Health Department by Uriah Smith

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 21, 1875

Health Department.

By Uriah Smith

"Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." 3 John 2.

A Lesson from the Arabs.

The old proverb says, "It is right to be taught by an enemy." So it is right to receive instruction, if we find ourselves in need of it, even from a class whose name has become a synonym for all that is wild and uncultivated, mischievous and evil. However much the Arabs may be deserving, in some respects, of the epithets that are applied to them, in others they furnish an example of good sense and wisdom, by which the nations of Christendom would do well to profit.

About the middle of the eight century, according to Gibbon (vol. v., p. 300), their correct habits of living reduced their physicians to a starving practice. He says:—

"Under the reign of the Ommiades, the studies of the Moslems were confined to the interpretation of the Koran and the eloquence and poetry of their native tongue. A people continually exposed to the dangers of the field must esteem the healing powers of medicine, or rather of surgery; but the starving physicians of Arabia murmured a complaint that exercise and temperance deprive them of the greatest part of their practice."

We have italicized the words to which the reader's attention is especially called. Such was the picture exercise and temperance held up before the world a thousand years ago. Such is the lesson they have ever taught when their claims have been heeded. Nature is ever true to her own laws. The same beneficent results will follow obedience to those laws on the part of the human family, now as then. All that nature wants is a chance to act. For this she has all along been pleading; and that compliance with her claims would secure a blessing, she has all along been demonstrating. Yet the world seems to be farther to-day than ever before from learning the lesson. Why have such an unparalleled regard for the doctors as to be willing to support them at the expense of our own health, comfort, time, and money? In exercise and temperance, with their accompanying health of mind and vigor of body, let us be Arabs, though the doctors starve.

U. s.