Читать книгу Health, Happiness, and Longevity - Louis Philippe McCarty - Страница 6

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"There is naught like universal co-operation to promote universal achievement."

Individuals may seek and obtain health through the agencies already, and to be, suggested. To keep in health, their neighbors must be induced or compelled to adopt the same course. This is not an absolute law, but manifestly is very essential. Supposing your own house, sidewalk, alley, or yard, are comparatively immaculate, it will be impossible to live without constant danger and exposure if your friend (or enemy in this sense) has an untidy house, a dirty sidewalk, and a filthy yard, in your proximity. Then how encouraging to note that health is as contagious as disease. It even spreads with greater rapidity. Health is gladly welcomed; disease is shunned like a deadly poison. All over the world past and contemporary history proves that, once started, health spreads at a rate that disease cannot follow. What will surely result? Healthful communities will make healthful municipalities; healthful municipalities will end in commonwealths and nations of like character. The whole earth will be leavened. From a record of 34 years as the average duration of human life, the thermometer of universal progress will point to the threescore and ten, or 70 years.

If you were induced to smile at the close of the last sentence, it shows that you are not lost to all sense of appreciation—but quietly put on your sober cap for a moment and read a few facts on vital statistics. The average length of life up to twenty years ago was 33 years, now it has reached about 34.8 years. This has not been caused by the whole world becoming more healthful—indeed, some portions of the earth, including sections of the United States, have retrograded, and the former limit of mortality has been lowered—but by the health of a number of organizations, sects, and individuals who have increased their standards of regularity, cleanliness, temperance, morality, and self-control. Thus the average rate of mortality has been raised nearly 2%. An interesting fact which is new to the majority of persons is this, that the whole sect of Friends, or Quakers, live an average of 58 years per individual. In the thirty-two years from 1850 to 1882 they raised the average six years, or about one year in five. With this ratio, which is itself increasing, the plurality of Quakers will be centenarians in less than two hundred years—in half that time if assisted by the world at large. By the foregoing it will be seen that the whole organization of Friends live 70% longer than the general age allotted to mankind, which includes them to make up the universal rate. Another noticeable feature in connection with the Quakers' life is this, the deaths among them average 18 in every thousand; in the general population, 22 per thousand; while the amount given to charities per inhabitant in that sect is $7.78, and in the total population the average is $1.46. Why this difference in longevity to so marked a degree?

The prohibitionist will give this reason, that the Friends dissipate less; the religionists will say they are more truthful, more godly. While each of the aforementioned reasons have a healthful tendency, there is a more scientific conclusion, for it is a well-known fact that there are thousands of cases of longevity of men and women who lack every moral principle, and dissipate all their lives. The scientist comes to our rescue. He tells us that the Quaker's life is prolonged by his methodical way of living, evenness of temperament, wearing the same weight of clothing, allowing nothing to furrow the brow, regularity of sleeping, drinking, exercising, and eating. He takes no food or drink into his stomach above 100° or below 50° Fahr. Boiling hot soup and frozen ice-cream are unknown in a Quaker family. This might convey the idea that ice-cream is foresworn by them. Not entirely so. They use the same good judgment in that as in every other indulgence, allowing the cream to rise in temperature from 10° to 15° above the freezing point, to soft consistency, before it is taken into the stomach. Dr. Ufflemann, a German physician of authority, draws some important conclusions from his own experiments and those of others. The rules laid down are briefly:—

1. That, in general, a temperature of food which approaches that of the blood is most healthful.

2. For quenching the thirst the best temperature is from 50° Fahr. to 68° Fahr. Americans prefer about 40°.

3. The gulping down of ice-water or hot coffee, etc., means eventually a stomach damnation.

4. The use of very hot and cold substances, following or alternating, is injurious to the teeth.

5. Ingestion of cold food and drinks lessens the bodily temperature, whether it be normal or febrile.

6. Cold food and drinks increase the tendency to cough, by causing, reflexly, a congestion of the bronchial vessels. Hence persons with bronchial disease ought not to indulge in cold drinks.

The habits of indulgence in alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, and other narcotics or stimulants, have less to do than is generally supposed with longevity, but much to do with happiness, while their abuse or irregularity determines all for health, happiness, and longevity combined. Temperance men and moralists will take issue with me, and undertake to prove that any quantity, no matter how small, of either alcohol, tobacco, or opium will shorten life; but the facts will not sustain the assertion. It is the irregularity with which the body is treated, either by outward application or bathing, in eating, sleeping, or excess in all vices. For health, a regular gratification in the full list of vices is better than having no vices—such as are so termed by the world—and being irregular in everything else. While I do not believe in practising any form of vice, yet the man who takes six drinks of alcoholic spirits in reasonable quantities at fixed intervals each day, smokes six cigars—two after each meal—chews three ounces of tobacco with the same punctuality every day, eats his meals slowly and at stated periods, sleeps from 8-1/2 to 9 hours per night between the same hours, will outlive the man who neither smokes, chews, or drinks, but does eat and sleep irregularly, and lies awake all night hating his neighbor for his immoralities. He gets thin and haggard, followed by all the weaknesses to which his system is heir; while the other man, with his evenness of nature, habits, and dissipations, enjoys health, becomes fat, and lives to the proverbial good old age.

Here, then, my reader, we have the explanation why a man may live through dissipation all his life, and then die only by accident at 80 or 100 years of age. A beggar, miser, or hermit may by degrees contract the habit of filthiness, non-bathing, scantiness of food and improper clothing, with such regularity that he will outlive all his friends and relatives, and be chronicled at his death as one of the centenarians. As an interesting fact, we state that in 1888 a beggar, aged 84, in Perth, Hungary, tried to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Danube because he was no longer able to support his father and mother, who were 115 and 110 years old respectively! Poisons may be taken in infinitesimal doses for a while, then increasing by degrees until twenty grains of morphia or strychnia may be taken at a single dose without immediate injury. There is at least one case of positive record in Colusa County, of this State.

In closing this chapter we wish to call attention to a reasonable result of true system, or regularity. Here is a convict in the State prison. Before he was incarcerated his health was imperfect, and he wore a sallow, dejected look; but behold him after six months of strict penitentiary discipline; he is a well man, fat and sleek—no longer a semi-invalid. There are exceptions, but they are due to melancholy generally. A soldier after he enlists, unless he is exposed to the constant privations of protracted war, throws off most defects in his physique. You must know the cause; it is the compulsory regulation of diet and clothing. Cleanliness and regularity are forced upon them, showing it to be just what they needed.