THE SUCCESSFUL CULTIVATION OF DISEASE.
By David Paulson
LAST year four and one-half times as many persons died of tuberculosis as were carried off by scarlet fever, smallpox, diphtheria, and typhoid fever combined. There are to-day one million two hundred thousand cases of tuberculosis in the United States; and about five hundred persons die from this disease in the United States every twenty-four hours. Tuberculosis claims, in this country, one third of all the deaths between the ages of fifteen and sixty. What does that mean? It was not so a few years ago. It is not because the climate has greatly changed; for we have as good a climate as God has given any people. Fifty years ago in Great Britain, in every one hundred and twenty-seven deaths one was due to cancer, and last year, in every twenty-two deaths one was due to cancer. Dr. Williams says that the increase of cancer has exactly kept pace with the increase in the use of meat; and that there is an average of one hundred and thirty-two pounds of meat per capita eaten every year in Great Britain: this is one of the factors that prepare the way for cancer. Dr. Roswell Park, an eminent surgeon in Buffalo, who has the last few years been investigating this subject, says that if cancer were to increase the next ten years as rapidly as it has during the last ten, it would carry away more victims than does tuberculosis. Now in reference to insanity: In the public insane asylums of New York City there are about twenty thousand insane persons, and probably as many more are cared for in private institutions and at home. Such a state of things could not have been found fifty years ago. During this time the number of these cases in proportion to the population has increased three hundred per cent. I am aware that there are many doctors who are anxious to close their eyes to this fact. I am also aware that there are many theologians who do not like to accept such statements as these; for they do not harmonize with their theories. But the true physician of to-day — the man who loves humanity — will not close his eyes to these truths, but will earnestly seek to find out the cause of this state of things. To consider a few of the different ways in which a plant may be killed, will serve to illustrate, in a simple way, the causes of many diseases: one of them is lack of air; another is lack of sunshine. All can recall homes where the parlor window curtains were all pulled down, because the mistress of the house wished to preserve the color of her carpets and upholstered furniture. And as she preserved these, the color left her children’s cheeks in consequence of their being deprived, of the proper amount of light and sunshine; meanwhile, she was trying to save money to purchase medicines, with the idea of putting some iron into the blood of her children. This illustrates a principle. People do not appreciate the fact that there is healing power in sunshine; and that the same power that puts color into the grass paints the hue of health on our cheeks. Again, the plant will not prosper without water: it must have air, sunshine, and water. Sometimes a man will say, “I have given up tobacco, but I do not get well: why do I not get well?” Simply because he goes right on violating other laws of health, eating between meals, etc. There is a passage of Scripture that says that if we are guilty of violating one point of the law, then we are guilty of all. If a plant is deprived of water, it will die all the quicker if you give it sunshine. A person sometimes rides a hobby in following up one thing in health reform. For instance, he takes exercises, and neglects everything else. His exercise only deforms him, because he does not obey the other principles of health. We must induce people to comply with all the simple requirements of human need. Another thing plants need is good soil. If you should scrape up a lot of gravel and put it around a plant, it would not thrive. I am confident that if children knew half as much about what they ought to put into their stomachs as they do about the specific gravity of the Dead Sea, or some other sea, or the height of Pikes Peak, more than one half their diseases would disappear. There is another way of getting disease, which we can not very well illustrate by the plant, and that is by wearing improper clothing — clothing that cramps and pulls the body out of shape. Instead of the clothes being made to fit the body, the body is made to fit the clothes, so that a person grows up in them, like a cucumber in a bottle. The body takes the shape of the dress, and becomes maimed and deformed. There are many factors that contribute to the tearing down of the race, but nine tenths of the causes that produce invalids are among some of these things to which attention has here been directed. It is a sad fact that persons who have brain enough to enable them to build up a colossal fortune and erect grand buildings have ruined their health because they do not know what to eat. These principles ought to be the A B C in every school. In writing a grammar, for instance, in selecting sentences for parsing, instead of such a sentence as, “The day was dark and dreary,” — “day” is the subject, and “was dark and dreary” is the predicate, etc., — take such sentences as, “The children were sick,” — “children” is the subject, and “were sick” is the predicate. “What made them sick?” — “They ate embalmed beef,” etc. Every sentence should teach something in reference to the human body and its needs. The arithmetic ought to be full of such sentences as these: “There are five digestive fluids and five digestive organs, — two times five are ten. And there are five digestive food elements, — three times five are fifteen.” This sort of teaching should be woven into the child’s education until he sees these truths before him, behind him, and on every side. He would not then grow up not knowing the difference between toasted bread and bread that is not toasted. A woman once told me that it had been worth hundreds of dollars to her merely to learn that difference. It certainly is better to let the cook stove do part of the digestive work, and thus save nervous energy for some other work, than to use it all up in the work of digestion. Just as disease is cultivated by the continual violation of these principles of living, so health is cultivated by constant adherence to the same. There are only a few ways of becoming sick, and there are just about as many ways of getting well. People have headache and other troubles; but the cause of these troubles is generally found to be because of corruption in the stomach.