Читать книгу Sandow on physical training: a study in the perfect type of the human form - Eugene Sandow - Страница 5

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n spite of the increasing value of individual life—the distinctive mark of the civilization of our time—little has as yet been done, on large lines at least, to secure for the masses of the people who do the work of the world that degree and maintenance of physical well-being implied in the phrase, "a sound mind in a sound body." For those even whom we are pleased to call "the flower of our population," we have systematically and intelligently done next to nothing in the way of physical culture. Only in recent years has physiology been put on the curriculum of our public schools and the young have been enabled to get some inkling into the framework of their bodies and the physical conditions on which organic life is held. Whether this knowledge, in the main, goes beyond an appreciation of the necessity for air, light, food, clothing, and cleanliness, as conditions essential to health, may be greatly doubted. What is remembered of the theoretic laws of health when school-days are over, is, if we except the case of the comparatively small contingent that goes on to the study of medicine as a profession, of little value in the practical government of our bodies. Even what we have picked up about sanitation is generally lost before we have well entered upon manhood, or is effectively and grimly set at naught in our homes by the plumber. Where physiology has been properly taught, we may not all be as heathen in our knowledge of the requisites of health. In a few fortunate instances, the youth may know something of the processes of waste and renovation in the body; but how those processes work to the best advantage and show their most beneficent results under the systematic exercise of the muscular system, is, admittedly, given to but few of us fully to appreciate or wisely to understand. Even the ancient Greeks, noted as they were for their fine physical development, grace and symmetry of form, groped largely in the dark regarding many things which modern physiological science has now made plain. This is well understood; but, with the higher knowledge that modern science has brought us, how indifferent has been our approach to