Sanitary and Social Lectures and EssaysKingsley, Charles
Science
Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays
Kingsley, Charles
Essays; Social problems
I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health Society,
{36} which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my readers,
announces a “Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary Physiology and
Hygiene,” by a lady, to which I am also most happy to see, governesses
are admitted at half-fees. Alas! how much misery, disease, and even
death might have been prevented, had governesses been taught such matters
thirty years ago, I, for one, know too well. May the day soon come when
there will be educated women enough to give such lectures throughout
these realms, to rich as well as poor—for the rich, strange to say, need
them often as much as the poor do—and that we may live to see, in every
great town, health classes for women as well as for men, sending forth
year by year more young women and young men taught, not only to take care
of themselves and of their families, but to exercise moral influence over
their fellow-citizens, as champions in the battle against dirt and
drunkenness, disease and death.
There may be those who would answer—or rather, there would certainly have
been those who would have so answered thirty years ago, before the
so-called materialism of advanced science had taught us some practical
wisdom about education, and reminded people that they have bodies as well
as minds and souls—“You say, we are likely to grow weaklier, unhealthier.
And if it were so, what matter? Mind makes the man, not body. We do not
want our children to be stupid giants and bravos; but clever, able,
highly educated, however weakly Providence or the laws of nature may have
chosen to make them. Let them overstrain their brains a little; let them
contract their chests, and injure their digestion and their eyesight, by
sitting at desks, poring over books. Intellect is what we want.
Intellect makes money. Intellect makes the world. We would rather see
our son a genius than a mere athlete.” Well: and so would I. But what
if intellect alone does not even make money, save as Messrs. Dodson and
Fogg, Sampson Brass, and Montagu Tigg were wont to make it, unless backed
by an able, enduring, healthy physique, such as I have seen, almost
without exception, in those successful men of business whom I have had
the honour and the pleasure of knowing? What if intellect, or what is
now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest wheel or
cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred
up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable unhappy
personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine Greek,
filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and tempted alternately
to fanaticism and strong drink? We must, in the great majority of cases,
have the _corpus sanem_ if we want the _mentem sanem_; and healthy bodies
are the only trustworthy organs for healthy minds. Which is cause and
which is effect, I shall not stay to debate here. But wherever we find a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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