadings of taste. The solution of this problem of nutrition, like the solution of the housing problem, must be sought by retaining the advantageous food customs which we now find about us and substituting scientific customs for the disadvantageous ones.
It would be impossible to enumerate all the inventions of civilization which have brought us difficult problems of individual hygiene. We shall name only a few more. The invention of chairs, though adding to human convenience, has tended to produce wrong posture, from which spinal, nervous and digestive disturbances follow. The invention of the alphabet and of printing has made possible the accumulation of knowledge, but has promoted eye-strain with a great train of attendant evils. The device of division of labor has created much wealth, but destroyed the normal balance of mental and physical work, recreation and rest. From this follow occupational diseases of overstrain, bad posture, industrial poisons, and a craving for narcotics. A combination of conditions has lessened the opportunities for prompt discharge of the body waste, and so led to dulling of the reflex which promotes defecation. We are only just beginning to realize how serious are the consequences.
We have described many of the unhygienic practises common to-day as direct results of upsetting Nature’s equilibrium. Others are indirect results. These latter practises may be described as attempts to remedy the evils of the former, the “remedies,” however, being often worse than the diseases. Much of our drugging, some of our wrong food habits and not a little of our immorality are simply crude and unscientific attempts to compensate for disturbances or deviations from a normal life. We wake ourselves up, as it were, with caffein, move our bowels with a cathartic, induce an appetite with a cocktail, seek rest from the day’s fatigue and worries in nicotin, and put ourselves to sleep with an opiate. In these practises we are evidently trying in wrong ways to compensate respectively for insufficient sleep, insufficient peristalsis, indigestion, overfatigue, and insomnia—evils due, as previously explained, to upsetting Nature’s balance, between work, play, rest and sleep.
So also our overeating is largely an unscientific effort to compensate for overconcentration of diet,—that is, an effort to get bulk. Again, too much protein is in large measure due to the need of compensating for rapid eating, for as has been remarked, protein is the one kind of food which can be eaten fast with impunity.
Again, a large part of our moral derelictions is due to an unbalanced life from which amusements are largely omitted. The “bad” boy in the city streets is usually following his instinct for amusement, of which the lack of playgrounds has deprived him. Dissipations of many kinds are explained in a similar way. It is largely because workmen are so often drudges and lack normal recreations that they seek amusement in the concentrated form they find in saloons, gambling places, dives and dance halls.
Finally those economic and social conditions of civilization which have resulted in deferring marriage beyond the best physiological age, lie behind prostitution and its terrible train of consequences including the venereal diseases.
The worst of it is that these wrong remedies, instead of helping, aggravate the disease. They become part of a vicious circle, which continues in an endless round.
The combined effects of all the unhygienic modes of living are undoubtedly greatly to shorten human life. Most other mammals live about five times the growing period. In man, this would mean that the normal life-span should be about a century and a quarter, an age which is now reached only in one case out of millions.
Yet it would be foolish, even if it were possible, to attempt a complete “return to Nature” by abolishing all the ways and conventions of civilization. This would be throwing away our social inheritance and returning to barbarism. We must go forward, not backward. Just as the cure for the evils of Democracy is said to be more Democracy; so the cure for the evils of civilization must be more civilization. The equilibrium of Nature having been upset by civilization, science, one of the great products of civilization, must now work out the remedies. Just as the waste of the soil which civilization has brought is to be compensated by that great product of civilization, scientific agriculture, so the waste of vital resources is to be compensated by scientific hygiene. The saving of civilization depends on following not those who repudiate it, like Thoreau, but those who make use of it, like Pasteur. What the world needs is not to abolish houses, but to ventilate them; not to go naked, but to devise better clothes, which have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of those we now wear; not to return to the diet of the anthropoid apes, but to remodel that which we have; not to give up chairs, but to improve the form of chairs; not to abandon reading, but to employ corrective eyeglasses and clear printing; not to abrogate division of labor, but to shorten the hours of labor and provide wholesome recreations and special compensating advantages when needed. When, in future centuries, these come to be reckoned among the great triumphs of civilization, we may expect human life to be longer and perhaps stronger than in any primitive state of Nature, just as where modern scientific forestry has been applied we find longer lived and better trees than ever grew in Nature’s jungles.
Section VI—The Fields of HygieneThe object of this book is primarily to instruct the individual as to what he can do to maintain his own individual health. But individual hygiene is only one particular branch of hygiene, and it is well for the individual, partly out of public spirit, partly in self-defense, to have some idea of the other important branches, namely, public hygiene, the hygiene practised by the health officer, semipublic hygiene, the hygiene of schools, institutions, and industrial establishments, and race hygiene or eugenics, the most important of all.
All these branches are so closely related that it is impossible to mark any exact dividing-line. But, in a general way, there is a broad distinction between eugenics, which is the hygiene of future generations, and the other two, which relate to the present generation, as also between these two themselves. Thus public hygiene is that which is practised by the government for its citizens, while individual hygiene is that which is practised by the citizens for themselves. Public hygiene consists chiefly in efforts by the government to maintain a wholesome environment in which to live, including good outdoor air—without smoke or foul odors—clean streets, pure water, good sewers, quarantine, and legal regulations concerning houses, schools, prisons, hospitals, and other public institutions, foods sold in markets, and conditions of employment. It is chiefly useful in preventing acute or infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, scarlet fever, measles, whooping-cough, small-pox, yellow fever, and diphtheria, and in preventing accidents and occupational diseases. Individual hygiene is chiefly useful in preventing the chronic or degenerative diseases, that is, diseases of nutrition and of circulation, such as heart and kidney affections, nervous prostration, insanity.
Public hygiene has made much progress during recent years. In consequence, the number of deaths from the acute or infectious diseases has been greatly diminished. Health officers are beginning to demonstrate the truth of Pasteur’s words, “It is within the power of man to rid himself of every parasitic disease.”
It is this work which has reduced the general death-rate in civilized countries and sometimes cut it in two, as at Panama. The United States Public Health Service, on invitation of the Peruvian Government, recently cut the death-rate in two in one of Peru’s disease-ridden cities.
Individual hygiene, on the other hand, has been greatly neglected, especially in the United States, and, doubtless largely as a consequence, the death-rates from the chronic or degenerative diseases are increasing rapidly. A further consequence is that, in the United States, while the death-rate in the early years of life (when infectious diseases do most of the killing) has been decreasing, the death-rate in later life (when the chronic diseases do most of the killing) is increasing. In Sweden, on the other hand, where individual hygiene is more generally applied, the death-rate is declining at all times of life. (See “Signs of Increase of the Degenerative Diseases,” Supplementary Notes.)
Both public and individual hygiene are being invoked in the fight against tuberculosis, a disease at once infectious and chronic, due to germs and to wrong methods of living.
No matter how thoroughly an individual attempts to care for his own health, he will find it almost impossible to avoid infections, at times, without the organized help of the community in which he lives. A man may do his best to keep his windows open, to breathe deeply, to eat hygienically, to hold his activities within the limits of overfatigue, to screen his house against flies and leave no tin cans about his kitchen door to breed mosquitoes; but if the city in which he lives has no good air for him to breathe, if his city’s water supply is contaminated, if neighboring malarial swamps are not drained or covered with oil, if flies alight on the food before it comes to his own house, if the food contains disease germs or dangerous preservatives, or if his next-door neighbor visits him and leaves infection behind him, mere personal defenses will hardly be adequate.
Even in so private a matter as moving the bowels, sometimes the fault lies partly with circumstances beyond the control of the individual. Unfortunately in most
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