And what should one say to this honest physician? Should one tell him to
go and be a physician to the poor? Would he be any happier there? He
could tell the poor the causes of their diseases, and they would listen
patiently--they are trained to listen, and to accept what they are told.
Here is a girl living in an inside bedroom in a tenement, and working
ten or eleven hours a day in an unventilated factory, and she is ill
with tuberculosis. The physician tells her that she needs plenty of
fresh air and rest, and a lot of eggs and milk in her diet. He tells her
that, and he knows that she has as much chance of carrying out his
orders as of flying to the moon. Or maybe he comes upon a typhoid
epidemic, and discovers, as happened to a friend of mine in Chicago,
that there is defective plumbing in some houses owned by the political
leader of the district. Or maybe it is a case of venereal disease, in a
young man who was drafted into the army and turned loose amid the joys
of Paris. Maybe it is just a commonplace, every-day story of a room full
of school children, 22 per cent of them undernourished, as is the case
in New York City, and the parents out of work a part of the time, and
with no possibility in their lives of ever earning enough to feed the
children properly. When you confront these universal facts of our
present social order, you realize that the problem of disease is not
merely a problem of the body, but is a problem of the mind as well; a
problem of politics and religion and philosophy, of the whole way of
thinking of the so-called civilized world. A book of health which did
not point out these facts would be, not a book of health, but a book of
sham.
But meantime, while we are trying to change the world's ideas, we have
to live, and we can do our work better if we keep as well as possible. I
have tried to point out the way; it is, as you can see, a matter in part
of the body and in part of the mind. All the bodily regime here laid out
has its basis in mental habits; all wise and wholesome ways of life can,
at the age when our minds are plastic, be made into "second
nature"--things which we do automatically, without effort or temptation
to do otherwise. This is the real secret of true happiness in the
conduct of our personal lives; to acquire self-control, to rule our
desires and our passions, not harshly and spasmodically, but serenely,
as one drives a car which he thoroughly understands. It is in vain that
we preach freedom to men who have not this self-mastery; as the poet
tell us: "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, slaves of their own
compulsion." And of all the personal possessions which man can attain on
this earth, the most precious is the one of a sound mind controlling a
sound body. I close this book by quoting some verses written by Sir
Henry Wotton three hundred years ago, which I have all my life
considered one of the noblest pieces of poetry in our heritage:
THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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