Health Principles or Health Fads
By David Paulson, M.D.
Ignoring Big Things While Busy with Insignificant Ones — More Lunatics than College Students — Have Some Real Excuse for Living — Some Articles of Food Suggested
By DAVID PAULSON, M.D.
Superintendent Medical and Surgical Sanitarium, Hinsdale, Illinois If you commence reading this article, you will not be likely to stop till you have finished it. The article is written in a manner to entertain, and at the same time you will appreciate its good sense. Dr. Paulson is one of those regular medical practitioners who have been in demand for many years as lecturers on health and temperance topics at Chautauquan and other large gatherings. He is also well known as a writer on topics allied with his profession. As you will see by this article, he believes that common sense is more beneficial than fads. It is far more important to have a healthy vision than it is to have a healthy body. Who has not seen husky, broad-shouldered, deep-chested men who were only employing their splendid strength to build up the devil's business? On the other hand, we may see men and women with frail and sickly bodies who are accomplishing marvelous things for God. This shows that while good health is a tremendous advantage, it is not absolutely essential to a useful career. There is a vast difference between adopting health principles and being swept off our feet by health fads. But it seems to be much easier for the average human mind to become enthusiastic over some small thing than it is to accept conscientiously a great principle. There was a people once who would count out nine insignificant garden seeds, and then lay aside the tenth one for the Lord. That is, they were tithing "mint and anise and cummin" with scientific accuracy but omitted "judgment, mercy, and faith." Matt. 23:23. In other words, they had forgotten the "weightier matters"; and while they were so particular that the Lord should receive one tenth of these almost microscopic seeds, they did not hesitate to crucify His own Son. This attitude was typical of that age. People are still inclined to do the same thing. There is nothing so unfashionable to-day as sound sense, while some foolish fad will draw people as honey attracts flies. This should impress upon us the truth of the striking statement, "That which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God." Luke 16:15. MORE LUNATICS THAN COLLEGE STUDENTS
People who think, and even some people who do not think, are compelled to recognize that we are facing a desperate situation. For example, there are more insane people to-day in our lunatic asylums than there are students in all our colleges, universities, and other higher institutions of learning. Furthermore, we have more than a million degenerates and criminals in this country. To any one whose eyes have been half opened, it is evident that we are traveling over the same road as did ancient Rome. We are confronted with many of the same desperate problems. Whenever flowers begin to degenerate, they need to be fertilized with fresh pollen from other flowers. The bee generally performs this useful office of carrying pollen from one flower to another. Degeneration has set in among humanity, and they need to be regenerated. Whence shall they derive the necessary pollen to fertilize them? ENGLAND SAVED FROM SOCIAL CRISIS
More than one hundred and fifty years ago, England was facing a great moral and social crisis. The different strata of society were arrayed against each other, and a revolution such as shook France to its very bottom seemed imminent. Degenerating forces were rapidly producing their baneful harvest. The bee that brought fertilizing pollen114from a higher source was John Wesley. His message literally regenerated England. Chapels and schools, Bible societies, foreign missionary societies, were organized; and even the conservative Church of England, that refused to accept this Heaven-inspired movement, was indirectly blessed and re-animated by it. To-day multitudes, instead of looking hopefully toward Heaven for an uplifting influence, are trying to save themselves by trivial human schemes. For instance, the eugenic fad is now on the very crest of the popular wave. We smile when we see a child trying to lift itself up by tugging away at its shoe-strings, but it is just as useless for humanity to try to lift itself by merely human resources. THE COMMON DRINKING CUP VERSUS THE UNIVERSAL WINE CUP
Many of our great states have been swept by an agitation that has outlawed the common drinking cup. But the amazing thing is that these same lawmakers could not get their eyes wide enough opened to see the much greater harm that comes from the almost universal wine cup. It is absolutely certain that for every person who ever caught anything besides water from the common drinking cup, there are ten thousand persons who have caught mental, moral, and physical damnation for this world and the world to come, from the wine cup. DRANK A BATH TUB FULL OF WHISKY
Last year we consumed in this country twenty-five gallons of liquor for every man, woman, and child in the land. As I did not drink my portion, the man who had my share as well as his own drank fifty gallons. That is more than enough to fill an ordinary bath tub. Think what human wreckage that means. Think of the enormous financial loss. JAILS, POORHOUSES, AND LUNATIC ASYLUMS DEPOPULATED
Kansas furnishes us an object-lesson, on a large scale, of what it would mean to us if the legislature would outlaw the wine cup as it has the common drinking cup. Dr. L. Mervin Maus, department surgeon of the United States army, in an article on "Alcohol and Racial Degeneracy" in the New York Medical Record, says: "During the drought in the West, when asked whether they wanted assistance, the governor replied that Kansas, with a tidy bank-account of $200,000,000, could weather worse storms than the drought of last summer without hardship. In 97 of 105 counties there were no insane. In 54 of these counties no feeble-minded; 96 counties with no inebriates; 38 county poorhouses were empty; the jails in 53 counties, empty; and 65 counties had no prisoners serving time in penitentiaries. Some counties have called no juries to try criminal cases for ten years." Kansas has been so long under state-wide prohibition that there are hundreds of men in the state old enough to vote who have never seen an open saloon. CHILD LABOR VERSUS CIGARETTE SMOKING
In recent years there has been a tremendous agitation, all over this country, in favor of such child labor legislation as would practically prevent children from working until after sixteen years of age. Viewed from one angle, that is a beautiful thing, although there is a question as to whether some children, if they do not learn to work before they are sixteen, will ever work afterward unless compelled to do so in the workhouse. The average successful men and women had a reasonable amount of hardship in their early life. In fact, hardship seems to be an ingredient that God invariably mixes with the clay early, before it is fully set, if He wants to make out of it a really beautiful and useful vessel. But I hear some say the object of child labor laws is to prevent the unmerciful starving of young minds and the stunting of the young bodies in ill-ventilated factories; to which I reply, "This ought ye to have done," and not left something else undone. What is it that ought not to have been left undone? Let me say that for every boy who has been stunted by being put to work before he was sixteen, there are a thousand boys who have burned out their brains, ruined their souls, and wrecked their bodies, by cigarette smoking. Yet I have seen Lucy Page Gaston, the anti-cigarette apostle, with tears in her eyes, pleading with legislators to pass a law to fine the men who sell cigarettes to these boys; still these very same lawmakers turned around and made a law fining men if they should give honest employment to these boys, but left them with their cigarettes. I ask the reader to decide whether it is not easier even to-day to tithe mint, anise, and cummin, than it is to recognize the weightier matters of the law,—judgment, mercy, and faith. COOKERY AND HEALTH CERTIFICATE
In Wisconsin they recently passed a law that no couple could be married until they had procured health certificates. I think no one can offer any serious objection to this arrangement. Yet, for the future good of the race, it would be a thousand times more important that the wife should secure a certificate that she can cook food that will not give her husband Bright's disease, nervous prostration, or high blood pressure before they have been married ten years. Before a man can run an automobile, he has to pass an examination and secure a license. So must the barber who trims my hair. But any woman, without a license, can step into a kitchen and prepare for fifty boarders food that is gradually undermining their health and strength and laying a foundation for serious diseases. The reader will readily call to mind a dozen other similar illustrations where frantic efforts are made to destroy the noxious tree by picking its leaves instead of laying the ax at its root. God wants us to deal with fundamental principles. If the devil can not keep us from doing something good, he will try to absorb our minds and energies in trivial and superficial remedial measures. HAVE A GOOD EXCUSE FOR LIVING
First and foremost, discover a good excuse for wanting to live. There is nothing that is half so important as to have a really good excuse for being alive. The chief reason why some people do not get well is because they have no strong incentives for doing so. They have merely selfish reasons. Do you want to be well because you know God has something for you to do that you can do better than any one else, and you need health in order to do it? Too many people are just floating around in this world like a chip on the wave. HELPS YOUR LIVER AND STOMACH AS WELL AS YOUR LUNGS
The next most important thing is to breathe day and night as much outdoor air as possible. Think of the consumptives cured to-day that would have been buried a generation ago; and then remember that it is not fresh air that heals their lungs, but the improved blood. It must be clear to all that the kind of blood that can heal a diseased lung can just as easily heal a sick stomach, diseased nerves, or a bad liver. So fresh air is now one of our most important remedies. Go into the most up-to-date hospitals, and you will find the pneumonia patients up on the flat roof making marvelous recoveries, simply because they are having a chance to breathe the fresh air that was formerly denied them. THE MAGNATE'S COAL AND HIS COOK
The best physicians know that three fourths of our chronic diseases are born at the dinner-table, the breakfast-table, and the supper-table. From personal observation, I know that the food served in the mansions of the rich is frequently as unwholesome as what the poor eat in the slums. Men who control great industries hire experts to determine just how much heat and energy they can expect to derive from the coal they purchase; but any ignorant woman, without any definite idea as to whether the food she is preparing will make blood in the body or will make poisons in the alimentary canal to destroy the blood, if she can flavor what she makes so it will tickle the palate, is considered an elegant cook by this same wise industrial magnate. The food should not only nourish the system, but it should also contain sufficient bulk to stimulate the elimination of its own waste products. The useful alkaline salts found in lettuce, spinach, raw chopped cabbage, and other green garden truck, will cleanse the blood, while their bulk will at the same time cleanse the alimentary canal. There are multitudes of sedentary people who, if they should induce two bowel movements a day instead of one, would be surprised to discover that their efficiency would speedily be increased from fifty to one hundred per cent. WASH THE INSIDE AND BATHE THE OUTSIDE
We should drink from principle. There are poisons in the system that are not properly eliminated unless they have abundant fluid to dissolve them. When I hear people say that they have not drunk any water for weeks, I feel that instead of being proud of this, they should be ashamed of it; for from a health standpoint, it is vastly more important to wash the inside of the body than it is to cleanse the outside, although neither should be neglected.