The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28
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Title: The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28
Author: Various
Editor: Charles William Daniel
Release date: February 5, 2006 [eBook #17682]
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Language: English
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_The_
HEALTHY
LIFE
The Independent
Health Magazine
VOLUME V
JULY-DECEMBER 1913
LONDON
GRAHAM HOUSE, TUDOR ST., E.C.
INDEX
VOLUME V.--JULY-DECEMBER 1913
Ballade of Skyfaring, A, S. Gertrude Ford, 490
Book Reviews, 532
Breathe, On Learning to, Dr J. Stenson Hooker, 630
Camping Out, C.R. Freeman, 438, 480
Care of Cupboards, Florence Daniel, 530
Castles in the Air, E.M. Cobham, 582
Cloud-capped Towers, E.M. Cobham, 626
Correspondence, 504, 533, 580, 658
Cottage Cheese, 658
Curtained Doorways, The, Edgar J. Saxon, 561
Doctor on Doctors, A, 637
Doctor's Reason for Opposing Vaccination, A, Dr J.W. Hodge, 597
Doctors and Health, 633
Fasting, A Significant Case, A. Rabagliati, M.D., 458, 492
Fear and Imagination, E.M. Cobham, 510
Food and the Source of Bodily Energy, 507
Fruit-Oils and Nuts, 659
Futurist Gardening, G.G. Desmond, 451
Health Queries, Dr H. Valentine Knaggs:--
About Sugar, 540;
Bad Case of Self-poisoning, 502;
Boils, their Cause and Cure, 498;
Canary _versus_ Jamaica Bananas, 579;
Can Malaria be Prevented? 466;
Cereal Food in the Treatment of Neuritis, 619;
Correct Blending of Foods, 655;
Concerning Cottage Cheese, 617;
Deafness, 615, 616;
Diet for Obstinate Cough, 618;
Diet for Ulcerated Throat, 575;
Dilated Heart, 653;
Difficulties in Changing to Non-Flesh Diet, 655;
Dry Throat, 653;
Eczema as a Sign of Returning Health, 613;
Excessive Perspiration, 574;
Farming and Sciatica, 575;
Faulty Food Combinations, 536;
Giddiness and Head Trouble, 468;
Going to Extremes in the Unfired Diet, 543;
Long Standing Gastric Trouble, 470;
Malt Extract, 539;
Neuritis, 538;
Onion Juice as Hair Restorer, 651;
Phosphorus and the Nerves, 577;
Refined Paraffin as a Constipation Remedy, 652;
Saccharine, 653;
Stammering, 654;
Severe Digestive Catarrh, 471;
Sciatica, 651;
Temporary "Bright's Disease" and How to Deal with it, 576;
Ulceration of the Stomach, 541;
Unfired Diet for a Child, 467;
Water Grapes, 619;
Why the Red Corpuscles are Deficient in Anaemia, 654
Health and Joy in Hand-weaving, Minnie Brown, 591
Health through Reading, Isabella Fyvie Mayo, 517
Healthy Brains, E.M. Cobham, 448, 474, 510, 546, 582
Healthy Homemaking, Florence Daniel, 495, 528
Healthy Life Abroad, D.M. Richardson, 559
Healthy Life Recipes, 462, 571, 610, 641
Hired Help, Florence Daniel, 495, 528
Holiday Aphorisms, Peter Piper, 508, 527
How Much Should We Eat? 442, 477, 513, 563, 593
Human Magnetism, 505
Imagination in Insurance, E.M. Cobham, 546
Imagination in Play, E.M. Cobham, 474
Imagination in Use, E.M. Cobham, 448
Indication, An, Editors, 437, 473, 509, 545, 581, 621
Learning to Breathe, On, Dr J. Stenson Hooker, 630
Letters of a Layman, I., 633
Lime Juice, Pure, 534
Longevity, A Remedy for, Edgar J. Saxon, 491
Mental Healing, A Scientific Basis for, J. Stenson Hooker, M.D., 456
Midsummer Madness, Edgar J. Saxon, 454
Modern Germ Mania: A Case in Point, Dr H.V. Knaggs, 638
More About Two Meals a Day, Wilfred Wellock, 487
New Race, The, S. Gertrude Ford, 601
Ode to the West Wind, Shelley, 555
Pickled Peppercorns, Peter Piper, 464, 570, 609, 660
Plain Words and Coloured Pictures, Edgar J. Saxon, 622
Play Spirit, The, D.M. Richardson, 602
Play Spirit, The: A Criticism, L.E. Hawks, 628
Quest for Beauty, The, Edgar J. Saxon, 523
Recipes, 462, 571, 610, 641
Remedy for Longevity, A, Edgar J. Saxon, 491
Remedy for Sleeplessness, 533
Salads and Salad Dressings, 462
Salt Cooked Vegetables, 506
Swan Song of September, The, S. Gertrude Ford, 523
Sea-sickness, Some Remedies, Hereward Carrington, 484
Semper Fidelis, "A.R.," 526
Sleeplessness, A Remedy, 533
Scientific Basis for Mental Healing, A, J. Stenson Hooker, M.D., 456
Scientific Basis of Vegetalism, The, Prof. H. Labbe, 549, 584
Significant Case, A, A. Rabagliati, M.D., 458, 492
Symposium on Unfired Food, A, D. Godman, 486, 648
Taste or Theory? Arnold Eiloart, B.Sc., 643
Travels in Two Colours, Edgar J. Saxon, 605
To-morrow's Flowers, G.G. Desmond, 451
Two Meals a Day, More About, Wilfred Wellock, 487
Vaccination, A Doctor's Reason for Opposing, Dr J.W. Hodge, 597
Vegetalism, The Scientific Basis of, Prof. H. Labbe, 549, 584
West Wind, Ode to, Shelley, 555
What makes a Holiday? C., 557
World's Wanderers, The, Shelley, 625
THE
HEALTHY
LIFE
The Independent
Health Magazine.
3 AMEN CORNER LONDON E.C.
VOL. V JULY
No. 24. 1913
_There will come a day when physiologists, poets, and
philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one
another._--CLAUDE BERNARD.
AN INDICATION.
Some laymen are very fond of deprecating the work of specialists,
holding that specialisation tends to narrowness, to inability to see
more than one side of a question.
It is, of course, true that the specialist tends to "go off at a
tangent" on his particular subject, and even to treat with contempt or
opposition the views of other specialists who differ from him. But all
work that is worth doing is attended by its own peculiar dangers. It
is here that the work of the non-specialist comes in. It is for him to
compare the opposing views of the specialists, to reveal one in the
light thrown by the other, to help into existence the new truth
waiting to be born of the meeting of opposites.
Specialisation spells division of labour, and apart from division of
labour certain great work can never be done. To do away with such
division, supposing an impossibility to be possible, would simply mean
reversion to the state of the primitive savage. But we have no call
to attempt the abolition of even the minutest division of labour. What
is necessary is to understand and guard against its dangers.
Specialisation _may_ lead to madness, as electricity _may_ lead to
death. But no specialist need go far astray who, once in a while, will
make an honest attempt to come to an understanding with the man whose
views are diametrically opposed to his own. For thus he will retain
elasticity of brain, and gain renewed energy for, and perhaps fresh
light on, his own problems.--[EDS.]
CAMPING OUT.
IV. THE FIVE-FOOT SAUSAGE.
The question of blankets and mattresses may be taken as settled. We
can now sleep quite comfortably, take our fresh air sleeping and
waking, and find shelter when it rains. But that same fresh air brings
appetite and we must see how that appetite is to be appeased.
Take a frying-pan. It should be of aluminium for lightness; though a
good stout iron one will help you make good girdle-cakes, if you get
it hot and drop the flour paste on it. You must find some other way of
making girdle-cakes, and if you take an iron frying pan with you,
don't say that I told you to.
Though it is obviously necessary that a frying-pan should have a
handle, I was bound to tell Gertrude that I do not find it convenient
to take handled saucepans when I go camping. I take for all boiling
purposes, including the making of tea, what is called a camp-kettle.
Most ironmongers of any standing seem to keep it, and those who have
it not in stock can show you an illustration of it in their wholesale
list. It is just like the pot in which painters carry their paint,
except that it has an ordinary saucepan lid. You should have a "nest"
of these--that is, three in diminishing sizes going one inside the
other. The big lid then fits on the outer one and the two other lids
have to be carried separately.
[Illustration: _The Five-Foot Sausage_]
You hang these camp-kettles over the fire by their bucket handles,
from the tripod or other means of getting over the fire. Sometimes the
bough of a tree high out of the reach of the flames will do. Sometimes
a stick or oar thrust into the bank or in a crevice of the wall behind
the fire is more convenient than a tripod. Again, you can do without
any hanging at all, making a little fireplace of bricks or stones and
standing the saucepans "on the hob."
It is a simple thing to tie the tops of three sticks together and make
a tripod. Then from the place where they join you dangle a piece of
string, pass it through the handle of the kettle and tie it to itself,
in a knot that can be adjusted up or down to raise or lower the kettle
from the fire. This knot is our old friend the two half-hitches. Pass
the loose end round the down cord, letting it come back under the up
cord, then round again with the same finish, and lo! the up cord makes
two half-hitches round the down cord. You can slip, them up and put
them where you like and they will hold, but you have to undo them to
take the kettle clean away from the fire. So we add to our equipment a
few pot-hooks or pieces of steel wire shaped like an S. Their use will
be obvious. If we have three of them it is quite easy to keep three
kettles going over one fire. They swing cheek by jowl when they all
want the same amount of fire, but each can be raised or lowered an
inch or several inches to let them respectively boil, simmer or just
keep warm.
These are the cooking utensils. A biscuit tin would make an oven and
Gertrude says she must have an oven. For my part I would not attempt
baking when camping out and I will say no more about ovens, except
that all the biscuit tins in the world won't beat a hole in the ground
first filled with blazing sticks and then with the things to be baked
and covered with turves till they are done.
I had great difficulty in persuading Gertrude to feed out of tin
dishes like those which we use sometimes for making shallow round
cakes or setting the toffee in. They are ever so much better than
plates, being deep enough for soup-plates and not easy to upset when
you use them on your lap. Any number of the same size will go into one
another and a dozen scarcely take up more room than one.
It was worse still when it came to a still more useful substitute, the
camp equivalent of the teacup. In the first place we abolish the
saucer, for the simple reason that we have no earthly use for it in
camp. We take tin mugs with sloping sides and wire bucket handles.
They fit into one another in the same accommodating way as the eating
dishes. Gertrude was nearly put off this device altogether by Basil's
remark that he had only seen them in use in poulterers' shops, where
they are put under hares' noses....
"Basil, you, you monster," cried Gertrude, and I had to push those tin
mugs as though I had been a traveller interested in the sale of them.
The drinking of hot tea out of these mugs is quite a beautiful art.
You hold the wire handle between finger and thumb and put the little
finger at the edge of the bottom rim. It is thus able to tilt the mug
to the exact angle which is most convenient for drinking. When
Gertrude had learnt the trick, she became perfectly enamoured of the
mugs. She sometimes brings one out at ordinary afternoon tea and
insists that the tea is ever so much better drunk thus than out of
spode.
Smaller mugs of the same shape do for egg-cups, and the egg-spoons I
take to camp are the bone ones, seldom asked for but easy to get in
most oil-and-colour shops. Dessert spoons and forks and table knives
are of the usual pattern, but the former can be had in aluminium and
therefore much lighter than Britannia metal.
The camping-out valise is by all means the rucksack. Never the
knapsack. I am almost ashamed to say this, because as far as my
knowledge goes the knapsack is now obsolete. It may be, however, that
it lingers here and there. If you see one, buy it for a museum if you
like but not for use. The bundle should be allowed to fit itself to
the back, as it does in a canvas bag. Suppose now that you fix the V
point of a pair of braces somewhere near the top of the sack and
bringing the webs over your shoulders, fix them, nicely adjusted, to
the lower corners of the sack, it will ride quite comfortably upon
your back--that is, you have made it from a plain sack into a rucksack
or back-sack. Get or make as many good large strong ones as you have
shoulders in the party to carry them. Have them made of a waterproof
canvas, green or brown, to reeve up tight with strong cord passed
through a series of eyelet-holes and, if you would be quite certain of
keeping out the rain, with a little hood to cover the reeved bag end.
The great bulk of your luggage you will generally find it best to
carry by wheeling it on a bicycle. Spread your ground-sheet on the
floor. On that lay your blankets, doubled so as to make a smaller
square, tent, mattress cover and bed suits on that, then your camping
utensils and all other paraphernalia and roll the whole up into a
sausage about five feet long, when the loose ends of the ground-sheet
have been tucked over as in a brown-paper parcel. Tie it well with
whipcord and fasten it to the top bar of your bicycle frame, leaving
freedom of course for the handles and the front wheel to move and
steer. Push the tent-poles through the lashings and start for your
camp at a comfortable four or five miles an hour. You will find it
easy to move camp at the rate of twenty miles a day and will see a
great deal of country in the course of a fortnight.
The sausage on the bicycle shown in the illustration may be taken to
contain all the gear and a little food. The rucksacks will take the
rest and each man's most precious personal belongings. There is a
small parcel tied to the handle-bar, scarcely to be seen because it is
smaller than the end of the sausage. It is a complete tent tied up in
its ground-sheet.
C.R. FREEMAN.
HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT: A WARNING.
_This article, by one of the pioneers of modern dietetics, is in the
nature of a challenge, and is certain to arouse discussion among all
who have studied the food question closely._--[EDS.]
When men lived on their natural food, quantities settled themselves.
When a healthy natural appetite had been sated the correct quantity of
natural food had been taken.
To-day all this is upside down, there is no natural food and only too
often no natural healthy appetite either. Thus the question of
quantity is often asked and many go wrong over it. The all-sufficient
answer to this question is: "Go back to the foods natural to the human
animal and this, as well as a countless number of other problems, will
settle themselves."
But supposing that this cannot be done, suppose, as is often the case,
that the animal fed for years on unnatural food has become so
pathological that it can no longer take or digest its natural food?
Those who take foods which are stimulants are very likely to overeat,
and when they leave off their stimulants they are equally likely to
underfeed themselves. Flesh foods are such stimulants, for it is
possible to intoxicate those quite unaccustomed to them with a large
ration of meat just as well as with a large ration of alcohol. The one
leads to the other, meat leads to alcohol, alcohol to meat. Taking any
stimulant eventually leads to a call for other stimulants.
How are we to tell when a given person is getting enough food, either
natural or partly natural? Medically speaking, there is no difficulty;
there are plenty of guides to the required knowledge, some of them of
great delicacy and extreme accuracy. The trouble generally is that
these guides are not made use of, as the cause of the disaster is not
suspected. A physiologist is not consulted till too late, perhaps till
the disorder in the machinery of life is beyond repair.
Diminishing energy and power, decreasing endurance, slowing
circulation, lessening blood colour, falling temperature, altered
blood pressure, enlarging heart and liver, are some of the most
obvious signs with which the physician is brought into contact in such
cases. But every one of these may, and very often does, pass unnoticed
for quite a long time by those who have had no scientific training.
The public are extremely ignorant on such matters because the natural
sciences have been more neglected in this country in the last fifty
years than anywhere else in Europe, and that is saying a good deal.
Hence diet quacks and all those who trade on the ignorance and
prejudices of the public are having a good time and often employ it in
writing the most appalling rubbish in reference to the important
subject of nutrition.
Being themselves ignorant and without having studied physiology, even
in its rudiments, they do not appear to consider that they should at
least abstain from teaching others till they have got something
certain for themselves.
If the public were less ignorant they would soon see through their
pretensions; but, as it is, things go from bad to worse, and it is not
too much to say that hundreds of lives have been lost down this sordid
by-path of human avarice.
On one single day a few weeks ago the writer heard of three men, two
of whom had been so seriously ill that their lives were in danger, and
one of whom had died. The certified cause of death in this case might
not have led the uninitiated to suspect chronic starvation, but those
who were behind the scenes knew that this was its real cause. A
further extraordinary fact was that two out of these three men were
members of the medical profession, whose training in physiology ought,
one would have thought, to have saved them from such errors.
The conclusion seems to be that they did not use their knowledge
because at first they had no suspicion of the real cause of their
illness. In other words, chronic starvation is insidious and, if no
accurate scientific measurements are made, its results, being
attributed to other causes, are often allowed to become serious before
they are properly treated.
These three men went wrong by following a layman quite destitute of
physiological training, who APPEARED to have produced some wonderful
results in himself and others on extraordinarily small quantities of
food.
If the above tests had been made at once by a trained hand the error
involved in such results could not have escaped detection, and none of
these men would have endangered their lives. I myself examined the
layman in question and finding him not up to standard refused to
follow him. The writer has no difficulty in recalling at least a dozen
cases similar to those above mentioned which have been under his care
in the last twelve months, and the three above mentioned were none of
them under his care at the time of their danger.
What, then, must be our conclusions in reference to these and similar
facts of which it is only possible to give a mere outline here? I
suggest that they are:--
1. Food quantities are of extreme importance.
2. These quantities were settled by physiologists many years ago, and
no good reasons have since been adduced for altering them.
3. The required quantity is approximately nine or ten grains of
proteid per day for each pound of bone and muscle in the body weight.
4. Any considerable departure from this quantity continued over months
and years leads to disaster.
5. The nature of this disaster may appear to be very various and its
real cause is thus frequently overlooked.
I will say a few words about each of these except the first, which is
already obvious. The layman above mentioned asserted that he could
live on but little more than half this quantity, but the food quantity
really required is that which will keep up normal strength, normal
circulation, normal colour, normal temperature and normal mental
power. As we have got perfectly definite standards of all these normal
conditions, serious danger can only be run into by neglecting to
measure them.
It is also possible to tell fairly accurately the quantity of food a
man is taking in a day, and then, by collecting and estimating his
excreta, the quantity also out of this food which he is utilising
completely and burning up in his body.
You would say that no danger should be possible with all these
safeguards, and yet the above case history shows that of two trained
physiologists, members of the medical profession, one died at least
twenty years before his time, and the other was in great danger and
only recovered slowly and with difficulty. Another similar case came
to the writer suffering from increasing debility and what appeared to
be some form of dyspepsia. He was quite unable to pass any of the
above-named tests as to physiological standards, and an investigation
of his excreta showed that his food was at least one-fifth or
one-sixth below its proper quantity and had probably been so for many
months past. Some of his doctors had been giving his "disease" a more
or less long list of names and yet had not noted the one essential
fact of chronic defective nutrition and its cause--underfeeding.
Naturally their treatment was of no avail, but when he had been sent
to a nursing home and had put back the 20 lbs. of weight he had lost
he came slowly back to more normal standards and is now out of danger.
In this case there was marked loss of weight, and few people, one
would think, would overlook such a sign of under nutrition. But loss
of weight is not always present in these cases, at least not at first.
Some people tend to grow stout on deficient proteid, and then the fact
that some of the essential tissues of the body (the muscles, the heart
and the blood) are being dangerously impoverished is very likely to be
overlooked. In the case last mentioned the loss of weight was put down
to the dyspepsia, whereas the real fact was that the "dyspepsia" and
loss of weight were both results of a chronic deficiency in food.
It is evident that some care about food quantities must be taken by
all those who do not live on natural foods. For physiologists there is
no difficulty in settling the question of quantity in accordance with
the signs of the physiology of a normal body. That all, even
physiologists, may run into danger if, while living on unnatural or
partly unnatural foods, or while making any change of food, they do
not consider the question of quantity with sufficient care.
That the question of nutrition should be considered in relation to
_every illness_ even though it may appear on the surface to have no
direct connection with foods or quantities. As a matter of fact, the
nature of the food and its quantity controls all the phenomena of
life. Some twenty years ago most people lived fairly close to the old
physiological quantities, now they have been cut adrift from these and
completely unsettled and are floundering out of their depth. A most
unsatisfactory, even dangerous, condition of affairs.
For the public it will now probably suffice if they insist on raising
the question of quantity whenever they suffer in any way. If they are
unable to answer the question themselves let them go to a trained
physiologist who can do so, and not to a diet quack. But muscular
strength, endurance, mental and bodily energy, skin circulation,
temperature and blood colour are all things which the public can see
for themselves and from which they should in all cases be able to get
sufficient warning to save them from the worst forms of disaster.
Some people imagine that they eat very little, when as a matter of
fact they have good healthy appetites. Others again think they are
eating a great deal, when as a matter of fact they take very little.
In both cases a physiological test of the excreta will give accurate
information. I once had a medical patient who imagined that he
produced great amounts of force and performed feats of endurance on
wonderfully small quantities of food. His excreta showed, however,
that he was merely under-estimating the food he took. A fat man may
seem to be living on very little, but fat does not require to be fed,
and his real bone and muscle weight is not large. A thin man may seem
to require a large quantity of food, but he is really very heavy in
bone and muscle, the tissues that have to be nourished. In all these
ways appearances are apt to be deceptive for those who are ignorant of
science and who do not go down to the root of the matter.
It is not necessary to follow the given quantity of grains per pound
slavishly and without regard to consequences. It is necessary to see
that the required physiological results are obtained.
If a patient says he can live on less than I ordered for him and if
he can pass the physiological tests satisfactorily I know that his
bone and muscle weight has been over-estimated. On the other hand, if
a patient falls below the physiological tests, though taking and
digesting the quantities ordered for him, I conclude that his bone and
muscle weight has been under-estimated.
In all cases it is possible to obtain the best physiological results
and to say when quantities are just right, neither too much nor too
little.
The evil effects of too much are not serious; they entail perhaps a
little "gout" or some temporary loss of freedom from waste products.
The evil effects of too little, if persevered in and continued,
especially if some of these effects are attributed to causes which
have no real existence, are deadly and dangerous, for they bring on an
insidious deterioration both of function and structure which leads by
several avenues, often miscalled "diseases," to death itself.
M.D.
HEALTHY BRAINS.
_Comparatively few health enthusiasts or food reformers realise the
necessity for mental, as distinct from bodily, hygiene, yet all real
health has its roots in the mind. Moreover, it is only by studying the
hygiene of mind that we are enabled to do work in greater quantity and
of better quality than we should otherwise be capable of, and to do
this without risk of strain on the nerves or injury to health. The
articles under this heading put forward some of the elementary laws of
mental hygiene._--[EDS.]
IMAGINATION IN USE.
To some people any talk about the importance of training the
imagination of children through their toys, games and studies seems
fantastic and trivial. They compare it to feeding them on sweetmeats;
they think it means substituting story books for real life and
encouraging the easy exercise of fancy for the careful study of fact.
But imagination is not a mere ornament to a life-work; it is rather
one of its most valuable and necessary tools. If it did no more than
sweeten and adorn the world, it would be well worth having, well worth
making considerable sacrifices to attain. But it does more than this.
It bears much fruit as well as flowers; fruit that, if it ripens in
suitable weather, endures and can be used for the service of man.
There is a wonderful palm-tree, called the Tal or Palmyra palm, which
in India and Ceylon supports six or seven millions of people, and
"works" also in West Africa, where it is probably native. It gives its
young shoots and unripe seeds as food; its trunk makes a whole boat,
or a drum or a walking-stick, according to size; hats, mats, thread
and baskets--in fact, almost all kinds of clothing and utensils--are
made from the split and plaited leaves; gum comes from it, and certain
medicines, jaggery sugar too and an intoxicating drink for those who
desire it. In one of the museums at Kew--a wet day brings always
_something_ besides disappointment--there is a book made up of the
very leaves of the palm, containing a Tamil poem enumerating more than
eight hundred human uses to which this marvellous single plant can be
put.
Now the imagination is like a Palmyra palm. We stand a long way off
and, looking up, say "What a graceful tree! But what a pity it
produces that intoxicating 'toddy' and nothing else!" Yet all the
while food and clothing and shelter and travel and learning are all
wrapped up in it, if only we were not too ignorant to guess, or too
idle to seek.
We talk as if the poet and painter had need of imagination, but not
the student, the doctor, the philanthropist, the business man, whereas
none of these can do work at a really human standard without
imagination that is living, penetrating, active and yet trained and
disciplined.
A recent illuminating address to a body of students pointed out that
Germany's immense industrial strides have been made possible by an
education which draws men's minds out of narrow old grooves, and helps
them to see and grasp wider possibilities. But the same speaker went
on to point out that the English worker has far more real initiative
and imagination than the German, and that in our own country we have
not even to make elaborate plans for developing these qualities, but
rather to release them in our administrators so far as to prevent
actually checking them in the children now growing up.
Imagination in business, for instance, means new possibilities, fresh
sources of supply and fresh markets to demand, economy of working and
better adjustment of work to worker, so as to have less waste of our
greatest capital, human time and power. America has taught us
something in these respects; what we must do is to take what new light
she has developed, while keeping our long-grown, well-earned skill
which she has not had the chance to make.
In research work, again, we need perpetually the synthetic and
constructive imagination if individual work is not to become narrowly
specialised and shut off from other divergent or parallel lines which
would illuminate it. The other day I was told of a great surgeon who
not only has six or seven assistants to help him in his immediate
tasks, but also, since he is too busy in the service of humanity to
have time for reading, has eight trained assistants whose business it
is to read in many languages what is being done all over the civilised
world in his own line, and keep him informed as to the development of
experience. A wonderful advance on the crystallisation of individual
method, this, and yet it needed but the imaginative projection upon
scientific work of what every business firm and every political unit
has long done.
To transfer to our own concerns a method developed elsewhere is one of
the most valuable services imagination can render. Almost all
educational reform comes about thus, most mechanical inventions, a
great part of economy and comfort in individual homes. Also, besides
these particular advantages, the incessant coming and going between
the different fields of activity, the circulation of attention which
this use of the imagination involves, tends to vitalise and enrich
not only the individuals who carry it out, but the whole social
organism of which they form part.
Upon the moral side not much need be said. "Put yourself in his place"
is a very old and respectable recipe for growing justice in one's
conduct, consideration in one's speech, sympathy in one's heart. As
employer or magistrate, as teacher or nurse, as customer or shopman,
as parent or husband or child we must all deal somehow with our
fellow-men: honestly and truthfully, we mean, kindly and helpfully, we
hope. But is it not the more or the less of our imagination that makes
such dealings possible? Without it, we are cruel because of something
we do not feel, unjust because there is something we do not know,
unwittingly deceitful because there is something we do not understand.
With it, our justice will support, our kindness uplift, our attempt at
help will not be barren, but will awake response and raise the whole
level of our human intercourse into a region of higher possibilities.
E.M. COBHAM.
FUTURIST GARDENING.
TO-MORROW'S FLOWERS.
These three months of July, August and September are the second
seed-time. I think they must be the most proper sowing-time, for is it
not clear that Nature sows seed, not in spring, but in autumn? At any
rate, now we can do more towards making a perpetually beautiful flower
garden than in any other season. The biennials, those that blossom in
their second year of life and those jolly perennials that come up year
after year and always stronger than before, without any trouble on our
part, are best started in life not too long before the winter.
Spring-sown seed sometimes forgets that it is biennial and blossoms
rather futilely the same summer, and at other times it grows so lush
and large by winter that it cannot stand the frost.
Now we see the flowers in blossom in the vineyards of our friend
Naboth and we know which we should most like in our own garden. There
is an exquisite joy in begging or stealing a few seeds and bringing
them home to blossom for us as they did for Naboth. I carry at this
time a few small envelopes bought for a few pence a hundred at
Straker's, and whenever I see something nice in seed I bag it. In
another week it would drop beneath the plant it grew on and, not being
cared for by a gardener, would be smothered or hoed up. In a nice
little seed-bed all to itself it can unfold all manner of pleasure for
its abductor.
Plant your flower seeds on a nice ripe, rich bed--that is, one
compounded of old and even half-used manure. Keep the seedlings
watered as they grow and by judicious pricking-out give them the room
they need. About October you can plant the best of them in the place
where you want a good bush next year, and, if it is a perennial, you
have for many years to come a beautiful plant with a personal history.
Even if you have bought your penn'orth of seed there may be a pleasant
anecdote connected with it. My garden is at present amazingly blue
with Dropmore Alkanet (Anchusa). Three years ago I bought three seeds
for a penny. Two of them came up. I slashed up the plants and now I
have half-a-dozen clumps as well as a similar number left in the old
garden whence I have removed.
If you asked me what kinds of seed in particular you ought to plant
for perennial flowers just now, I might want many more pages to tell
you in. Let me give you a very short list of those that most appeal to
me on the spur of the moment. It will be enough to go on with:--
Trollius (globe flower).
Helianthemum (rock rose).
Epilobium (willow herb).
Hollyhock.
Echinops (globe thistle).
Anchusa Italica, Dropmore variety.
Lupine.
Tritoma (red-hot poker).
Heuchera (coral-root).
Yarrow.
Lychnis (garden campion).
Inula (Elecampane).
Funkia (Plaintain lily).
Eremurus.
This list is representative because it includes some species, such as
Eremurus, Trollius and Tritoma, that are not usually grown from seed
by the amateur. To raise these rather expensive monsters from
pennyworths of seed is a floral adventure which brings its own
abundant reward.
I should be very proud of a garden that consisted entirely of plants
that I had raised from seed. It might be one that had never had
anything else in or the seedlings might gradually oust the bulbs and
corms and grown plants with which the garden began. There would be
many things there intrinsically as well as extrinsically valuable.
Carnation seed, for example, is constantly producing new varieties,
and to grow rose seedlings is even to court fortune. It is a long time
before you see your rose. The seed takes sometimes two years to
germinate, and then you have to wait a year or two before you get a
typical blossom. The growers hurry matters by cutting a very tiny bud
from the first sprout and splicing that on to an older stock. One of
the advantages of having your roses grown from seed and on their own
stocks would be that they could not produce wild suckers.
I have just seen a wonderful grove of Aquilegias, the glorified
columbine which has the centre of one colour and the outside petals of
another--sulphur with mauve or yellow with pink, and many other
varieties. The nucleus was grown from shop seed and the rest from the
seed of the first-comers. The only thing to choose between them is
that the new ones have produced a least one variety not represented in
the first batch. You may be sure that I am going to get some seed
from here and raise some Aquilegias for myself. Good reader, go thou
and do likewise.
G.G. DESMOND.
MIDSUMMER MADNESS.
We had come, "3.7" and I, to the Boundary, a white, unpaved road which
winds across the full width of Wimbledon Common, from the old Roman
camp to the windmill. Simultaneously we cried a halt, I because I
never cross that road without some hesitation, he because he wanted to
get out of the folding go-cart in which he had been riding and turn
it, with the aid of a small piece of string and a big piece of
imagination, into a 40-horse-power motor car.
On the map the road is not called the Boundary. If you want to know
why I call it so I can only say that once you have crossed it things
are different; I do not mean a difference merely of country or
scenery, but a difference of atmosphere; better, and more literally, a
change of spirit. To put it bluntly, I never knew the reality of
fairyland until I blundered across that road one grey gusty evening
ten years ago, and heard the tall grasses whistling in the wind. Since
then the road has always been a frontier, not to be crossed without
preparation.
As "3.7" tumbled out of his go-cart I looked at my watch and saw it
lacked but a few minutes to noon. It was just such a cloudless June
day as must have inspired Shelley's _Hymn of Apollo_. No smallest
cloud to break the dazzling blue; and, high above our heads, Apollo,
standing "at noon upon the peak of heaven."
If it had been Midsummer Day I should have thought twice about
crossing the Boundary. As it was, we were quite near enough to the
24th of June to make it risky. So, as "3.7" bent a tangled head over
the bonnet of his Daimler, I flung myself down on the level turf
beside him and stared across the road.
Behind us and on either side were clumps of gorse bushes, and beyond
them the immense level expanse of the open heath. Immediately in front
was the road, sunk a foot beneath the turf, which comes right up to
it, both on this side and that.
"Another piece of string, please," said "3.7," rummaging in my pockets
without waiting for an answer, "and a pencil, and----"
And then I saw it. On the farther side of the road there is a stretch
of short turf, some hundred yards wide; and beyond that an irregular
line of silver birches; and beyond that the blue of distant hills, for
the Common slopes down where the trees begin. Between the silvery wood
and the road, through the midst of the wide belt of turf, and parallel
with the Boundary, ran a river. There was nothing to be much surprised
at, for it was just the kind of river you would expect to see running
through the fields of fairyland. It was a river of grass.
It was the slender-stalked, tufted, not very tall, grey-headed grass
that grows quite generally in open country and wild places. But the
wind and the sun now turned it into a river which ran fast between its
banks of green, its waves silvery grey, quick-flowing waves, gleaming
and dappled, an endless succession. It flowed from somewhere out of
sight in the west, and disappeared to the east over the edge of the
great slope that brings you down to the woods, vanishing, to all
intents and purposes, over the edge of the world.
Without taking my eyes off this astonishing spectacle I stretched out
a hand and, catching "3.7" by the edge of his white smock, told him to
run across the road to the grass and--paddle in it. I said it was
better than motor cars. He made no comment on this but, after glancing
warily up and down the road (for he has been brought up in wholesome
awe of the entire tribe of automobiles), he crossed the Boundary, ran
across the turf and plunged up to his knees in the river.
I cannot be certain, but it is my considered opinion that Apollo
stopped his golden chariot for the space of a whole minute to look
down at the golden-haired boy wading in that noiseless, fast-flowing
river.
In another minute "3.7" was back at my side, both hands full of the
tufted grass he had pulled. I regret to say he tickled my ear with it.
* * * * *
Honest, solemn reader, ardent food reformer, keen educationist,
clear-headed moralist, practical-minded housewife, I tell you frankly
there is no moral to this little episode. It throws no light on what
to eat, or on the purchasing power of an English shilling, or on the
ethical training of young children, or on the nature of neurasthenia.
Fairyland, of course, is a childish fiction, Apollo a solar myth, a
road is a road, grass is grass and heaven is a state of mind. I quite
agree with you. But let me whisper something in your ear. If you
should ever blunder across your Boundary, don't be surprised if things
look queer on the other side; above all, whatever you do, don't let
any strange river you may find flowing there carry you away, or it may
bring you, spite of all your protests, through one of the gates of
pearl into the City of God.
EDGAR J. SAXON.
A SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR MENTAL HEALING.
There is a vast amount of loose talk, and innumerable assertions from
irresponsible individuals concerning the wonders that have been
achieved by Mental Healing, but naturally the scientist and physician,
when dealing with such a question as this, has to put aside, not all
enthusiasm, but certainly all emotionalism, and then, most carefully
sift the evidence laid before him. The scientist here wants hard, dry,
irrefutable facts; the responsible physician requires to know--by his
own careful diagnosis or by an array of tabulated facts--the condition
of the patient before and after treatment--that is, of the one who
claims to have been cured by mental means. Innumerable claims are
thus being made by patients and others, so that it is imperative for
the unbiased physician at all events to consider the above question;
this in order to give a reason for the faith that is in him, when he
is known to be one of those who favour the metaphysical means of
healing. Even the sciolist in the matter knows that in the case, say,
of blushing, or blanching of the face, the action of mind over
matter--of the body--is palpable; all admit that the quality of joy,
for instance, will prove a splendid tonic; that despair, on the other
hand, will pull down the bodily condition. But all this, we shall be
told, is unconscious action; true, but fortunately we are now aware
that by a forceful action of the will we can _consciously_ direct or
derivate, as the case may be, currents of nerve-force to any part of
the body. Occultists have known this for many centuries. Joy, hope,
faith: these are very potent factors in improving the health
conditions--simply because they act upon the sympathetic nervous
system, and this latter acts upon the circulation. Happiness dilates
the blood-vessels. Fear contracts them. Thus, unbounded faith; renewed
hope; sudden joy; enforced will-power; all have a marked effect upon
bringing about an equilibriated condition of the circulation--just the
same as a hot bath does, though not so rapidly or so perceptibly.
Further, we must remember that all disease more or less is a stasis, a
congestion, somewhere; we have only to dissipate this; to separate the
cells; to expand the part, as it were, and "resolution," as we call it
in congestion of the lungs, takes place. So that it seems to me that
we can fairly claim a strictly scientific basis for Mental Healing. I
have always, however, maintained that the attitude of the patient's
own mind has much to do with the result: in his consciousness there
must be faith and hope in order to get the best effect.
Judging, then, of the very remarkable and palpable changes which
anyone can see occur on such superficial parts as the face and
extremities, I can see no reason that, by an enforced mental action,
the deeper parts--including any hidden diseased part--should not be
altered for good. I am very confident that it is upon these lines,
coupled, as they can always be, with advice as to clean feeding and
right living generally, the physician of the future will largely
depend for his cures. Thus we are fully justified in not only trying
the system on "functional," but also for "organic," cases.
J. STENSON HOOKER, M.D.
A SIGNIFICANT CASE.
ACCOUNT OF A FAST, UNDERTAKEN FOR THE CURE OF A PROFOUND BLOOD
DISEASE.
The following account of a fast is worthy of attention. It is rigidly
accurate _in principle_, as far as I could make it so, and I am
responsible for its truthfulness. But the subject of it, feeling that
he is engaged in a duty and "labour of love," as he expresses it, is
yet naturally anxious to prevent his identity from being discovered;
and so, while the facts of the narrative are true in principle they
have been varied in a few details for the purpose of preventing the
recognition of the subject of them.
They occurred in the history of a man of about 40 years of age, who
fell ill of an infectious disease some 20 years ago, while living
abroad. The exact time of the infection is not known. The patient was
treated by qualified doctors living in the same country as himself,
and there is no reason to believe that he was not properly and
skilfully treated. He had, however, for years buoyed himself up with
the hope that he should be able to come to England for the best
treatment, and recently he found himself in this country for that
purpose. It goes without saying that the eminent men consulted treated
him after the most modern and approved methods, which were also, so
far as knowledge goes, the most likely to benefit him. Not only as to
treatment must it be assumed that the best was done, but the diagnosis
also is supported by the authority of the doctors seen, and was
confirmed by physiological and pathological investigation. This would
be recognised if it were possible to publish names, places and dates
which are withheld from the courteous reader for the reason already
given. I can only say that I entirely concur in the diagnosis and in
the suitability of the treatment.
The man came under my care on a Sunday, the fast, which is the subject
matter of this communication, having been commenced on the Friday six
weeks before that day, the last food having been taken on the Thursday
at 5 P.M. I saw him, therefore, on the forty-fifth day of the fast.
His pulse was 59, soft, steady, regular. Temp. 96.8 degrees, about 11
A.M. He was able to be up, and walked actively, all his bodily
movements being active and his mind quite clear and rational. His
weight on the day after I first saw him was, in the same clothes as
when weighed at the beginning of the fast, 129+1/2 lbs. He said he
weighed 171 lbs. on the machine at the commencement, and therefore the
loss of bodily weight up to that time was 41.5 lbs. The average loss
of weight during the 46 days of the fast was about nine-tenths of a
pound daily if the 41.5 lbs. loss is divided by the 46 days of the
continuance of the fast up to that time--41.5/46=.9 lbs. almost
exactly.
When he came to my consulting room on the forty-sixth day, about 2.15
P.M., the pulse was 64, temp. 95.6 degrees (thermometer 3 minutes
under tongue). He was much troubled with a nasty expectoration of
mucus. His breath was very offensive. No enlarged glands could be felt
in either groin--perhaps a trifling enlargement in the right. In
middle of front border of right tibia a little irregularity is felt,
and a small hollow, which he thinks is filling up; but it might be
that the exudation on the bone immediately above and below the hollow
is somewhat reduced, as this would equally give the suggestion that
the hollow is filling up. There is a similar but rather smaller
irregularity on the left tibia also. He felt rather weak that day,
which he attributed to not having had his usual walk the day before.
The nasal cavity consists of a large grey septumless cavern showing
dry crusts. The issuing breath is most offensive. Patient had drunk
freely of water, he said, to the extent of 4 or 5 quarts a day during
the fast but when I said--do you mean that you have been taking over a
gallon of water daily?--he rather hesitated, and did not think it was
so much as that. He had not measured it and had taken it cold usually,
though occasionally hot, and had taken it without stint as he wanted
it. On the forty-eighth day of the fast he complained of being weak
but worst of all, he said, his breath was very offensive to himself.
It was so to me also--faint, fetid, putrid. His sense of smell was
greatly impaired, so much so that he could not smell the offensiveness
of the bowel-excreta which came away every day on using the
gravitation-enema, and which were horrible to by-standers. It would
seem from this as if his distress at the bad smell of his breath was
probably due to a perversion of the sense of smell, which can be
easily understood if we reflect that the disease-process was going on
in the region where the smell-apparatus is specially located. The
temperature was 96.2 degrees that morning the patient said. At 2 P.M.
when I saw him the pulse was 68, regular, even, steady. He says he was
feverish last night. I suppose he felt hot. He sleeps well, but says
he hears the clogs of the mill-hands as they go to their work in the
mornings. Has lost 2 lbs. weight in last 2 days. Temp. 93.6 degrees to
my observation 2.30 P.M. Says he feels "done at the stomach." His
voice is poor. Expectorates somewhat freely. A small blob of green
thickish mucus in ordinary white mucus came away in my presence. Urine
acid 1010. No glucose. Faint trace of albumin to heat and picric
acid: also to nitric acid. The right lachrymal punctum is blocked; the
tears run down the cheek; and I failed to get even a hair-thick wire
into it. Evening, pulse 65, temp. 97.2 degrees in bed with hot-water
bottle. Faeces most offensive, no bowel-excreta coming away except to
enema. Forty-ninth day. In bed, temp. 97.2 degrees, pulse 65, soft,
steady, regular. No great emaciation of limbs. Showed me some green
expectoration. He says it is from Salvarsan as it is exactly like what
he was injected with! The motion to the enema as offensive as before,
but the breath is less offensive to me: not so fetid.
On this day patient completed 7 weeks of fasting. Feels sick and as if
he would vomit. About midday he did vomit about a teaspoonful of dark
green stuff, very bitter and acid (bile, I should call it, though he
calls it "pure citric acid") and immediately after that he got rid of
a motion without the use of the enema, brown, dark and very offensive
still. I think the breath, however, is rather less offensive; and so I
thought also two days ago. Temp. 97, pulse 67, soft, steady, regular;
about 1.30 P.M. In bed since fiftieth day of fast. Not feeling very
ill and not specially emaciated, though the buttocks are thinning; but
legs and thighs and arms and forearms not specially thin. He came to
me to be weighed on the forty-ninth day and weighed 127+1/2 lbs.
Fifty-second day of fast. Still in bed. Condition much the same as to
pulse, temperature, etc., and as to emaciation so far as observation
goes. Remained in bed, not because unable to be up, but because he
thought it would be better for him to be resting. On the fifty-fourth
day, as he still felt sick, I gave him, at his request, an emetic in
the form of 10 grains of copper-sulphate. This was followed by
sickness after about an hour, when he got rid of a very little of the
same green stuff as before. Bile? But the difficulty is to understand
how, after all this time of fasting, he should still feel sick and
with inclination to vomit. On the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth days of
the fast he remained in bed, the condition being much the same. On
Thursday, the fifty-sixth day, he broke the fast at 5 P.M., just 8
weeks after beginning it. He had meant to go on for 60 days, and I did
not think that there would have been any danger in his doing so; but I
did not press him to continue any longer. He took 3 oranges on that
day; and on the Friday he took 5 more. I advised him not to increase
the quantity of food too quickly. The breath has been quite sweet
during the last two days. He has been too weak to take enemata, so we
cannot say if motions would still have been offensive. And as there is
no weighing machine in his room, we don't know the exact loss of
weight sustained during the fast, though there is no reason to think
that it has averaged more than .9 lb. a day. Up to the time of
stopping the enemata, pieces of mucous membrane and mucus itself came
away from the bowel, and the motions were very offensive. He seems to
have a mucous enteritis without fever.
On the fourth day after breaking the fast, patient took 6 oranges, 4
apples and a banana; and he ordered much more food, which, however, I
advised him not to take. On this day his bowels were opened naturally,
with a very offensive motion. But the breath was much sweeter, in fact
not offensive at all.
On the sixth day he came to my consulting-room and weighed 128 lbs.
Pulse 80, soft, steady, regular. He had not slept all night and had
had to be up no fewer than 6 times to have his bowels opened. No
diarrhoea, he said, but full motions, the first 3 very offensive.
Breath not offensive. Has dry pharyngitis and is complaining of sore
throat.
Next day. Weight 133 lbs. Bowels acted again, 1 A.M., 3 A.M., 6 A.M.,
9 A.M. and 1 P.M. Large motions. I told him I thought he was taking
too much food. Pulse 104. Not sleeping well. Complained of sore
throat.
Eighth day. Weight 138 lbs., a gain of 5 lbs. a day for 2 days. Pulse
80 at 7 A.M. (his own statement), at 2.30 P.M. pulse 100, temp. 99.4
degrees. Bowels acted at 12 midnight, 3.30 A.M. and about 11 A.M. Went
that day to have his photograph taken. The throat was better. Tongue
dry and leathery. It was plain to me that he was taking too much food.
He was having a mixed diet and taking much and often. He said his
"mouth was coming to pieces," and in fact the mucous membrane was
glazed and peeling; also the lips. On the ninth day he returned home.
The loss of weight can be seen from the following statement. On
commencing the fast the weight was 171 lbs.
First day weight was 171 lbs.
Sixth day " " 165+1/2 "
Seventh day " " 163+1/2 "
Twelfth day " " 158 "
Fifteenth day " " 155+1/2 "
Eighteenth day " " 150+1/2 "
Twenty-fifth day " " 142+1/2 "
Forty-seventh day " " 129+1/2 "
Forty-ninth day " " 127+1/2 "
Fast ended on fifty-sixth day. On the sixth day after breaking the
fast the weight was 128 lbs. On the next day it had risen to 133 lbs.
and on the following day to 138 lbs. In the first 47 days of the fast
the loss of weight was 43.5 lbs., or an average loss of .888 lbs.
daily (43.5/49=.888 lbs.) The loss of weight for the last 8 days
before the fast was broken is not known as patient was in bed, though
it probably was at much the same rate as during the other times of the
fast when the weight was taken on the scales.
The following comparative measurements are interesting. Of course he
had been eating for a week after the termination of his fast, so that
the measurements taken on that day would be higher probably than if
they had been taken seven days before, when he broke the fast.
BODILY MEASUREMENTS.
_At Commencement_ _At Termination_
_of Fast._ _of Fast._
Forearm 11 inches 9+5/8 inches
Arm 11+1/2 " 8+3/4 "
Hips 38 " 32+1/2 "
Thigh 21+1/4 " 16 "
Pelvis 37+1/2 " 30+1/2 "
Calf[1] 15+1/4 " 13+1/2 "
Neck 14+1/2 " 12+1/2 "
Chest 38 " 31+1/4 to 34+1/2 "
[1] There was a bundle of varicose veins behind right calf.
Patient kept a diary during his fast, but it does not seem necessary
to reproduce its statements here. It shows that he walked about during
the time, notes the state of the weather as foggy or very foggy or
freezing, mentions that water was taken, sometimes hot apparently, as
on 15th March, "after glass of hot water, pulse 70, temperature 98+1/2
degrees." No doubt drinking the hot water had elevated temporarily the
mouth-temperature, as it does. The diary also notes that he felt weak,
had a bath, or did not have a bath, notes the pulse-rate, etc., as
also the effects of the daily enemata. On the twenty-ninth day of the
fast he took a bottle of Apenta Water. Such are samples of statements
from the diary.
A. RABAGLIATI, M.A., M.D.
_The remainder of this article deals with conclusions of great
interest and value, and will appear in our next issue._--[EDS.]
HEALTHY LIFE RECIPES.
SALADS AND SALAD DRESSINGS.
For salads it is not necessary to depend entirely upon the usual salad
vegetables such as lettuce, watercress, mustard and cress.
The very finely shredded hearts of raw brussel sprouts are excellent,
and even the heart of a savoy cabbage. Then the finely chopped inside
sticks of a tender head of celery are very good; also young spinach
leaves, dandelion leaves, endive, sorrel and young nasturtium leaves.
Then there are the onion family (for those who can take them), the
tender kinds, such as spring onion, chive and shallot being very good
when chopped finely and used as a minor ingredient in any salad.
The root vegetables should also be added in their season, raw carrot,
turnip, beet, artichoke and leek, all finely grated.
A taste for all the above-mentioned vegetables, eaten raw, is not
acquired all at once. It is best to begin by making the salad of the
ingredients usually preferred and mixing in a small quantity of one or
two of the new ingredients.
For those who find salads very difficult to digest, it is best to
begin with French or cabbage lettuce and skinned tomatoes only, or, as
an alternative, a saucerful of watercress chopped very finely, as one
chops parsley.
Any salad, however made up, should be served in as dainty and pleasing
a fashion as possible. It is, perhaps, usually best to serve it ready
chopped and shredded, and to allow each person at the table to take
his or her own helping of "dressing."
English people seldom serve salad in the French fashion--that is,
quite dry, save that the dressing is well mixed in an hour before the
meal. Readers who have been to France may have seen French peasant
women whirling a wire salad-basket round their heads in order to dry
the materials after the cleansing has been done. When dry, the
green-stuff is torn with the hands, the dressing (and the French know
all about salad dressings) is added and the whole allowed to stand
some little time, so that by the time the meal is served there is a
complete blending of all flavours.
Not everyone likes this method; but it is certainly better than the
customary method here, which too often leaves a little puddle of water
at the bottom of the bowl.
There are many ways of preparing good salad dressing without resort to
vinegar, salt and pepper. The two prime necessities are (1) really
good oil and (2) some kind of fresh fruit juice. Most people prefer
lemon juice or the juice of fresh West Indian limes, well mixed into
either olive oil, nut oil or a blended oil such as the "Protoid Fruit
Oil" or Mapleton's Salad Oil. The ordinary "salad oils" obtainable at
grocers are seldom to be recommended; they almost invariably contain
chemical preservatives and other adulterants. It is better to have the
best oil and use it sparingly if need be, than take any faked product
just because it is cheap.
With most people the addition of pure oil assists the digestion of the
salad, as well as serving other purposes in the body.
Many excellent salad recipes and suggestions for novel yet simple
"dressings" will be found in _Unfired Food in Practice_, by Stanley
Gibbon.[2]
[2] 1s. net; 1s. 1+1/2d. post paid, from the office of _The Healthy
Life_, 3 Amen Corner, London, E.C.
PICKLED PEPPERCORNS.
_This, which is a regular feature of THE HEALTHY LIFE, is not intended
as a household guide or home-notes column, but rather as an
inconsequent commentary on current thought._--[EDS.]
An interesting booklet by Raymond Blathwayt with samples of Bath
Mustard will be sent free on application to J. & J. Colman, Ltd.
(Dept. 49) Norwich.--Advt. in _Punch_.
Rumours are also afloat that G.K. Chesterton has written a brilliant
booklet on Eiffel Tower Lemonade, and that the Attorney General has
been commissioned to write a highly interesting brochure on American
macaroni.
* * * * *
"I enclose you a photo of my baby, Willie, aged fifteen months.
He was given up by two doctors, and then I consulted another, who
advised me to try ----'s Food, which I did, and he is still
having it. You can see what a fine healthy boy he is now, and his
flesh is as hard as iron."--From an advt. in _Lady's Companion_.
Evidently a case of advanced arterio-sclerosis.
* * * * *
HEALTH BISCUITS. Nice and Tasty, handled by our 55 salesmen
daily.--Advt. in _Montreal Daily Star_.
One reason, perhaps, why both the public and the sales have
declined.
* * * * *
WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE FOR A PERFECT SKIN?
Is 3d. too much?
Many perfect skins to-day are traced to a single sample.
--Advt. in _Lady's Companion_.
The price is reasonable; but I think I would rather see a sample
first, wouldn't you?
* * * * *
OUR SPECIAL FILLING FAST--Headline in _Daily News_.
The correct antidote for the well-known "starvation of
over-repletion."
* * * * *
Cold Anniversary Raised Pie and New Potato Salad.--From the
_Seventh Anniversary Menu of The Eustace Miles Restaurant_.
I am told that one old gentleman, misled by the chef's quite innocent
use of adjectives, protested to a waitress that the day was really
very warm; also that a youthful wag obliterated the initial C from his
menu with a pen-knife and then inquired which was the better vintage,
'06 or '09.
* * * * *
But to contend that there is no difference between a good yellow
man and a good white man is like saying that a vegetarian chop of
minced peas is like a chop of the chump variety.--_New Witness_.
Chop-chop--as the good yellow man might be tempted to say if he came
upon this specimen of white wisdom.
* * * * *
Canvassers can make a very good profit by selling a patent
ladies' folding handbag, also wristlet watches.--Advt. in _Daily
Mail_.
Nevertheless, the only place for a patent lady is a registry
office.
* * * * *
CAKEOMA PUDDING? You cannot know how delicious they are until you
have tasted them.--Advt. in _Lady's Companion_.
One of the things that would never have occurred to you if you hadn't
seen it expressed so clearly.
* * * * *
SAXON.--How cruel of you. Although I have not the honour of cap
and gown, I do possess a Classical Dictionary. If I can help
further, write again. Regarding the recipe, it depends upon its
nature. Perhaps VERA is the lady to whom you should address your
question--_Lady's Companion_.
My colleague, Mr Edgar J. Saxon, denies all knowledge of this affair.
But I do wish he would be a little more careful in future.
PETER PIPER.
HEALTH QUERIES.
_Under this heading Dr Knaggs deals briefly month by month, and
according as space permits, with questions of general interest._
_Correspondents are earnestly requested to write on one side only of
the paper, giving full name and address, not for publication, but as a
guarantee of good faith. When an answer is required by post a stamped
addressed envelope must be enclosed._--[EDS.]
CAN MALARIA BE PREVENTED?
A. de L. (Lisbon) writes:--For five months I have been a strict
"fruitarian," and as I am obliged now to go to Mozambique
(Portuguese East Africa) to remain there five rears, I should be
much obliged to you if you kindly let me know what I must do to
prevent the African fever and biliousness which seem to afflict
all Europeans in that part of the world. Any hints you could give
me as to maintaining health in such a climate would be most
gratefully acknowledged.
I do not think that it is possible for any European, whether he adopts
fruitarian or ordinary diet, to entirely escape malaria, since it is
caused by a minute parasite which is forced into the blood by a
certain form of biting mosquito.
The parasite will, however, surely gain less hold on one whose blood
is clean and pure and whose vital force is strong, than on one who
dissipates his strength by partaking of meat, alcohol, tea, coffee and
other stimulants, or who otherwise gets his blood into a bad state by
faulty diet generally.
Therefore, the thing this correspondent should do is to live as much
as possible upon the simple frugal fare of the natives. He can take
raw coker-nut freely and eat the fresh fruits which grow in this part
of Africa. If he can obtain pineapple or papaw he will find these
excellent to help him to retain his health and strength in this
country.
UNFIRED DIET FOR A CHILD: IS IT SUITABLE?
Mrs L.B.F. writes:--My husband and I are much interested in _The
Healthy Life_, deriving much benefit and good advice from its
pages. It is the only magazine, we find, which answers questions
that we have long been puzzling over. Reading a work of the
"Montessori Method" of training children last night I was
disturbed to find I had, according to that book, been feeding my
little boy, aged three years, all wrong. It says: "Raw vegetables
should not be given to a child and not many cooked ones. Nuts,
dates, figs and all dried fruits should be withheld. Soups made
with bread, oil, bread and butter, milk, eggs, etc., are the
principal foods Dr Montessori recommends. She also advocates the
use of sugar."
Our boy has nuts, ground and whole, all the fresh fruits and
dried ones, salads, brown bread and nut butter, sometimes dairy
butter, no milk, his food mostly uncooked, as we ourselves
believe in. If Dr Valentine Knaggs would give us his opinion on
this I should be very grateful. The boy is healthy, but I notice
a slight puffiness below the eyes of late in the morning. Also
his temper does not improve as he gets older. Will he be having
too much proteid (nuts) for one of his years, or is the temper
natural as a result of bad discipline. His father is away all
day, and mothers are, as a rule, soft marks, are they not?
It is difficult to answer fully a question of this sort, as so much
depends on the child's temperament and environment. A frail, delicate
child with the promise of high mental development requires a finer and
softer grade of nutriment than one of a coarse animal nature with
strong, well-developed digestive organs.
All healthy children, especially boys (as Mr Saxon will attest!), are
full of mischief and restlessness, which it is the duty of a mother or
a nurse to divert into right channels.[3] The display of temper is
probably an indication of this not being done, though it _may_ be due
in part to the raw diet not suiting the child.
[3] This correspondent, and all mothers of difficult children, should
study the works of Mary Everest Boole, published by C.W. Daniel, Ltd.;
also _The Children All Day Long_, by E.M. Cobham.--[EDS.]
The advice I would give would be to alter the diet and make it
lighter.
From my point of view, Dr Montessori has not given sufficient
attention to the other side of the diet question, preferring to remain
more on the side of orthodoxy. Moreover, her own work has been done in
Italy, where a climate prevails which does not call for so free a use
of vegetables and salads as is the case in our own cooler and bleaker
clime.
I suggest, as a beginning, the following diet might be tried, but it
is necessarily impossible to guarantee good results unless the cause
of the puffy eyes and temper have been definitely located by personal
examination:--
_On rising._--A raw ripe apple, finely grated, or simply scraped out
with a silver spoon.
_Breakfast at 8._--A scrambled egg on a Granose biscuit with a little
finely chopped salad or finely grated; raw roots appetisingly served
with a dressing of oil, lemon juice and a little honey. This to be
followed by an "Ixion" or "P.R." biscuit, with fresh butter.
_Dinner at 2._--Home-made cottage cheese, or cream cheese, or a nut
meat (served cold out of the tin, or, better still, home-made). Two
casserole-cooked vegetables, done with a little fruit juice and lemon
to retain colour. This to be followed by a baked apple with cream and
a little home-made, unfired pudding made of dried fruits.
_Supper at 5._--A slice of "Maltweat" bread, and butter, and a cupful
of clear vegetable soup, or some hot water with some lemon juice
added, and slightly sweetened with a little honey.
GIDDINESS AND HEAD TROUBLE.
Mrs L.B.F. also writes:--I sometimes think I must make dietetic
mistakes. My husband thinks I am perfectly healthy, so I do not
say anything of the giddiness in the morning and after eating, a
drowsiness and slight pain at the back of the head and underneath
one of my ears. Also under my eyes is on some mornings quite
swollen and puffed up. It is not so marked, but I am quite
conscious of it. Our diet consists mostly of a salad, with bread
or baked potato and cheese or ground nuts or cooked brussels
sprouts and a nut meat pie, apple pie and cream, with brown bread
and butter, or a raw fruit meal, nuts, apples, grapes, figs,
dates and no bread.
Two meals a day, first in the morning at eight o'clock, second at
two or three in the afternoon. A glass of hot water with lemon at
nine P.M., and the same in the morning. I do some exercises night
and morning and am out in the fresh air often through the day. We
live in the country and I have every chance of keeping myself
healthy. Perhaps I should say I do not eat many nuts, finding
them rather difficult to digest. Should I use an enema when I
feel like this, or wait for natural results?
The symptoms of which L.B.F. complains are in all probability due to
flatulence and to general disturbances of the digestive process.
Perhaps it would be a good plan to make the diet lighter. The nuts
could be omitted and cheese or eggs substituted. An evening meal would
be helpful.
As to the bowels, some senna and camomile tea at bedtime would help to
clear them. Unless there is distinct evidence of faecal retention in
the colon it is better not to use the enema as a regular thing.
_On rising._--A tumblerful of Sanum Tonic Tea made with hot,
preferably distilled, water.
_Breakfast._--An all-fruit meal consisting of nothing but apples,
bananas, grapes, or orange, or any fresh ripe fruit that is in season.
_Dinner at 12.30._--A cooked meal consisting of two casserole-cooked
vegetables, with grated cheese as a sauce dressing, with some
twice-baked or well toasted bakers' bread, followed by a baked apple
and cream. (Omit nut meat pie and apple pie.)
_Tea meal at 5._--2 oz. of cottage cheese or cream cheese, wholemeal
bread and butter, small plateful of finely grated raw roots with an
appetising dressing containing some "Protoid Fruit-Oil."
_Bedtime._--Tumblerful of hot water (preferably distilled) to which
senna leaves and German camomile flowers (very little) have been
steeped to infuse; or a cupful of dandelion coffee could be taken if
the bowels are regularly acting.
LONG-STANDING GASTRIC TROUBLE.
W.T. writes:--Having tried a diet, recommended in _The Healthy
Life_, for a month I find the nuts and cheese are far too heavy
for the apparent weak condition of my stomach, also that the
salads and casserole-baked vegetables are too irritating to the
membrane of the stomach. I have no desire to return to flesh food
and ordinary feeding, which I feel would not be good for me. From
eggs I cannot obtain any good results. The continuance of loss of
weight is worrying me, being down to eight stone from eleven
stone in twelve months. I feel satisfied it is only a question of
diet, if I could only strike the correct one. I am naturally most
anxious to regain some of my lost strength and weight. I am at
present taking bread and butter, cooked fruit, and occasionally
an egg, boiled rice, vegetables and a little dried fruit. No
matter how light I make my diet I still suffer after every meal
with dilated stomach and irregular working of the heart. Blood
circulation is still bad and constipation is gradually getting
worse. As before stated, I am anxious to succeed with the
reformed diet, but I am really at a loss to know which way to
proceed to make any progress. As I was in South Africa twenty
years, and only returned to England just before this catarrh set
in, is the climate here against my progress, do you think? I am
so sorry to take up so much of your time, but shall be grateful
for any help you can give me which will be greatly appreciated.
It is difficult to advise how best to proceed in this case as our
correspondent really ought to seek medical advice. Only in this way
can he obtain really satisfactory guidance. For without knowing the
state of his blood and the organs generally it is impossible to advise
correctly. Speaking generally, until salads and casserole-cooked
vegetables can be taken freely there can be no possible permanent
cure.
In many such cases the best way to train the digestive organs into a
healthy state is to keep to a diet consisting chiefly of dextrinised
cereals, which must be eaten dry, with some vegetables and as little
fresh fruit as possible. This to be continued until little by little
the raw salad vegetables are found to agree; then the rest is easy.
A diet on the following lines would probably be a good temporary
measure:--
_Breakfast._--One egg lightly boiled, poached or baked, with two
Granose biscuits and fresh butter, eaten dry.
_Dinner._--Brusson Jeune bread (one or two rolls) with butter, and
small helping of vegetables, cooked at _first_ in the orthodox way.
_Supper._--Plateful of boiled rice (cooked dry in the Indian
fashion[4]) with a tablespoonful of good malt extract.
No sugar, honey, stewed fruit, or dried fruit should be taken until
improvement has set in. As little fluid as possible should be taken
until the stomach has regained more tone and become more normal in
size.
[4] See _The Healthy Life Cook Book_. 1s. net (post free, 1s. 1+1/2d.).
SEVERE DIGESTIVE CATARRH.
Miss S.L.P. writes:--I should like a little help as to diet. I
have just had an attack of epidemic influenza with throat
trouble, so that I feel very much run down and unfit for a diet
too depleting in character. For over four years I have adopted a
non-flesh diet on account of a tendency to chronic catarrh of the
whole alimentary tract, due to rheumatic tendencies which affect
me internally rather than externally. The continuous damp weather
has produced much gastric irritation, and frequent acidity.
I cannot discover a diet that is convenient and at the same time
sufficiently nourishing. I lose flesh on what I take, and I have
none to spare, though at one time I was inclined to be stout. My
age is forty-eight.
I take three meals a day. A light breakfast either of "Maltweat"
bread or "P.R." Cracker biscuits and butter, with tomato or fresh
fruit or occasionally an egg. For midday meal an egg or milled
cheese, or nuts or cream cheese, with a baked potato and a
conservatively cooked vegetable. Occasionally I have a little
salad and grated carrot, but unless I am better than usual I
cannot digest these. The evening meal consists of "Maltweat"
bread or "P.R." Cracker biscuits or Granose flakes, with cream
cheese. As a child I suffered constantly from colds in the head,
but now my troubles are oftener internal.
The action of the bowels is irregular. I depend chiefly upon an
enema of warm water when constipation is present.
I never drink tea, only hot water, or Emprote and water, or
occasionally vegetable juices or fruit juices. I find I am better
without much fluid.
So far as it is possible to judge from this letter, this correspondent
is suffering not only from stomach and bowel catarrh, but her
condition as a whole is unsatisfactory. The vital force is depleted
and the nervous system is not doing efficient work.
She needs suitable treatment to remove the acid and toxins with which
the system is evidently clogged. This is not an easy task, for as soon
as elimination begins trouble arises in the form of influenza or other
similar derangements. These are probably little else but attempts on
the part of nature to rouse the vital force of the body into action
with a view to clearing out the clogging poisons.
Waste clearing should be done gradually. The skin should be made to
act better by means of home Turkish baths, or by wet-sheet packs. Then
mustard poultices can be applied _along the course of the spine_ and
massage with suitable manipulations can be applied to the muscles and
bones which make up the spine. The daily practising of the excellent
and simple breathing and bending exercises described in Muller's _My
System for Ladies_[5] will be very helpful. By means such as these the
body will be gradually cleared of its poisons, and so the nervous
system will be made to do better work.
The diet specified can be continued.
H. VALENTINE KNAGGS.
[5] 2s. 8d. post free from the office of _The Healthy Life_, 3 Amen
Corner, London, E.C.
* * * * *
_May we ask the co-operation of all our readers during the holiday
season in the following way. On holidays you are bound to meet fresh
people, and make new acquaintances, and even friends. We suggest you
purchase a few extra copies of _THE HEALTHY LIFE_ before you start and
hand them on to any likely to be interested. People tell us the
magazine is its own recommendation. This does not mean that you need
not add your own. The circulation grows steadily, but it is far short
of what it might easily be if every reader were to gain one fresh
reader every month._--[EDS.]
MORE APPRECIATIONS.
I want to say how very interesting and helpful I find _The Healthy
Life_, and it is always a pleasure to buy an extra copy to give to
friends, for I always feel it will do them good to read it, and
perhaps make regular subscribers of them.
H. BARTHOLOMEW, Knebworth.
THE
HEALTHY
LIFE
The Independent
Health Magazine.
3 AMEN CORNER LONDON E.C.
VOL. V AUGUST
No. 25. 1913
_There will come a day when physiologists, poets, and
philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one
another._--CLAUDE BERNARD.
AN INDICATION.
The pursuit of health, considered from the negative standpoint, is the
flight from pain.
And pain is the great mystery of life.
James Hinton, himself a well-known physician of his time, attempted to
solve the mystery of pain by showing that it is the accompaniment of
imperfection. That what is now experienced as pain might be exquisite
pleasure given a higher stage of human development.
But this, after all, only shifts the mystery one step farther. Instead
of the mystery of pain we have the mystery of imperfection. Yet to
image perfection is always to image something incapable of growth or
further development.
Take, for example, a perfect circle. So long as it remains unbroken,
flawless, the line (or infinite number of lines) composing it cannot
be continued or extended. But given a break in the line and it may be
continued round and round, up and up (or down and down) into an
infinitely ascending spiral. This possibility of extension depends on
a break, on an imperfection.
It does not follow, of course, that every flaw in human nature is
always the starting-point of new growth, every failure a
stepping-stone to greater knowledge, but the possibility is there. It
is for men to see that they do not neglect their opportunities.--[EDS.]
IMAGINATION IN PLAY.
_Regular readers will recognise in this wonderfully simple and
suggestive article a continuation of the series previously entitled
"Healthy Brains." The author of "The Children All Day Long" is an
intimate disciple of one of the greatest living psychologists, and she
has a message of the first importance to all who realise that true
health depends as much on poise of mind as on physical fitness._--[EDS.]
The fruit of imagination ripens into deeds actually done in the
service of man: its flower brightens the whole of life and makes it
fragrant, from the budding-time of children's play and laughter to the
developed blossoms of the creative imagination which we call painting
or poetry or music.
Play and art have this in common, that they are activities pursued for
the sake of the activity itself, not as a means to any other object,
not aiming at any material usefulness. Actually, of course, there is
nothing more useful, on every scale of usefulness, than the
development of the individual in art or play, but these would never be
really themselves while an ulterior purpose formed a background to
them in consciousness.
Physical exercises devised for the sake of health are a more or less
pleasant form of work; they do not take the place of play. Our
ordinary work is usually more or less one-sided and unbalanced in the
demands it makes upon us; we therefore try to find what other set of
movements will undo this unbalancement and give us back unbiased
bodies. When that is done, and not till then, we get freedom, and it
is at that moment that real "play" begins--the use of the freed
muscles according to our own will and pleasure.
The same thing is perhaps true in connection with our minds. We all
see the fallacy of the old-fashioned hustlers' cry, "Make your work
your hobby; think of nothing else; let every moment be subordinated to
the dominating idea of your career; put aside all sentimentalism, all
laziness and self-will, all enthusiasm about things not in your own
line of work."
We have come to see that this kind of effort leads often to nervous
breakdown and early death; always to a certain narrowing of sympathy
and hardening of method even in the career itself. So we
conscientiously "take up" a hobby or a sport and set aside some hour
or day for indulgence in it. We make it a duty to lay aside for the
time being all idea of duties; part of our work is to learn to rest.
So far so good. But does all this go far enough?
Work imposed by any set of outer needs puts the whole being under a
certain strain. The aim of remedial exercises, prescribed rest-times
and legal holidays is to undo this strain, to unwind us from our coil
by twisting us the other way.
When this has been satisfactorily done, too often the person
responsible thinks that this is enough. But it is really and truly at
this moment that one is beginning one's real life.
When the body is freed from strain and weariness is the time to leap
and dance and sing and wrestle.
When the mind is free from prejudice and weariness is the time for its
original activity to begin; new thoughts spring up unbidden and the
creative imagination lives and grows.
(In the sphere of will, many great sages have said that an analogous
sequence holds good. When the whole emotional and moral nature has
thrown itself in a particular direction, and then an unwinding has
taken place, the moment of completed renunciation has been said to be
the dawn of some great new spiritual light.)
Who does not know the peaceful activity of a Sunday evening, the
fruitful quiet of a long railway journey or sea-voyage _at the end_ of
a holiday? Two friends walk slowly home together after an exciting
expedition or debate; two girls give each other their confidence while
brushing their hair after a dance.
Why is this so? Nowadays people are very ready to answer the question
by refusing the fact. It is waste of time not to be _doing_ something
strenuously. Rest is almost as strenuous as everything else; it is to
be thorough while it is the duty on hand and is to fit exactly on to
the work time, without overlapping but without interspace.
In this way too often the imagination, the really individual part of
the mind, is starved and atrophied. Especially in childhood there
ought to be a space left between useful work and ordered play for the
individually invented games, the pursuits that are not for any
definite end, for dreams and lived-out tales, when the child may make
what he likes, do what he likes, and in imagination be what he likes.
If we scrupulously respected this growing-time we should soon have a
race of sturdier mettle altogether. Just now this particular want is
probably most nearly supplied among elementary school children than
among those who have more "educational advantages"; they "go out to
play" in the streets for hours every day, and one cannot help thinking
that it is the vitality thus evolved that keeps most of them healthy
and happy in spite of many hardships.
In later life, if we really want to make something of our lives, we
shall do well to insist an keeping such a margin of free time to
ourselves. It need not be long. Five minutes, if one really sails away
in the ship of imagination, will take us to fairyland and back again.
But the five minutes (or the day in the country, or the week of quiet,
or whatever we take or can get) must really and truly be free; we
must have the courage to seek for what we really want, and we shall
have the inestimable reward of finding what we really are.
E.M. COBHAM.
HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT?[6]
[6] See July number.
For some years I lived according to the advice given by "M.D." with
regard to the quantity of proteid that should be taken. But experience
led me to believe that it was wrong. In recent years my diet has
consisted of the following quantities per annum:--
Three to four bushels of wheat.
Seventy pounds of oats.
One bushel of nuts (measured in the shells).
And with these foods rich in proteid, I have taken plenty of raw
vegetables and fruit, and three to four gallons of olive oil.
I do not mention this as an ideal, in order to suggest another and
better standard than that of "M.D." I do not think any such thing as a
standard really exists or can exist. But I mention it to show how far
I have travelled away from where I was.
I take it that all food reformers will agree that the main reason for
food reform is to make the body a more harmonious instrument for the
true life of man, and that carries with it the belief that there is
some correspondence, if we cannot yet see absolute unity, between the
physical and the spiritual. Now the law of life, according to Christ,
is one of continual progress towards perfection and I do not see how
this will harmonise with the teaching of a fixed law for the body. All
my experience and observation point to a progressive law for the body,
and I do not know of a single fact contrary to it.
My first point, then, is that there is no such thing as a standard of
proteid needed by the body. All that can be said is this, that if you
take a man who has been fed on a certain quantity for such and such a
time and then feed him on a certain other quantity, alterations in
the physical condition will appear. But who can say whether these
changes are attributable merely to a deficiency or to a previous
excess? If "M.D." and his patients take excessive food they naturally
get trouble from stored poisons when they reduce the quantity. But why
put all the trouble down to present deficiency instead of to previous
excess? To this I can find no satisfactory answer.
If we have got our bodies into so hopeless a condition that we cannot
use our God-given instincts, tastes and feelings in the first place,
the wisdom of troubling much about the continuance of bodily life
would be doubtful; and, in the second place, one would need most
overwhelming signs of knowledge to substitute for them. But where are
they? There is no agreement between those who have been taught
physiology. On the one hand, "M.D." gives a proteid standard, now
impossible to myself, and I believe to many others, for it would
involve eating a nauseating quantity; and, on the other hand, another
doctor, presumably acquainted with the same physiology, tells me I
cannot eat too little, so long as I do not persistently violate true
hunger and taste. Then another doctor gives quite a different
standard, and a much lower one. If we discard our natural guides,
which of the claimants to knowledge is to be followed, and is there
any knowledge at all such as is claimed?
Imagine what a mockery it would have been to give such a standard as
that of "M.D." to the agricultural labourer about the middle of last
century, a typical one with a large family, and one who worked as men
do not work to-day, and had to rear his family on a few shillings a
week. How could such a one have provided more than a fraction of what
"M.D." says is necessary, either for himself or his children?
The broad fact is, that all the hardest work of the world has always
been done by those who get the least food. As one who has had some
experience of labour, I doubt if the workers could have done so much
if it had not been for a spare diet. Certain it is, that since they
have more to eat, they are much less inclined to work.
My contention, then, is that there is no fixed standard of proteid
needed by the body, but that the quantity depends on the development
that is in progress and is only discoverable by the natural guides of
appetite and taste, ruled by reason and love of others. Moreover, I
contend that even if there were such a standard as "M.D." says
physiology has found, it obviously is not known.
I cannot help recognising in "M.D." one whom I gratefully love and
respect. He helped me on the road, and now that I differ from him I do
not forget it, and I ask his forgiveness if I seem to be arrogant. He
thinks I cannot see what he sees because I am underfed, and I think he
cannot see what I see because he is overfed. In a sense we are both
right, and we form a beautiful illustration of the different states of
mind that belong to different physical conditions. I urge the laymen
like myself not to be afraid of that musty old ill-shaped monster
called Science[7] when he is up against the eternal truths that belong
to every simple untutored man. Shun the monster as you would a priest,
to whom he has a great likeness, and unite with me in a long strong
pull to get "M.D." out of the rut in which the monster holds him, so
that we may have him with us on the road, for he carries much treasure
and we cannot do without him.
A.A. VOYSEY.
[7] I do not wish to be misunderstood. No sane man despises real
science, but when the mixture of science and ignorance, which usually
stalks about in the name of science, wants to usurp our heaven-born
instincts we cannot but notice his ugly and monstrous shape. It is the
function of science, or a true knowledge of details, to fill in the
mosaic of the temple of wisdom, but the mosaic can never be the
structure itself and is only useful and good when it is subservient to
that structure and harmonious with it.
CAMPING OUT.
FOOD QUESTIONS.
"We have to consider," I said, "the question of what food to take and
how to cook it."
"Camping out," said Sylvia, "ought to be a complete holiday from the
food bother. Why not live on unfired food, such as tinned tongue,
sardines and bottled shrimps?"
Thereupon Felix laughed a great laugh, and said: "Just try and do a
thousand miles on sardines."
Felix is Sylvia's brother, who has spent some twenty years in America,
travelling for weeks through country that contained no people, and
spending nearly two years in a single journey to Dawson City and home
again. He plainly knows far more about bed-rock camping than anyone
else in the family and we allowed him to take the floor for a time.
"The first thing is bread." said Felix, "because you can't do without
bread. You must take some yeast or else some baking-powder with you to
make it rise, or you must bake it very quickly so that the steam
aerates it. You might take a Dutch oven with you, but it's nothing
like the Dutch oven that you know in this country. It is an iron pot
on three legs, with an iron lid. You stand it in the fire and cover
the lid with hot brands and you can cook anything inside it--ducks and
chunks of venison, and bread of course."
"But Mr Freeman has barred the oven," said Sylvia, "and if we are not
going a thousand miles from home perhaps we can do without it."
"As you like," answered Felix. "I only mention it so that you can get
hold of the general principle. You can make very good bread in a
frying-pan. You must mix the dough up stiff so that when the pan is
nearly upright it won't tumble out. You fix the pan up with a prop
behind it so that the dough faces the fire, quite close, and you draw
some more fire behind it so that the back is warmed as well. When it
burns a good crust on both sides it is done."
"What are flap-jacks," I asked.
"Just pan-cakes made without eggs or milk," said Felix. "You mix a
quart of flour with a tablespoonful of baking-powder and put in water
till it is just so thin that when you take up a spoonful and let it
drop back you can see the shape of it for a few seconds before it
melts into the rest. You fry the batter in bacon fat or butter just
like pan-cakes, and the cakes are very good."
[Illustration: _A Summer Idyll_]
"That's a good tip for us," I said, "and another good thing to take is
cuddy biscuits, a kind of captain's biscuit. Soak them a few minutes
in water or milk and fry them. They're nice with tomatoes or anything,
or by themselves."
"Mebbe," said Felix, and his tone said, "Mebbe not." "I'm only
discussing general principles, and you've got to work your own way out
in the light of them. I've known an outfit come away without a
frying-pan. How do you make bread then?"
We had to give it up, and Felix went on: "Open your flour sack, turn
down the edge like it is in a baker's shop, make a little hole in the
flour and pour in water to make a pond. Mix in what flour you want to
use and get your dough into the shape of a snake, wind it round a
stick and cook it like that. You've got your bread then like a French
roll, and very good it is."
We all liked the idea of making bread every day and eating it hot.
Here was something to be had in camp that you could not get at home.
And we liked the idea of learning our cooking by means of first
principles. Whether we liked it or not, Felix liked talking about it,
and he began to grow anecdotal.
"Once," he said, "I met a whole lot of men, ten of them I should
think, camped on a cold frosty night with nothing to eat. They were
trying to do a journey of thirty miles on rough prairie and their
horses were tired and they could not get on. They had brought their
lunch and eaten it long ago, and they told me they were starving. They
had nothing to eat, nothing to do any cooking with and no wood to make
a fire with. I never saw such hungry people. They were new settlers
just out from England and it was up to me to do something for them.
"'What have you got in that great waggon?' I asked. They told me they
had some sacks of flour and two frozen quarters of beef, but there was
nothing to cook it in and no wood to make a fire.
"There was any amount of cow-dung on the prairie, and it was dry as
chips. I set them collecting that and soon enough had a fire. I filled
a bucket with water and put it on to boil. I chopped off some meat and
put it in. Then I made some dumplings and put them in. You just put
them into boiling water, you know, and then they cook at once on the
outside and don't come to pieces. If they boil too much they get
pappy, and if not done through they're not good. Most dumplings you
eat in England are not done, but mine were just right and those ten
hungry men had just as good a supper as anyone could wish for."
"Tell us about the coffee you used to make," said Sylvia. "What
horrible stuff it must have been."
"The very best coffee ever I drank," said Felix.
"We used to make it in a pot that was nearly a yard high. We never
turned out the grounds, but let them settle and put in a little more
every time we made coffee, till the pot was so full that it wouldn't
hold any more water."
"I don't see anything against it," I said, when Sylvia and Gertrude
were both expressing their horror. "There is no tannin or other bad
principle in coffee and you never get anything worse out of it than
you do at the first soaking."
"The fellows that work the logs on the river have their own kind of
coffee that they call drip coffee," said Felix. "They have a tall pot
like ours was and they tie the coffee in a sack above the water, so
that the water never touches it, but the steam goes up and fetches it
out in drops. They don't change the sack every time, but keep adding
coffee till it won't hold any more."
"The moral of which is?" said Basil, who had for some time been
growing impatient.
"That there are plenty of ways of cooking an egg besides frying it,"
said Felix, "and that a bit of common-sense is about the best article
you can take with you out camping. Take your food as raw as you can
get it and know how to cook it. Also know a good herb when you see it,
and never overlook a chance of getting a meal from the country that
will save your stores."
C.R. FREEMAN.
_Food reformers will have their own opinion about a diet of shrimps,
sardines, tinned tongue and stale coffee when camping out: the most
important part of the outfit is doubtless an adequate supply of
common-sense._--[EDS.]
SEASICKNESS: SOME REMEDIES.
_In the April and May numbers of the present year we published an
article by Mr Hereward Carrington entitled "Seasickness: How Caused,
How Cured." The following supplementary suggestions by the same
well-known writer will be useful to many readers._--[EDS.]
A very good plan, when you think of undertaking a voyage, is to begin
to prepare for it several days in advance. For three or four days,
before embarking, eat only very simple and somewhat laxative
foods--such as fruits--so as to open the bowels well and tone up the
system. This simple diet should be followed for the first two or three
days aboard--of course not so rigidly, but taking care not to indulge
in many heavy, greasy dishes. Unfortunately, the food on board is
usually very rich and plentiful, and tempts one to eat. If one suffers
from seasickness, there is not this same temptation, to be sure; but
the malady may certainly be warded off, in the majority of cases, if
only reasonable care be taken of the diet before and during the
voyage, and if instructions herein laid down be followed.
As before stated, drugs are as a rule useless for the cure of
seasickness; but on occasion a "seasick cure" of some kind may prove
effective. The harm which results from the drug may perhaps be more
than counterbalanced by the benefits which the system derives from the
cessation of seasickness. A preparation of this kind which is very
highly recommended by many travellers is known as "Antimermal," and
though none of these remedies are to be recommended with assurance,
this one--and perhaps one or two others--might at least be tried, in
cases of dire necessity, when seasickness has already supervened.
It is hardly necessary to say that the patient should remain in the
open air continuously, until all symptoms of seasickness have paused.
_Live_ in your deck chair until you feel quite well and able to get
up and walk round. Do not attempt to go downstairs into the
dining-saloon to meals, if you feel in the slightest "squirmish."
Rather have some hot soup or broth of some kind sent up to you, and
drink it sitting in your chair. Do not be afraid to drink water at all
times, even if you feel ill--as the water is easily returned, and it
is less strain on the stomach to be able to bring up something than to
find nothing in the stomach when an effort is made to eject what is
not there. Water will serve to allay this strain, and thus serve a
useful purpose.
In very severe cases of seasickness, the stomach of the patient should
be emptied and washed out at once. This is usually an easy matter.
Have the patient drink one or two glasses of water, warm or cold, with
a little salt or bi-carbonate of soda added--say a teaspoonful to a
pint of water. This will have the desired result! In extreme cases of
seasickness, dry cold, such as ice-bags, placed behind and about the
ears, will sooth the patient, and help to allay his suffering. Cold
cloths to the forehead will also prove helpful. Full baths had best be
omitted, until the attack has worn off, as they are injudicious on
account of the reactions they induce.
In prolonged cases of seasickness, there is often a craving for acids
and fruit juices. The continued absence or diminution of the acid
contents of the stomach, and the privation from normal food, accounts
in part for this, and it is highly proper to satisfy such a
craving--providing due care is taken not to add to the stomach's
distress by taking too much juice, or the juice of unripe fruit, or by
swallowing the fibre of the fruit, which is allowable only when
recovery is complete.
HEREWARD CARRINGTON.
IMPORTANT.
If readers who possess copies of the first number of _The Healthy
Life_ (August 1911) will send them to the Editors, they will receive,
in exchange, booklets to the value of threepence for each copy.
A SYMPOSIUM ON UNFIRED FOOD.
_In the November number we published a letter from a reader containing
the excellent suggestion that readers who had experimented to any fair
extent with unfired diet should be invited to contribute to a
conference on the subject in _THE HEALTHY LIFE_, and that the
symposium should be gathered round the following points_:--
(1) The effect of the diet in curing chronic disease.
(2) Its effect on children so brought up--_e.g._ do they get the
so-called "inevitable" diseases of chicken-pox, measles, etc., and
_especially_ have they good (_i.e._ perfect) teeth?
(3) The effect of the diet in childbirth.
(4) The cost of maintaining a household in this way, as compared with
the cost under ordinary conditions.
(5) Is the diet satisfying, or is there a longing for conventional
dietary (often found amongst food reformers)?
(6) Is the diet quite satisfactory in winter?
_Two letters were published in the January number. Two more in
February. Others will appear in future issues. We are anxious to
receive a large number of personal experiences, but they must be
brief, and classified under the above heads as far as possible._--[EDS.]
ST ALBANS.
In response to your invitation I am sending you my experience with
vegetarian dietary. Although, as you will see, this has not been
altogether "unfired," I think it should be of interest to many.
(1) I became a vegetarian at the time of my marriage, nearly three
years ago, my husband being already a vegetarian of eleven years. I
considered this a good opportunity to commence. Previous to this I
had for some time suffered from indigestion, which continued for a
few months after marriage. I attribute the cure to the change of
diet, and drinking hot water after meals.
(2) We have one child eighteen months old, totally breast fed for
twelve months, and another four months: on breast and Ixion Food
and some fruit juice.
She has never had any disease whatever, and so far her teeth are
perfect and she has cut them quite easily. She is a bonny, sturdy
little girl, and very intelligent.
(3) With regard to childbirth, I previously followed the advice of
Dr Alice Stockholme in "Tokology," avoiding flesh meats and
bone-making food and adopting a diet of fruit (chiefly lemons) and
rice, brown bread and nut butter, wearing no corsets and taking
frequent baths. The effect during pregnancy was highly
satisfactory. I enjoyed perfect health the whole time, free from
the usual discomforts, and at childbirth I received similar
results: a speedy and safe delivery. Indeed, since marriage, my
husband, baby and myself, have been singularly free from even
minor complaints.
(4) As we do not have the specially prepared, expensive vegetarian
foods (supposed to substitute meat), but mainly the simple foods, I
consider the diet less costly than the meat diet.
(5) We are honestly quite free from the craving for meat or meat
foods.
(6) In the summer-time we live principally on salads, cheese,
rissoles, etc., made from beans, peas, lentils, etc., fresh fruits,
brown bread and nut butter. In the very cold weather we seem to
need rather warmer stuffs, such as porridge (carefully cooked) and
cooked vegetables, etc.
D. GODMAN.
* * * * *
BRIGHTON.
I have read with the greatest interest the correspondence in _The
Healthy Life_ on the unfired diet. As the majority of your
correspondents have not been living _exclusively_ on unfired food,
or have only done so for short periods, may I suggest that some of
your correspondents or contributors live on an _entirely_ unfired
diet, _excluding dairy produce_, for a period of six or twelve
months and then relate their experiences. In this way some valuable
evidence would be obtained. At any rate I am prepared to do this
myself.
With reference to living on the unfired diet on 4d. a day, I have
often had two unfired meals for less than 4d., and two meals a day
are sufficient for anyone. Of course to do this one has to buy the
food which is in season and therefore cheap. Dried fruit and nuts,
followed by a cress salad with oil and lemon dressing, does not
cost more than 2d. An unfired rissole made from grated carrot and
flaked peanuts cost at most a penny, and if followed by dates or
figs would be a sufficient meal, and 2d. would cover the cost.
In conclusion, I have no difficulty in producing a "two course"
unfired meal for 2d.--but perhaps I should have left the subject of
cost for Dr Bell to deal with. Yours faithfully,
ALFRED LE HURAY.
MORE ABOUT TWO MEALS A DAY.
With reference to my article, "Two Meals a Day," which appeared in the
May issue of _The Healthy Life_, several correspondents have asked me
to give more particulars about my life and diet. I do so gladly; but I
must be brief, as the demand upon space in this magazine is now very
great.
Resolved into a single sentence, what all my correspondents wish to
know is this: Is a two-meal dietary best for all?
To this question, however, a definite answer cannot be given, for the
simple reason that scientific experimentation with respect to food
quantities and times of meals, etc., has gone such a little way, so
that it would be presumptuous to set a limit in regard to meals and
food reduction. To my mind, apart from the question of the quantity of
food to be taken, there is a great and important field of inquiry open
with respect to the effect of rest upon the stomach and the
intestines, upon the digestive and assimilative powers of the body.
Now the whole purpose of my article was to show that a reduction of
one's dietary was a matter of training, of gradual adaptation, but
also--and this is the important fact-of gradual strengthening. My
theory is that the two-meal plan is possible owing to the immense
economy in digestive energy that is effected through giving the
stomach adequate rest, and also through keeping the blood stream pure
and unclogged, almost absolutely free from surfeit matter. A rested
stomach will get more nutriment out of a small amount of food-stuff
than an overworked stomach will get out of a much larger quantity. But
experimentation which is sudden and covers a few weeks only, is worse
than useless, as it tends to disprove the very principles that a saner
method of experimentation would probably establish. And if I can
impress this fact upon the reader I shall have performed a good
service.
Carefully undertaken, and properly graduated, I believe there are few
people in these days who would not greatly benefit by a reduction in
the number of meals and in the quantity of food they take. By means of
a healthy and cheerful habit of introspection--not morbid and
feverish--I am firmly convinced that by cutting down their meals most
people would not only greatly improve their health, but their mental
and spiritual condition as well, and also greatly increase their
capacity for work ... And if in this way we can effect such an
improvement in our life and condition it does not really matter
whether we get to the two or even one meal basis or not.
As to myself, my work is chiefly literary and my life moderately
sedentary. But the fact is that I now have two moderate meals a day
whereas I used to have four pretty good ones. But I have many friends
whose work is mechanical, and demands much muscular energy, who are
two-mealists. One lady I know, who is one of the healthiest, strongest
and best physically developed persons I have ever met, is a
two-mealist, and not only does she work at a mechanical occupation for
ten hours a day, but on several evenings each week conducts a ladies
gymnastics class as well. But in her case, as in mine, the two meal
was an ideal that was gradually and slowly attained, and not a sudden
reform. Indeed, the main thing to remember is that it is all a matter
of training, it being quite impossible to say where the limit is. For
of one thing I am quite sure--viz. that most people, were they to
adopt a slow process of food and meals reduction, on the lines I
suggested in my article, would be astonished at the result. The number
of people one meets, chiefly among those whose life is more or less
sedentary, who say they can't work as they should, are subject to
pains and heaviness in the head, constipation and indigestion, is
simply appalling; and on questioning such people I come to the
conclusion that in the majority of cases it is because they eat too
much or too often.
My meals are very simple, and the simpler they are the better I like
them. I like a cold lunch about noon, and a hot meal about six. I have
tried a wholly uncooked diet, but as yet my body does not seem ready
for it: perhaps it will be after a little while. The first meal
usually consists of wholemeal bread and fruit, green or vegetable
salads, just according to my needs at the time. In winter I take a
more liberal supply of dried fruits and nuts. Pulses I eschew
altogether. My second meal consists of a substantial entree with one
or two conservatively cooked vegetables--occasionally I have a soup
and a sweet in addition. But of course it is for everyone to find out
his or her own ideal diet; and let me say that it is worth while to do
so, even though it involves much confusion and perplexity during the
period of experimentation.
WILFRED WELLOCK.
A BALLADE OF SKYFARING.
Ye whom bonds of the city chain,
Yet whose heart must with Nature's be;
Ye who, bound to a bed of pain,
Dream there of torrent and tower and tree,
Here behold them--the magic key,
Turned by a thought in yon gates of blue,
Even now has revealed to me
Alps and Mediterranean too.
Why of the bondage of earth complain?
Wide as heaven is our liberty!
Where are the streets and their smoke and stain
When to the land of the lark we flee?
Where is the sight that we may not see,
Cloudland's citadel passing through?
Switzerland beckons with Sicily,
Alps and Mediterranean too.
Here, 'twixt walls with the marble's vein,
Oared on a river of gold are we;
There we watch, on a sapphire main,
White fleets voyage to victory.
Day unto day flashes grief or glee;
Night to night utters speech anew,
Figuring forest and lane and lea--
Alps and Mediterranean too.
ENVOY
Prince whose course through the world is free,
Fare you better than dreamers do?
Here are the mountains and here the sea--
Alps and Mediterranean too.
S. GERTRUDE FORD.
From _Lyric Leaves_, by S. Gertrude Ford. Cloth, 2s. 6d. net; 2s. 8d.
post free from _The Healthy Life_, 3 Amen Corner, E.C. This charmingly
bound book makes an excellent holiday companion, for it contains many
beautiful lyrics, all characterised by serious thought, generous human
sympathies and a delicate imaginative quality.
A REMEDY FOR LONGEVITY.
Once upon a time there was a little boy whose parents took things very
seriously. They answered all his questions with painstaking precision.
At a comparatively early age he could prove that fairies were
non-existent. At the same time his toys were marvels of mechanical
perfection.
At the age of seven he was sent to a very efficient school, where,
being naturally a bright boy, he gained high marks every term and
passed all the examinations, for he had a wonderful and well-trained
faculty for remembering exactly what his teachers had told him.
When he left school he entered a London merchant's office, where his
knowledge of arithmetic was of the greatest assistance in bringing him
to the front. Moreover, he could argue very tellingly with all the
clerks and warehousemen, and always knew what the morning papers were
saving about health, neck-ties or religion.
In course of time he grew a moustache, joined the Territorials, was
made a partner in the firm, married a well-educated young lady and
became a strong supporter of the local Liberal Club, where his
opinions were so well known that it was unnecessary for anyone
seriously to combat them. He was never known to vote for the
Conservative candidate or to lose his head. His concluding speech in
the historic debate on The National Health Insurance Act will always
be remembered, by those who heard it, for its earnest defence of the
medical profession. In fact, the Mayor, who was in the chair, and was
a doctor himself, warmly congratulated the speaker, who was evidently
very pleased.
Ten years later he became a Town Councillor, opened several Institutes
for the Care of the Poor, and sent his second son to join the eldest
at the same kind of school at which he (the father) had been so well
trained. About the same date he bought a new edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica and carefully compiled a list of facts and
figures showing that idealists and all new-fangled ideas were the
greatest danger to the increasing trade and expansion of the Empire.
At the age of fifty he took a house at Surbiton and was continually
congratulated on his hale and hearty appearance. His opinions were
known and respected by all who met him. His sons were models of what
the children of such a father should be, and they supported him in
every argument.
At the age of fifty-two he retired from business. A month later he had
an idea; and it so interfered with all his opinions, and so affected
his general health, that he died.
EDGAR J. SAXON.
A SIGNIFICANT CASE--II.
He stopped smoking tobacco on the second day, and does not mean to
resume its use. Of course he had no alcohol in any form during the
fast, but he never has taken much alcohol, although he was not a
pledged abstainer. The temperature was taken many times and seems to
have been almost always subnormal, about 97 degrees Fahr., but this is
not so unusual a condition as to call for comment. The chief cause of
a subnormal temperature, in my opinion, is blocking of the body with
too much food. No doubt in prolonged fasting the temperature may fall
also; but sometimes a fast will be the cause of raising a subnormal
bodily temperature, as happened in a case of mine in which on the
twenty-eighth day of the fast there was a large elimination of urates
by the kidneys and a rise of temperature from 96 degrees to 98.4
degrees. Subnormal bodily temperature has not received the attention
which it deserves. It is usually one of the forerunners, or prodromata
as they are called, of the onset of incurable diseases like cancer,
Bright's disease or apoplexy. The commonly accepted view that the heat
of the body depends upon the food, and that people eat blubber in the
Arctic and Antarctic regions to keep the bodily heat up, is one of the
chief causes for neglect of the study of subnormal temperature. And it
is quite surprising that physiologists have not thought it necessary
to explain why nature has provided sugar and palm oil and cocoa-nut
oil and ground-nut oil in the tropical regions, as well as abundance
of olive oil in the warm temperate regions of the earth if these foods
keep the bodily heat up. They ought to have been more abundantly
supplied in the Arctic and Antarctic regions if the accepted view is
correct. Besides, if we must eat blubber to keep bodily heat up in the
Arctic regions when the outside temperature is 50 or 100 or more
degrees lower than that of the body, what ought we to eat in the
tropics to keep bodily heat down when the outside temperature is 50 or
even 80 degrees above that of the body? Physiologists have not
explained this, although assuredly an explanation is wanted. But the
true explanation, the correct explanation, would have demolished the
doctrine that bodily heat is due to the food, and so it has not been
given. It is too simple to imagine that the bodily heat is, like the
body itself and all its functions, the effect of the life-force that
inhabits the body and builds up the body so that the body shall be a
fit dwelling-place for itself--this explanation is too simple and too
idealistic for modern science, which is less and less disposed, we are
told, to invoke the aid of a force of life to account for vital
phenomena, although it assumes an attracting force to account for
gravitating phenomena, and an electric and chemic force to account for
electric and chemic phenomena. Modern science (and ancient science,
too, apparently) which sees well enough that an idealistic or a
materialistic explanation would equally account for the nexus of the
phenomena of the universe, deliberately and almost invariably prefers
the materialistic explanation. She is anxious that we should be kept
free of superstition. But the superstition that forces are the effects
of things does not seem to distress her at all. And so we are told
that gravitation is a property of matter, and are forbidden to think
that perhaps gravitation, a force, procreates matter, a thing, in
order that the effects of the fore may be perceived by dull sense. We
are told that the function of the liver and the brain depends on the
structure of the liver and the brain respectively and we are not
allowed to think that perhaps the force of animal life, feeling the
need of an instrument to secrete bile, on the one hand, and to secrete
cerebral lymph to act as a vehicle for the conveyance of thought and
emotion and higher things, on the other, introduces the liver with its
elaborate structure and the brain with its still more complicated
structure, in order that both the one function and the other may be
well performed. And so, although all forms of kinetic energy (and
among them zoo-dynamic, or the force of animal life) manifest warmth
and luminosity as qualities, science attributes animal heat to chemic
force and refuses to consider that perhaps zoo-dynamic uses
chemico-dynamic for its own purposes, even if these purposes are
unconscious, because the higher force always dominates the lower.
Properly speaking, science is out of her sphere, though she does not
seem to know it, in making these suggestions. When she keeps herself
to the investigation of facts, their exposition, their sequence and
their laws, in her painstaking and accurate manner, we accept her
revelations thankfully, and beg her to allow us to make our own
philosophic and other explanations in attempting to account for the
existence, sequences and relations of the facts of life.
After his return home, patient continued to gain weight, as might have
been expected. On the seventeenth day after ending the fast he
weighed 140 lbs. and on the nineteenth day 144 lbs. On that day he
received from a hospital a report that the reaction of the
physiologico-pathological test was negative. This has naturally had a
great effect on the patient; and it is worthy of very careful
consideration. Of course one negative result may not be conclusive
although it was positive before the fast. But if the result should be
repeated, and especially if it should prove to be permanent, the
importance of the fact can hardly be exaggerated, since the suggestion
arises in our minds that perhaps we may be able to cure profound
blood-poisoning by fasting, neither the usual treatment nor the use of
Salvarsan enabling the investigator to say that the result of the
pathological reaction was negative; but this has followed after a
heroic fast of 56 days. The result if confirmed would not be unique.
Quite recently I saw a specific ulcer close to the ankle-joint for
which operation had been recommended. It seemed to me that operation
would be likely to open the joint, and that therefore it was a risky
proceeding. But under a restriction of the diet, putting the young man
on barley-water for a few days and then advising him to eat once a day
only, the ulcer became very much smaller, and no operation has had to
be performed. Blood-poisoning of this nature, of course, is not caused
by improper nutrition, but it may readily be believed to be aggravated
by the ordinary conventional over-feeding to which, so far as I can
see, we are all subjecting ourselves, especially as persons who put
themselves in the way of contracting blood-poisoning do not generally
belong to the class of those who are attracted by the suggestion that
it is noble to keep the body under, and that if we do not strive to
keep the body under, it will be very likely to keep us under. Although
we shall be liable to be infected, however we live, still we may
believe that we shall be more likely to be badly infected (if we put
ourselves in the way of contracting disease) if we have been
previously subjected to the bad effects of over-feeding. This
consideration renders a possible cure by fasting, a not impossible
suggestion. And if, therefore, we have in fasting the suggestion of a
remedy which offers us the hope of eradicating such a fearful disease
from the human system, it certainly behoves us to make use of it.
As a rule it seems to me that bad forms of blood-poisoning of this
nature are incurable. In three or four generations they destroy the
strain affected by it, do what we will. Meantime it shows all the
signs and symptoms of a hereditary disease, for the children are born
suffering, showing a coppery rash, and old before they are young. And
when they get a little older they have no bridges to their noses,
their teeth are ill-formed, their vision is imperfect, their
intellects dull. It seems as if nature could not forgive crimes of
this nature. She seems to treat them as the unpardonable sin. If we
find cancer appearing in a family at 55 years of age in 3 or 4
successive generations, there is no proof of heredity in that. Inquire
and see if like causes acting on like organisms in 3 or 4 successive
generations have not produced the disease each time. The children are
not born cancerous, and our efforts to prevent the disease may
succeed. But children often _are_ born with specific disease, and
there is no doubt at all about its being a hereditary disease. Even
now I should not like to sanction marriage in the case of this man who
has heroically fasted for 56 days, although he seems for the present
to have got rid of his disease. But the outlook is hopeful, more
hopeful than I thought, and in the hope that the suggestion may convey
a message of hope to those who are willing to do penance for crimes
against the body, I send out these remarks. The opinion expressed by
the patient that he was getting rid of the Salvarsan which had been
injected into his blood to cure his disease is, of course, his own
only. I offer no opinion upon it. But I think the whole case very
instructive, and it will be deeply interesting to follow it up with
special regard to the inquiry whether the pathological test remains
negative. The reflective reader of these remarks will need no hint
from me to suggest how a study of questions of this sort raises in our
minds all sorts of other questions, physical, metaphysical,
philosophical, social, religious; what are laws of nature, how they
come to be what they are, whether they can be disregarded without
paying the penalty, and whether we men are bond or free. Each of us
will settle these questions for ourselves, for each of us is
responsible for his own conclusion. But as to the inevitableness with
which such questions do rise in our minds, I take it there can be no
difference of opinion.
A. RABAGLIATI.
HEALTHY HOMEMAKING.
_For the benefit of new readers it seems well to explain that this
series of articles is not intended for the instruction of experienced
housewives. It was started at the special request of a reader who
asked for "a little book on housekeeping, for those of us who know
nothing at all about it; and put in all the little details that are
presumably regarded as too trivial or too obvious to be mentioned in
the ordinary books on domestic economy."_
XXI. HIRED HELP.
It does not seem proper to conclude the present series of articles
without touching upon the "servant problem," but I do not pretend to
be able to solve it. It is a problem usually very difficult of
solution by the homemaker of small means. If she has but few persons
to cater for, and is not the mother of a young family, she is often
very much better off without hired help, except for a periodical
charwoman. But it is not always indispensable to the woman who has
other duties besides housekeeping.
I am not here concerned with the housewife who can afford to keep more
than one efficient servant. Indeed, I am hardly concerned with one who
can employ a really good "general" at from L20 to L25 per annum. The
person I am concerned with is the homemaker who can afford at most to
employ an inexperienced young girl at from L10 to L14 per annum.
I will draw the worst side of the picture first, for although it _is_
the worst side it is true enough, as so many harassed housewives know.
The young "general" often comes straight from a council school where
domestic economy had no place in the curriculum, and from a home in
name only. Such an one is usually slatternly and careless in all her
ways, has no idea of personal cleanliness, and regards her "mistress"
as, more or less, her natural enemy! She is "in service" only under
compulsion, and envies those of her schoolmates whose more fortunate
circumstances have enabled them to become "young lady" shop
assistants, typists and even elementary school teachers. If she had
her choice she would prefer labour in a factory to domestic work; but
either a factory is not available, or the girl's parents consider
"service" more "respectable" in spite of its hardships. Its hardships?
Yes, it _is_ its hardships that account for its peculiar unpopularity.
For there are hardships connected with domestic service in small
households that do not apply to other forms of much harder labour.
Everyone who is familiar with the small lower middle-class household
knows how often the life of the little "general" resembles that of an
animal rather than a human being. All day long she drudges in a
muddling, inefficient way, continually scolded for her inefficiency
yet never really taught how to do anything properly. Her work is never
done, for she is always at the beck and call of her employers; yet
she lives apart in social isolation, is referred to contemptuously as
the "slavey," and even her food is dispensed to her grudgingly and
minus the special dainties bought for Sundays and holidays. This is
domestic service at its worst, of course, but the prevalence of such
"places" in actual fact is undoubtedly at the root of the young girl's
objection to it. How can she help gleaning the impression that such
work is "menial," when her employers more or less openly despise her?
Being human, how can she but envy those of her old friends who have
their evenings to themselves? What contentment can she find in a life
of drudgery unenlightened by intelligent interest in learning how to
do something well? What wonder that all her hopes and ambitions become
centred in the possession of a "young man," and that reason--stunted
from its birth for lack of room to grow--being entirely absent from
her choice, she marries badly and too young, and becomes the mother of
a numerous progeny as helpless, hopeless, stunted and inefficient as
herself?
Some conscientious women try to remedy this state of things by
treating the girls they take into their homes as "one of the family."
This _may_ answer well sometimes, but it has its drawbacks, both for
the girl and the "family." Husband and wife, brother and sister,
inevitably find the constant presence of a stranger with whom they
have little in common very irksome. While the girl herself is equally
conscious of restraint when forced to spend her leisure time with her
employers. She would usually infinitely prefer the solitude of the
kitchen, if combined with a good fire, a comfortable chair and a story
book.
Among the girls I have spoken to on the subject I have not found
"socialist" households popular. One girl I met refused to stay in such
a place for longer than three days, because she "never had the kitchen
to herself." Another told me that she found it intensely boring to
take meals with the family, because she was not interested in the
things they talked about.
I think that the ultimate solution of the "servant problem" will not
be that every woman will do all her own housework, but that domestic
work will become, on the one hand, very much simplified and, on the
other, will be put on the same footing as teaching, nursing or
secretarial work. That we are beginning to move in this direction is
evidenced by the coming into existence of schools of domestic economy,
to which "ladies" do not disdain to resort for training. This will
undoubtedly result in domestic labour becoming a much higher-priced
commodity than it is now, the housewife will have to pay at least as
much for three hours help per day as she now does for nine hours, but
the fact that the help will be skilled, combined with the greater
simplicity of housework, will surely more than compensate for this.
But what is the homemaker of limited means, who must have some help,
to do under present conditions? This we must consider next month.
FLORENCE DANIEL.
HEALTH QUERIES.
_Under this heading Dr Knaggs deals briefly month by month, and
according as space permits, with questions of general interest._
_Correspondents are earnestly requested to write on one side only of
the paper, giving full name and address, not for publication, but as a
guarantee of good faith. When an answer is required by post a stamped
addressed envelope must be enclosed._--[EDS.]
BOILS: THEIR CAUSE AND CURE.
Miss L.C. writes:--I should be deeply indebted to you if you
would advise me in the following matter. I have been suffering
from a recurrence of boils on different parts of my body during
the last six months. I have consulted a local doctor, but he can
find no reason for their appearance, but suggested I should try a
mixed diet, to include some animal food, rather than adhere to
vegetarianism as I have done for some two years past.
My diet is about as follows:--
_On rising._--Tumblerful of hot water.
_Breakfast_ (eight o'clock).--One egg, toasted bread (wholemeal)
and butter, with either a little lettuce or marmalade and either
weak tea or cocoa.
_Lunch_ (one o'clock).--Steamed green or root vegetable, with
cheese sauce or macaroni cheese or similar savoury, or nuts.
Boiled or baked pudding or stewed fruit with custard or blanc
mange.
_Tea_ (four o'clock).--Tea or cocoa, with or without a little
bread and butter and cake.
_Supper_ (7 o'clock).--Vegetable soup, milk pudding and a little
cheese, butter and salad and wholemeal bread.
I am forty-nine years of age, lead a fairly active life,
frequently taking walking exercise. I am very tall and weigh
twelve stone. Have had no serious illness, but been more or less
anaemic all my life.
If you can tell me whether there is anything wrong in connection
with my diet and suggest the cause of, and treatment for, the
boils I shall be exceedingly obliged.
In order to help this correspondent to permanently get rid of these
boils, we must first ascertain what those troublesome manifestations
are and look to the causes which produce them.
A boil is a small, tense, painful, inflammatory swelling appearing in
or upon the skin, and is due to the local death or gangrene of a small
portion of the skin's surface. This eventually comes away in the form
of a core, and, until this has cleared away, the boil will not heal or
cease to be painful.
Boils occur chiefly on the neck, arms or buttocks. If very large they
are known as carbuncles, and if they occur on the fingers or toes they
are described as whitlows. It is often the friction of a frayed-out
collar or cuff, of tight waist clothing, or, in the case of whitlows,
the introduction of some irritant or poison between the nail and the
skin that determines the precise site at which they will come.
Boils, although rarely dangerous to life, are usually accompanied by
pain severe out of all proportion to the extent of surface involved.
This gives rise to much broken rest and loss of vitality, which at
once ceases when the boil has finished its course. Boils usually occur
in series or crops.
Now large numbers of people wear collars and cuffs with frayed edges,
or handle irritants with their fingers, but they do not necessarily
contract boils or whitlows. Therefore, we see that there must be other
factors to be taken into consideration to account for their presence.
The orthodox germ-loving practitioner may tell you that a boil is a
purely local disorder and that a certain form of microbe, known as the
_Staphylococcus pyogenes_, is the cause of it. This germ, he asserts,
lives normally on the surface of the skin and, when this surface
becomes broken, it enters the part and infects it, thereby starting
the boil.
If this is true every person who wears old collars or dabbles his
hands in dirt should without exception contract boils. This is
obviously untrue.
The factor to be considered, then, is this. What is it that induces
boils in one person and not in another under identical circumstances?
The answer is obvious. The boil is not a local disease at all, but is
a manifestation of some constitutional defect, or of some impurity of
the blood stream, which enables this microbe to find a congenial
breeding ground.
The people who suffer most from boils are young or middle-aged adults,
and we usually find the two extremes among sufferers. There is the
full-blooded, often overfed, individual and there is the pale,
debilitated and emaciated person whose constitution is broken down by
worry, overwork, sexual troubles, unhealthy surroundings or badly
selected foods.
If we inquire into the constitutional history of these cases we shall
almost invariably discover that the digestive or assimilative
processes of the body are not working smoothly. This may be due to the
worry or overwork, or to unhealthy surroundings which dis-harmonise
the digestive and nutritive functions, or to nervous exhaustion from
one cause or another, or it may be due to the wrong diet, which is
filling the colon (or large bowel) with fermenting poisons.
When the body is clogged in this manner nature often proceeds to get
rid of the accumulating waste through the skin. By a vigorous effort
on the part of the life-force the impurity is thrown outwards to the
surface. Looked at in this light a boil is really a most salutary
cleansing agent, and the Nature-Cure practitioner, who calls it a
"Crisis," often does everything in his power to produce boils when
treating chronic diseases.
The alternative is often some more deeply seated form of elimination,
resulting in serious organic disease of the organs or tissues. One of
the first signs of improvement in disorders like diabetes,
consumption, arthritis, Bright's disease, or even cancer, is the
appearance of boils, showing that the vitality has improved to an
extent sufficient to enable the foreign matter to be expelled by means
of relatively harmless boils. The hydropathic expert also tries to
induce this condition by means of his mustard and water packs.
If our correspondent wants to rid herself of her boils she must adopt
all means to improve her vitality and to cleanse her body of its
impurities. She can do this along many lines. She can take a holiday
and rest from her work; or by positive thinking she can set to work to
get rid of her worries. She can learn to laugh as often as possible,
and to breathe deeply, slowly and fully. If her house is unsanitary
she should make it sanitary, or move elsewhere.
Then she must restrict her diet and take only those forms of food
which create a minimum amount of poison in the system. _She must
cleanse the colon daily_ with warm water enemas, and encourage the
action of the kidneys in doing their rightful part in the elimination
of poisons by the drinking of distilled water or a good herbal tea on
rising, and of clear vegetable broth at night.
Clay packs, applied cold, are the best form of treatment for
application to the boils themselves. They should never be cut or
squeezed, as this only intensifies the trouble. Hot applications, as
poultices, are bad, because they induce the boil to mature
prematurely, and also are conducive to reinfection of the skin in
other parts. Drugs or medicines are of very little use in the
treatment of boils, because they do not go to the root of the
trouble. The only remedy that I have found of any avail is yeast. In
former times this was taken in the form of fresh or dried brewers'
yeast, and it was, if unpleasant, a very effectual remedy. Yeast
yields a free supply of what is called nuclein and nucleinic acid.
These, chemically, are identical with the same substances found in the
human cells. Nuclein is a powerful antiseptic. It has been found that
the toxins or emanations from diphtheria and other deadly germs are
precipitated and destroyed by nucleinic acid.
It is for this reason that yeast extracts, such as Marmite, often have
a beneficial effect in disorders accompanied by the formation of pus
matter.
Our correspondent's diet should be amended as follows:--
_On rising._--A cupful of unseasoned Marmite.
_Breakfast._--One scrambled or lightly poached egg with stale,
yeast-made, wholemeal bread and nut butter, with lettuce or other
salad food. No marmalade; no tea or coffee.
_Lunch._--1 to 2 oz. of grated cheese or flaked pine kernels, finely
shredded raw cabbage, or grated radishes, or grated raw roots with oil
and lemon dressing. No cooked savouries, no puddings, nor stewed fruit
with custard or blanc mange should be taken.
_Tea Meal._--Cupful of Marmite, only.
_Supper._--Clear, unseasoned, vegetable broth, with Veda or wholemeal
bread, or Granose biscuits, with nut butter and some fresh fruit.
_At bedtime._--A cupful of Marmite.
NOTE.--The unseasoned Marmite should be used, as the ordinary kind is
rather heavily salted.
A BAD CASE OF SELF-POISONING.
Mrs H.W. writes:--I should be very glad if you would give me
enlightenment on one or two points about my diet. I am suffering
from a somewhat dilated stomach, also a catarrhal condition of
nose, throat and alimentary canal, with constipation and much
flatulence in the bowels. My teeth are decaying quickly, my nails
have got softer, and I have become anaemic and generally
debilitated, being unable to properly assimilate my food. All my
joints crack when moved, and the knee joints creak as well. Is
this a uric acid condition, or do you think it merely due to a
lack of nourishment, causing a lack of synovial fluid? The joints
are not swollen and not painful, they merely crack. My whole
system seems to be over-acid, and my mouth gets sore and
ulcerated. I have got very thin, having lost a stone in twelve
months.
I notice that you always advise for dilated stomach greatly
restricting the liquid part of the diet. Will you tell me just
how much one _may_ drink in a day, because when I go without
drinking my constipation and other troubles are worse and the
urine gets thick and muddy.
You also deprecate milk. This puzzled me until you explained to a
correspondent last month in _The Healthy Life_. Will you tell me
if the same applies to dried milk--will it tend to increase
intestinal trouble? I am anxious to know this because I have been
relying somewhat on Emprote and Hygiama lately, for I had got so
that I could scarcely digest anything.
Do you consider it better to use the enema than to take a mild
aperient? I do not want to start with the enema again if I can
possibly manage to do without, because I found that my bowels
depended upon it. And that is why I want to ask if it is
absolutely necessary when on an antiseptic diet to entirely avoid
fruit. I find it so necessary to keep the bowels working
naturally.
I _do_ want you to answer me these questions, because I have got
so worried and fearful (people's theories are so varied) that I
scarcely dare eat any food at all. I am at present taking only
two meals daily (I like the two-meal plan best): at eleven A.M.
and 6 P.M. I take a cup of weak coffee on rising, without milk or
sugar--this warm drink seems to start the peristaltic action and
I then get bowel action. I think of changing the coffee for Sanum
Tonic Tea or Dandelion Coffee.
At eleven o'clock I have an egg with Winter's "Maltweat" bread
and almond butter, and some conservatively cooked vegetable
(celery or carrot or spinach).
At six P.M. I have one or two baked apples, a teaspoonful or two
of malted nuts, or Emprote, and more "Maltweat" bread and butter.
At four P.M. I take a cup of barley water or carrot water, and at
bedtime another cup of barley water.
Do you think that if I went on to a milk diet for a time it would
do good?
This correspondent seems to be suffering from auto-toxaemia, or
self-poisoning in a severe form, and a condition of what is termed
arterio-sclerosis or premature old age. Associated with it are
evidently symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, which is affecting her
joints and teeth. It is not one of ordinary gout or uric acid
poisoning. The trouble no doubt has been caused by past errors of
diet, so that the present efforts at reform have come too late to be
of service to her. Something more than diet is now needed to clear the
acids and toxins from the system. It is not a simple case of digestive
catarrh, for the whole body is affected. The present diet will answer
very well as it stands.
The first thing to do is to obtain a well-fitting dilatation belt.
This must have leg straps and firmly support the lower half of the
abdomen. The next thing is to promote skin action so as to
encourage the clearing out of poisons along this line of elimination.
Vapour baths, wet-sheet packs or alkaline hot baths can effect this
purpose. An alkaline hot bath should be of a temperature of 105
degrees Fahr. or more, and to the bath should be added 1/4 lb. of
bicarbonate of soda and 1/4 lb. packet of "Robin" starch. She should
remain as long as possible in this so as to well clear the acids from
the skin and induce as much skin action or perspiration as possible.
The _first_ baths must be of very short duration, and she should be
careful to avoid chill after the bath; it is best to lie prone and
completely relaxed for half-an-hour at least after the bath. Finally
massage and Swedish movements directed to the entire back will help to
disencumber the central nervous system, which is evidently very badly
depleted of its vital force. It is, of course, a pity the
correspondent cannot get away to a properly organised Nature-Cure home
and have the continuous attention and treatment which her condition
really necessitates.
H. VALENTINE KNAGGS.
CORRESPONDENCE.
AMANZIMTOTI, NATAL.
_To the Editors._
SIRS,
You will see that your little magazine finds its way even to this
out-of-the-way corner of the globe, and you may be sure that it is
appreciated. I am specially interested in Dr V. Knaggs'
contributions and should like to ask him a few questions. May I
say that I have some knowledge of chemistry and that I try and
take an interest in the scientific aspects of food reform.
(1) P. 237. What grounds has Dr Knaggs for speaking so definitely
about human magnetism and that of vegetables? How would he
recognise or test for either, and where can I get further
information (scientific) on the question of food magnetism.
(2) Same page. Dr Knaggs says salt added to cooking vegetables
converts organic salts into inorganic. I cannot follow that. _What_
organic salts are so converted? One or two examples would suffice.
(3) I have been reading Dr Rabagliati's _Conversations with Women
Concerning their Health and that of their Children_.[8] In it he
says that food is not the source (cause) of body energy, but is
used merely to replace waste material. Elsewhere I read that
"Professor Atwater's investigations into nutrition have shown in a
most convincing manner that the body derives _all_ its energy from
the food consumed. This may be regarded as established." Which of
these definite and contradictory assertions does Dr Knaggs support,
and why? Where can I get information _re_ Professor Atwater's
experiments and other recent works on similar subjects?
To me the questions involved are intensely interesting, hence my
queries. I hope they do not read as if I were hypercritical or
sceptical.
With all good wishes for the success of your healthy little
magazine. I am, yours, etc.,
W. BLEWETT.
[8] 5s. net. C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 3 Amen Corner, London.
We handed the above interesting letter to our contributor, Dr H.
Valentine Knaggs, and append his reply:--
HUMAN MAGNETISM.
There is very little information available from ordinary scientific
sources anent the question of the life-force or of the animal
magnetism which animates our bodies and is the motive force common to
all organic structures whether animal or vegetable. We do know that
fresh fruits and vegetables are strongly magnetic because the
magnetism which they emit can be gauged by means of delicate
galvanometers. It has been found that leaves, flowers and seeds are
positively, and roots negatively, charged. We also know that the same
conditions are found in the human subject, since Dr Baraduc, who is a
celebrated French Psycho-Therapeutist, in his book, "The Vibrations of
Human Vitality," tells us that he has invented a machine called a
biometer to test these very vibrations. I have had one of these
machines myself and have experimented with it a great deal. By its aid
we can make the machine work differently with different persons, and
by careful tabulation of records Dr Baraduc has been able to elicit
some very remarkable information about the magnetic currents which are
constantly flowing into and out of the human body. If our
correspondent really wants to know more about the wonders of human
magnetism he should read some of the voluminous literature upon the
subject published by the Theosophical Society. Just recently also a Dr
Kilner has invented a form of coloured screen by which he and others
who have some psychic sight can actually see the magnetic emanations
which flow through a person placed in a darkened room.
SALT-COOKED VEGETABLES.
The one object of the vegetable kingdom is to build up, for the use of
the animal or organic realm, the constituents found in the mineral or
inorganic kingdom. These mineral constituents are dissolved, sorted
out and built up in the right proportions for the use of animals when
taken as foods. Whenever these foods are not so eaten they are sent
back again to the earth by the aid of microbes during the process of
decay, to be again available for plant use. Cooking is a process
invented by man which is analogous to that of decay, for it dissolves
and disintegrates the structures which Nature has built up. When man
eats food that is partially disintegrated he does not obtain from it
the right sort of nutriment which Nature intended him to have. To
intensify the wrong-doings of the cook, man further hastens the
disintegrating process by adding to the things that he cooks a due
proportion of a common and very stable mineral, called salt. It is
powerful, because it is not easily disintegrated. The salt greatly
expedites the process of decay, whether in the natural form of
fermentation, or whether by the application of heat, as in cooking.
Salt is used in Nature to promote the flow of those electric and
magnetic currents which are a manifestation of the universal
life-force which pervades all things seen and unseen. It is an
essential constituent of the sea because the ocean is the life-blood
of the earth. It is an essential constituent of our own blood, because
it is needed to make the blood stream a good conductor of magnetic
currents. When you put this salt into water and then proceed to boil
vegetables in it, it quickly sucks out all the life-force from them,
and if persisted in reduces them to the state of minerals from which
they were originally constructed.
FOOD AND THE SOURCE OF BODILY ENERGY.
Dr Rabagliati and Professor Atwater are, I believe, both right, but
the former does not always explain himself clearly to the lay mind.
The life-force or animal magnetism is the real source of bodily
energy, and it manifests itself only when it has something that
resists or regulates its flow.
It does this just as certain forms of wire, or other materials, which
possess indifferent conducting power, resist the flow of electricity
through them.
Electricity cannot manifest as light in the usual electric lights used
in our houses, as heat in the electric culinary appliances or stoves,
or even as power in the motors which run our trams and trains, unless
it be given the requisite apparatus to bring about the manifestation
required.
In exactly the same way life cannot manifest itself as consciousness,
with its flow of thoughts, emotions and bodily activities, without the
food which is daily supplied to the body.
It consequently depends considerably upon how we select our daily
rations as to how this vital force will manifest within us.
H. VALENTINE KNAGGS.
HOLIDAY APHORISMS.
A Sun Bath needs no Soap.
* * * * *
Man was made for the Weather, not the Weather for man.
* * * * *
A long drink often makes a short walk.
* * * * *
You may bring a man to the Sea, but you cannot make him think.
* * * * *
A tanned face doesn't make a healthy body.
* * * * *
Dew paddling should be done in the dark.
* * * * *
The only things that bathing machines make are cowards.
* * * * *
It is better to board yourself than let others be bored by you.
* * * * *
"A bore is one who thinks his opinions of greater importance than your
own."
* * * * *
People who throw pebbles into the sea shouldn't dive near shore.
* * * * *
A toothbrush is what many forget but few should need.
* * * * *
Scotland Yard is not in the Grampians.
* * * * *
Cheap food is often dearly bought.
* * * * *
Lyons have no depots in Skye.
* * * * *
Orange-trees never yet sprang from scattered peel.
* * * * *
A pear in the hand is worth two in the can.
PETER PIPER.
THE
HEALTHY
LIFE
The Independent
Health Magazine.
3 AMEN CORNER LONDON E.C.
VOL. V SEPTEMBER
No. 26. 1913
_There will come a day when physiologists, poets, and
philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one
another._--CLAUDE BERNARD.
AN INDICATION.
Food reformers sometimes forget that "man does not live by bread
alone," not even when supplemented by an ample supply of fresh air and
physical exercise.
It has been pointed out by psychologists that the more highly
organised and highly developed the creature, the less it depends on
nervous energy obtained via the stomach and the more it depends on
energy generated by the brain. True, the brain must be healthy for
this, and one poisoned by impure blood, due to wrong feeding, cannot
be healthy. But something more than clean blood is necessary. For, as
change of physical posture is necessary to avoid cramped limbs, so
periodic reversal of mental attitude (consideration from other than
the one view-point) is necessary to the brain's health.
Again, change of air is often prescribed when the patient's real need
is a change of the personalities surrounding him. While for the
lonely country dweller a bath in the magnetism of a city crowd may be
a far more efficacious remedy than the medicinal baths prescribed by
his physician.
For man lives by _every_ word that proceeds out of the mouth of
God.--[EDS.]
FEAR AND IMAGINATION.
_Regular readers will recognise in this article a continuation of the
series previously entitled "Healthy Brains." The author of "The
Children All Day Long," is an intimate disciple of one of the greatest
living psychologists, and she has a message of the first importance to
all who realise that true health depends as much on poise of mind as
on physical fitness. We regret that in the previous article,
"Imagination in Play," the following misprints occurred:--P. 475, line
4 from top, "movement" should be "moment"; p. 475, line 5 from bottom,
"admiration" should be "imagination."_--[EDS.]
Some people are given to excusing their own uncharitable thoughts by
saying, "I suppose I ought not to have minded her rudeness; I am
afraid I am too sensitive." In the same way, people say, "Oh, I
_couldn't_ sleep in the house alone" (or let a child go on a
water-picnic, or nurse a case of delirium or do some other thing that
suggested itself), "I have too much imagination." In both cases the
claim, though put in deprecating form, is made complacently enough.
The correlative is: "You are so sensible, dear; I know you won't
mind," which is a formula under cover of which many kindnesses may be
shirked and many unpleasant duties passed on.
The sensible, practical people who listen to these sayings sometimes
attach importance to them, so that a habit has grown up of describing
morbidly neurotic people as "over-sensitive" and cowardly ones as "too
quick of imagination." Ultimately, this leads to the thought that both
sensitiveness and imagination are mental luxuries too costly for
ordinary folk to grow, and that it is safest to check, crush or uproot
them when we discover them springing up in others or in ourselves.
Is not this attitude of mind due to a misunderstanding? Imagination is
an _organ of activity_; it can be kept in the highest possible
condition of health by having plenty of exercise; it should be working
continually against resistance. A rabbit's gnawing tooth, if the
opposing tooth be broken, may grow inwards and cause the creature's
death, but the same activity of growth, if working under suitable
conditions, enables him to go on living and gnawing at his food year
after year without wearing his tools away.
The problem, then, in economy of effort is: How shall we use whatever
force of sensitiveness and imagination we have, so as to get its
maximum efficiency of usefulness and its minimum pain and
inconvenience?
For many ages man has been dominated by fear. His way to freedom, now,
is to step out through his cobweb chains and go right forward with
courage and in faith. So we are told with relentless and almost
tiresome reiteration. It is the fashion, one might almost say, to have
cast off fear, and the one thing an honest "modern thinker" is afraid
of is being afraid. (To less honest ones it is the thought of _being
thought_ afraid that is a very real and present fear.)
But, if this standpoint is right, is not fear at least a vestigial
organ, a survival of a mental activity which served its purpose in
times gone by? Is it not even truer to go further still and say, as
_each particular fear_ serves its purpose it may safely be discarded,
but that, as far as our present knowledge goes, other grades of
sensitiveness, finer shades of imagination of the type we have called
fear, must take its place, to be discarded in their turn for yet other
apprehensions?
For if we lost the kind of perception that we associate with fear, if
our imagination closed itself automatically to the suggestion of all
sorts of ugly possibilities, should we not find ourselves soon in the
midst of difficulties akin to those of the hero of the German tale of
the man who felt no pain? We accept the evidence of pain as a guide
to action; when we have decided on action we proceed to get rid of the
pain as expeditiously, safely and permanently as we can.
The same thing seems true of fear. Over and over again we laugh at
ourselves for fearing something that either never happened at all or
happened in such a way as to be softened out of all likeness to the
monstrous terror we had created. On the other hand, when misfortune
falls heavily because of our lack of imagination in not foreseeing
possible consequences of particular actions or events, we lament and
complain: "If I could only have guessed! If I had only known!"
Fear pure and simple--the imagination of possible trouble--is a stage
we can hardly yet afford to do without. But when it has roused our
attention to a danger, its work is done. Let us practise turning it
into action; taking due precautions against accident, guarding against
hurting a neighbour's feelings, watching some possibility of evil
tendency in ourselves. Then, and not till then, may we let it drop. It
may pass; it has done its work. It is no longer our responsibility to
foresee, it is our privilege to lay down the fear and live happily and
at peace.
Even the dread perceptions of eternal laws come under the same method.
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," the _beginning_:
the end is faith and love.
E.M. COBHAM.
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HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT?
_The article (signed "M.D.") with the above title which we published
in the July number has, as we anticipated, aroused considerable
discussion. One interesting criticism appeared in the August number.
We now publish two further contributions, to be followed, in our next
issue, by two further articles by Dr Rabagliati and Mr Ernest
Starr._--[EDS.]
I
As one who has tried the low proteid diet, and came to grief on it, I
desire to set my experience against that of Mr Voysey,[9] and to
assert that, if it is true for him, it certainly is not true for me.
Mr Voysey indulges in many loose and generalised statements which do
not help the average man or woman in the least. I imagine it is these
that "M.D." has in mind when he advises a certain standard of diet,
below which it is not safe to go. If Mr Voysey can, as Horace Fletcher
can, exist on a very low proteid diet, that does not prove that all
men and women can do the same and be healthily active; it only shows
that he and Fletcher are exceptions to the average person, and that it
may be dangerous to follow their example. For most men, "M.D.'s"
proteid standard is not so nauseating as he finds it. Here is a
specimen dietary for a day, for a man of ten stone, following, as most
of us do, a sedentary occupation:--
3 oz. cheese.
9 oz. bread.
8 oz. vegetables and salad.
8 oz. fruit.
1+1/2 pints milk.
Will any average person say that that quantity, divided into three
meals, would be nauseating to him? And is that diet so very expensive
that it would be beyond the means of an agricultural labourer in any
country? It is certainly no mockery. The cost to such a labourer would
probably not exceed 3d. or 4d. Of course the diet can be made as
expensive as one chooses, and widely varied.
[9] See August number.
Who amongst ordinary men and women has a reliable natural taste that
would be an infallible guide in all matters of food? And what a
misleading statement that is which asserts "that all the hardest work
of the world has always been done by those who get the least food."
Put it to the test on the average person and see where it leads to.
My contention is that the average person, throwing over his or her
accustomed meat diet, requires some definite guidance as to the
quantity of proteid, such as Dr Haig's wide experience and much
patient research have proved needful, or at least advisable, for the
continuance of a healthy and vigorous life; and I will say that it
does not help this average person in the least to put before him the
misty statement that "the quantity depends on the development that is
in progress, and is only discoverable by the natural guides of
appetite and taste, ruled by reason and love of others." All very
noble and very well in another place, but hardly meeting the case of
the ordinary person who is seeking a healthy diet. Nor can you "make
the body a more harmonious instrument for the true life of man" by
habitually underfeeding it. I thought that was a mediaeval notion that
had been knocked on the head long ago.
Is there any man, lay or scientific, Mr Voysey notwithstanding, who
can claim to have as wide an experience of diet in its relation to
health and disease as "M.D.," to say nothing of the trained mind and
long years of patient thought that have been exerted in dealing with
the facts of this wide experience. For myself, I have come to see
that, if "M.D." does not hold in his grasp the absolute truth in the
matter of diet, he is nearer to it, and is a safer guide, than all
your low proteid advisers, lay or otherwise, where they come much
below "M.D.'s" standard.
So, using Mr Voysey's phrases, I would urge laymen like myself to shun
that weak-kneed manikin, the low proteid diet, and unite with me in a
long strong pull to get him and others like him out of the rut in
which that sorry weakling holds him.
HY. BARTHOLOMEW.
II
The Editors were quite right in saying that the article under this
heading in the July issue would arouse discussion. My wife and I,
having discussed "M.D." and many others with the title, feel
constrained to put forth a warning against blind faith in anything
which the faculty have to say on dietetics.
There are of course brilliant exceptions, such as Dr Rabagliati, Dr
Knaggs, Dr Haig, the late Dr Keith and others, who give chapter and
verse for every statement made; but when we consider the excellent
work of laymen such as Albert Broadbent, Joseph Wallace, Horace
Fletcher, Alice Braithwaite, Eustace Miles, Hereward Carrington, Edgar
J. Saxon, Bernarr MacFadden, Arnold Eiloart, ordinary folks like
ourselves may be excused if we venture to give our experience as
against that of "qualified" men.
With your permission, then, we reply to "M.D.'s" five suggestions in
the order he gives them:--
1. Food qualities are _not_ of extreme importance.
2. Quantity tables may have been "settled" by physiologists to their
own satisfaction many years ago; but very good reasons have since been
given for altering, or even ignoring, them.
3. The particular number of grains of proteid to be consumed per day
is not of serious moment.
4. That departure from the quantity specified has not led to disaster
is proved by the fact that the human race still persists, in spite of
the very varying eating customs found in different nations. The great
majority being poor or ignorant, or both, know neither "tables" nor
the need for them.
5. There can be no reply to such a general statement as: "The nature
of this disaster may appear to be very various, and its real cause is
thus frequently overlooked."
In such matters an ounce of personal experience is worth a pound of
cut-and-dried theory. We--my wife and I--have been reared in an
atmosphere suspicious of doctors, both sets of grandparents having
relied rather on herbs, water treatment, goodness of heart and faith
in God; and their children have had too many evidences of medical
ignorance to accept any dogmas. We are anti-vaccinators, nearly
vegetarian, and, to come to the point, we have four children who will
persist in thriving on a basis of always too little rather than too
much of food. The respective ages are girl 13, boy 10, girl 6, boy 2.
All have been brought up on these lines: never pressed to eat, but
continually asked to chew thoroughly. Foods "rich in proteid" put
sparingly before them. Milk has been well watered; and eggs, bacon and
other tempting and rich foods only on rare occasions given to them.
We would ask readers who can to make the following experiment: Let
your children have a good drink to start the day, and then run and
play; don't offer food till asked for. You will almost to a certainty
find, if you start this plan immediately after weaning, that day by
day and year after year it is twelve to one o'clock before they
inquire for "something to eat." We have done this for twelve years,
with children of entirely different temperament and of both sexes.
They go to school, poor things! breakfastless. During these twelve
years light breakfast for father has been on the table--he goes
without lunch--and not once in fifty do they ask to join him. Nor, if
invited, will they after three or four years of age.
The have never had a fever which lasted more than a day or two, and
they are all above average height and weight.
They get fruit in season just as asked for, and as much to drink as
they like, _but not at meal-times_.
Our experience is over a period of twelve years, and we have come to
the conclusion that the infectious diseases so prevalent and
death-dealing amongst children of all classes, rich or poor, are, in
the main, the result of over-feeding. We find it wise to keep highly
nutritious foods (like eggs, cheese, meat, etc.) away from
children--that is, for regular consumption; a little occasionally may
do no harm.
You will have it borne in on our minds year by year, as your children
grow up under such a plan, that Dr Rabagliati, Hereward Carrington and
others are quite right. We do not get our strength, nor heat, from
food. Let the force of animal life (zoo-dynamic, I believe Dr
Rabagliati calls it) have free play, and your children can't help
growing up well and strong.
In to-day's _London Daily Chronicle_ I see a special article by Dr
Saleeby, under this heading: WORLD'S DOCTORS VERSUS DISEASE. 5000
MEDICAL MEN MEET TO-DAY. THE TRIUMPHS OF THREE DECADES. We know how
much this wonderful faculty knew thirty years ago about, _e.g._, fresh
air for consumptives. There is not a word said in this article (which
is a sort of programme of the weighty matters for discussion) on the
relation of food to the body. That question probably 4950 of them
believe was settled by the eminent physiologists who compiled those
"food-tables" years ago--and in so doing went far to pave the way for
the modern frightful increase of cancer, Bright's disease, etc., as
well as for "scientific" horrors like anti-toxin, tuberculin--not to
mention compulsory eugenics!
J. METHUEN.
HEALTH THROUGH READING.
Do many people consider reading from the point of view of health of
mind and body--of refreshment in times of struggle--of recuperation
after knock-down blows of sorrow, disappointment or misfortune?
Let us begin by saying that some of the greatest books are not to be
read by everybody at all seasons. When one's heart or ankles are weak,
one does not start to climb mountains, or one may end as a corpse or
a cripple. So with one's soul under shock or stress. Personally, I can
imagine nothing more cruel than the action of two women, one a
story-teller of great repute among the "goody," who, to a specially
stricken and lonely young widow, tendered as "bed-side books," Victor
Hugo's _Les Miserables_ and Browning's poignant _The Ring and the
Book_. If they had wished to make her realise to the bitterest depths
the awfulness of the world wherein she was left alone, and the
blackest depravity of the human nature around her, they could not have
done differently. _Les Miserables_ she read till she reached the
dreadful scene where a vicious cad hurls snowballs at the helpless
Fantine. Then the strong instinct of self-preservation made her put
the book aside--not to touch it again for nearly thirty years. With
_The Ring and the Book_ her mind was too wrung and too weary to
wrestle--all it could receive was a picture of wronged innocence, and
especially of the rampant forces of evil with which she was left to
contend. With the same want of tact and judgment, if with unconscious
cruelty, the gloomy, fateful _Bride of Lammermoor_ was selected out of
all Scott's novels for the reading of a very homesick youth, solitary
in a strange country!
Yet we must always remember that, as in affairs of the body so of the
spirit, "what is one man's meat may be another man's poison." Some of
the wisest and most successful nurses or doctors will occasionally
permit an invalid to indulge in a longed-for diet which would
certainly never be prescribed. They know that idiosyncrasy follows no
exactly known rule. So we could tell of one who, amid the dry
agnosticism of the later half of last century, had felt her faith, not
indeed extinguished, but obscured and darkened. From the perusal of
certain writers she had shrunk, perhaps with cowardice. They were put
on such a pinnacle that she feared she would find no arguments fit to
oppose to theirs. Weakly, she locked the skeleton cupboard. Then she
was attacked by a malady which, while leaving her mind free and
strong, she knew might be very speedily fatal. Straightway she said
to her husband: "In two or three days I shall probably 'know'--or
cease from all knowing. There will not be long to wait. Therefore
bring me three books," which she named, works of authors of extreme
agnostic views. Rather reluctantly he complied with her wish. She went
steadily through the joyless pages, turned the last with the
significant remark: "If this is all they can say, well!--" The
skeleton cupboard, once opened, was speedily swept out. She quickly
recovered, but never forgot her experience. Yet it must be remembered
that this was the patient's own prescription, and was permitted by one
who thoroughly understood her temperament. Therefore, though one would
never wish to overrule a strong personal desire, that is quite
different from offering counsel and furtherance--or proving
experiments upon oneself.
A celebrated woman writer of the middle of last century was of opinion
that young people of both sexes should not indulge in reading "minor
poetry." "Let them keep to the great poets, made of granite," was her
graphic phrase. A woman of singularly self-controlled nature has
confessed that the only time in her whole life that she experienced an
unwholesome moral and emotional disturbance, after reading a book, was
when, at about twenty-two years of age, she read Emily Bronte's
_Wuthering Heights_. She dared not finish it: and when, some time
later, a copy was presented to her, she caused it to be exchanged for
another book, not wishing it even to be in the house with her. Years
afterwards, she read it again, quite unmoved. It may be added that her
first reading was made in the course of a systematic study of English
literature, which had already led her through the works of Chaucer and
Fielding. She has herself asked: "Is it possible that the strong and
unpleasant effect was produced because the book was the production of
another young woman, perhaps of somewhat 'sympathetic' temperament?"
Taken as a whole, probably most fiction and all highly emotional work
of any sort should be indulged in sparingly by those in the
danger-zone of life, or by any under special mental or moral stress.
History, philosophy (with sustained chains of reasoning) and
biographies (best, autobiographies) of active and strenuous lives,
should be resorted to by those temporarily doomed to spells of
suspense and involuntary inaction. Invalids should be encouraged to
read Plutarch's _Lives_ rather than the _Memorials_ of other
sufferers, however saintly!
It may be broadly stated that, during the tragic episodes which seem
to occur in all lives, the most wholesome reading is to be found in
the books of the great World-Religions--the Bible, and the teachings
of Buddha, Confucius and Mahomet. The Bible is of course a library in
itself, and many of its books are suited to very widely different
circumstances and temperaments. The Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistle
of St James, and parts of those great poems known as the "prophetical
books" and the more personal and less doctrinal portions of Paul's
epistles are perhaps of widest application. From the words of Buddha,
Confucius and Mahomet there are many admirable selections--and one
remembers a wonderful compilation of more than thirty years ago,
called _The Sacred Anthology_, and wonders if it be out of print. It
does not follow that these works should not be studied at other times
than "tragic episodes." If this were more often the case, perhaps
there would be fewer "tragic episodes"!
Next to these come such wonderful books of spiritual experience as A
Kempis's _Imitation of Christ_, the _Pilgrim's Progress_, the _Devout
Life_ of Francis of Sales and others which will occur to the memory.
Allusion to the _Pilgrim's Progress_ brings us to the remark that no
books are more truly wholesome than some that can be enjoyed by those
of all ages, and of very varied types of "culture": in which the
children can delight, and which refresh the aged and weary. Like
Nature herself, they have hedgerows where the little ones can gather
flowers, little witting of the farther horizons of earth and sky
lifted up for the eyes of the elders. Let the children read the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ simply as "a story," its eternal verities will
sink into their souls to reappear when they too are in _Vanity Fair_
or in bitter conflict with _Apollyon_.
For the same reason, the Book of Proverbs should be commended to
youthful study. Under wise supervision--or rather, in mutual study--it
becomes at once a series of vivid pictures of primitive Eastern
life--for all allusions should be explained, where possible,
pictorially--while at the same time the memory will be insensibly
stored with shrewd common sense and knowledge of the world, to be
turned to, and drawn upon, as needed.
And then, while the children revel in the fun and the fancy of Hans
Andersen's _Fairy Tales_, let the sorrowful or sore or wounded heart
turn to them for solace, soothing or healing. Hans Andersen enjoys a
very special "popularity" and yet some, who have learned to love and
value him, doubt whether justice has yet been done to his work.
Because it is matchless for the young, it may be easily forgotten that
it can be so, only by some quality which makes it matchless for all
others. Perhaps some of his most popular stories are not his most
wonderful, but have simply caught the popular fancy, because of some
artist's illustration, or some personal application to the writer's
own history, as in the case of his _Ugly Duckling_. How many--or
rather, how few!--can readily recall the pathos and wit of his
_Portuguese Duck_ or the deep philosophy of his _Girl Who Trod on a
Loaf_?
It is told of Hans Andersen, a gentle soul in a homely exterior, which
attracted the snubs and neglect which "patient merit of the unworthy
takes," on some such occasion was once heard to murmur: "And yet I am
the greatest man now in the world!" It was very naive of him to say
so, even in a whisper, probably wrung from him only in self-defence,
but perhaps he might have thought it, in solemn silence--and--not been
so very wrong! It may have been part of the very transparency of his
inspired genius that he could not keep the secret to himself!
There is at least one reader who declares that she finds the seeds of
all vital philosophy--ancient or modern--in his stories. How much he
derived from those who went before him, it is not for us to say, but
this disciple, herself a devoted student and admirer of the world's
latest teacher, Leo Tolstoy, yet puts Hans Andersen above him, as
having attained in practically all his work what Tolstoy attained only
occasionally--_i.e._ Tolstoy's own ideal of what Art should be and do.
In such a paper as this little can be done beyond indicating on the
broadest lines the kind of reading which tends to preserve or to
restore mental health. Away with your "problem" novels and "realistic"
poems stated in the filthy material of moral gutters! Hans Andersen
will take some birds, some flowers, some toys, and will state the same
problems, and get the same eternal solutions, without making the
inquirer run any risk of meanwhile catching moral malaria. Isaiah will
help us to build "castles" for the human race and for our own future,
but he will take care that we shall remember that righteousness and
unceasing vigilance and unflagging repair must go into the laying of
foundations and the upholding of walls. David, even in his "cursing
psalms," will exemplify for you the power of hate and vengeance in
your own heart, and as he holds it up before you, you will see how
small a thing it is, how mean, how ludicrous!
As a man eats and drinks, so is his body: if he is a gross feeder, his
body will be gross and sensual; if his food lacks nourishment, he will
pine and fade. So it is with our minds and our morals. With whatever
original "spiritual body" we may start, it needs spiritual sustenance,
spiritual discipline, spiritual sufficiency and spiritual abstinence.
Too often we ill-use it, as bodies are ill-used, goading its weakness
with fiery excitement, or gorging its greed with sickly sentiment, or
emasculating it by empty frivolity.
All who desire spiritual health must find out what books best promote
it in themselves: and sometimes they are found, like wholesome herbs,
in very lowly places. One good rule is never to recommend what we have
not seen proved in ourselves, or on others.
ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO.
THE SWAN-SONG OF SEPTEMBER.
This fine sonnet is from _Lyric Leaves_, poems by S. Gertrude
Ford. 2s. 6d. net (postage 2d.). (C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 3 Tudor
Street, London, E.C.)
Sing out thy swan-song with full throat, September,
From a full heart, with golden notes and clear!
No rose will wreathe thee; yet the harebell's here,
And still thy crown of heath the hills remember.
Bright burns thy fire, e'en to its latest ember,
The sunset fire that lights thee to thy bier,
Flaming and failing not, albeit so near
Dun-robed October waits, and grey November.
And though, at sight of thee, a chill change passes
Through wood and wold, on leaves and flowers and grasses,
Thy beauty wanes not; thou hast ne'er grown old;
Death-crowned as Cleopatra, lovely lying
Even to the end; magnificently dying
In pomp of purple and in glare of gold.
S. GERTRUDE FORD.
THE QUEST FOR BEAUTY.
If you have travelled at all frequently on certain of the London
"tube" railways you may occasionally have noticed, facing you in the
carriage, a small framed poster which for beauty and imaginative power
has, I should think, never been surpassed in advertising art. If the
first sight of it did not make you catch your breath you will not, I
am afraid, be interested in this article.
The poster represents a rich landscape, in which noble tree-forms show
sombre against a tumultuous sky--the latter an architectural mass of
pale cloud, spanned by a vivid rainbow. Across the lower part of the
picture is a scroll, on which are written, in musical notation, two
bars from Chopin's Twentieth Prelude. At the top are the words,
_Studies in Harmony_: it is an advertisement of Somebody & Co.'s
wall-papers.
In both colour and design this poster is very beautiful. It would be
scarcely less so without the rainbow; but "the dazzling prism of the
sky" not only intensifies the subtle harmony of colour throughout the
picture: it turns the poster into a symbol. And the artist might well
have stopped there; only, you see, he had an inspiration. When he
wrote across the picture those eight descending chords from the
immortal _Largo_ he made of the poster--a poem.
I do not know anything about the artist who conceived this
advertisement of wall-papers. I do not even know his name. But I
believe him to be the herald of an invasion.
The invasion of life by beauty.
Do you think it a degradation of art that it should be enlisted by the
makers of wall-papers? Are there not too many ugly and discordant
posters? Do you consider trade and manufacture so sordid that they are
beneath the ministrations of beauty? It doesn't matter a new penny
whether you answer such questions with a nod or a no: the invasion has
begun. It is irresistible. Beauty is stooping--stooping to conquer.
Your ardent social reformer is too often obsessed with one idea.
Across his mental firmament he sees only one blazing word: INJUSTICE.
And, fine fellow though he often is, he is inclined to be impatient
with any talk of art or beauty. "How can beauty grow in these vile
cities?" he cries. "What is the use of your music, your statuary, your
fine pictures, your poetry, to the starving and the oppressed?" And he
does not see that his passionate desire for justice is at root the
quest for beauty, for fullness and harmony of life. His stormy sky
shows no rainbow: yet it is there. And so is the stately music, the
transmutation of colour into sound. And if his eyes could be opened to
one and his ears to the other, there would be more power to his elbow.
For beauty is inspiration and courage--
"My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky...."
And there is more than that in it. The cultivation of a sense of
beauty, of harmony, makes reformers less harsh in their judgments,
broadens their sympathies and helps to save them from becoming mere
doctrinaires. If you have any love for the beautiful you simply cannot
be happy about most Utopias, though they be Justice itself in civic
form; and, when our "scientific" Fabian has demonstrated to you how to
organise the national life in all its parts into one vast smoothly
working State mechanism you will shudder, and then laugh. And then,
without any rudeness, you will say: "Hang mechanism and a minimum
wage! Live men and women want living crafts, liberty and a maximum
beauty!"
And really, I am coming to see that there are a great many
health-culture enthusiasts (not to mention food reformers) who see no
rainbow in the sky and hear no music in the wind; and even if they
did, ten to one they would see no connection between the two. I verily
believe there are some poor souls who have studied food questions so
closely that they cannot see the sun for proteid nor the sea for
salts. In all meekness, and knowing the frailty of the human mind (I
have written dozens of articles on diet!), I would prescribe for them
a course of artistic wall-paper advertisements, combined with the
letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. He, poor fellow, had to battle
against disease all his short life; but he managed to end one of his
letters something like this (I quote from memory): "_Sursum Corda_!
Heave ahead! Art and blue heaven! April and God's larks! A stately
music.... Enter God."
A somewhat ecstatic utterance. A trifle too exclamatory. Perhaps. You
and I don't end our letters like that. (Or do you?) More likely we say
something about the weather down here being miserably cold (or damp,
or dull, or changeable, or hot) and brave out the lie with "yours
truly." But O for one little spark from the fire that shone in the
soul of R.L.S. Better to die young with a broken heart, if it were a
heart as brave and gay as his, than beat Methuselah by means of a
mincing, calculating, cold-blooded attention to irritating self-made
little rules.
Oh yes, I know well the value of little rules. And I know also that
Nature offers us only two alternatives--obedience or death (either
sudden or slow). But then Nature is something more than Mistress and
Lawgiver. She is Beauty. And in that aspect, as in all other aspects,
Nature is unescapable. We turn our backs on her only to find her
awaiting us at the next turn in the road. Looking at the matter all
round, I don't think we can come to any other conclusion than that
Nature (or whatever you like to call It, Her or Him) is aiming at
beauty all the time. So that we who are literally, if not
figuratively, the children of Nature, had best do likewise.
Some mystic or other has said that man's search for God is God's
search for man. If he was right--and I think he was--it follows that
man's quest for beauty is Beauty invading life; and that the only
healthy life worth the having is that which begins with "Lift up your
hearts!" and issues in "a stately music. Enter God."
EDGAR J. SAXON.
* * * * *
_SEMPER FIDELIS._
Do two things worth doing, every day.
Be scrupulously polite and kind, rather than witty or entertaining.
Cherish cleanliness, sobriety, frugality and contentment.
Cultivate sweetness of disposition and tranquillity of mind.
Think before speaking, and so reduce your causes of regret.
Seek peace and be peaceable for _lis litem generat_.
Begin at home, let home always find you faithfully on duty.
Care carefully for those whom Providence has entrusted to your care.
And the reward of the faithful will abundantly yours,
And your heaven will go with you wherever you go.
"A.R."
MORE HOLIDAY APHORISMS.
Two's company, three's fun.
* * * * *
Levity is the bane of wit.
* * * * *
Braggers mustn't be losers.
* * * * *
Never put on to-day what you can't put on to-morrow.
* * * * *
It's an ill mind that finds no one any good.
* * * * *
It's no use crying over spilt milk: you're better without it.
* * * * *
Look before you sleep.
* * * * *
Never put an excursion ticket in the mouth.
* * * * *
Long hair never made true poets.
* * * * *
Obesity always carries weight.
* * * * *
Look after your manners and your friends will look after themselves.
* * * * *
Cranks of a feather fight together.
* * * * *
All is not toil that blisters.
* * * * *
_To Sea Anglers_:
A live catch is no better than a dead fish.
* * * * *
Better a place in the sun than a plaice on a hook.
PETER PIPER.
HEALTHY HOMEMAKING.
XXI. HIRED HELP (_continued_).
What is the homemaker of limited means, who must have some help, to do
under present conditions? Well, meantime, there is only the young
"general" for her, either the "daily girl" or one who "lives in." Of
the two I prefer the "daily girl," when she can be obtained. And the
younger she can be obtained, other things equal, the better. She will
have fewer bad habits to overcome. Some housewives object to the daily
girl on the score that she may bring dirt or infection from her home,
and also because she can seldom arrive early enough to help get
breakfast. But a little management overnight can reduce the labour of
breakfast getting to a minimum, and if the "outings" of the girl who
lives in are as frequent as they ought to be the risk of her carrying
infection, etc., will always apply.
The "daily girl" has definitely fixed hours of work and the same
chance of enjoying a measure of home life, of keeping her friends and
individual interests, as the typist or factory worker whose lot the
domestic servant so often envies; while her employers are not faced
with the alternatives of condemning a young fellow-creature to a
solitary existence or forcing an unreal companionship which is equally
irksome on both sides. It is true that the wages of the "daily girl"
do not equal, in actual money, those of the factory worker, neither
does she obtain the Saturday half-holiday or the whole of Sunday free.
But to set against this she receives her entire board and, with a
kindly mistress, is not tied down to staying her full time on days
when she is "forward" with her work.
The life of the young "daily girl," if her employer is a conscientious
woman, need not be hard nor unpleasant; very little harder and no more
unpleasant than the lot of the young "lady" who is paying from L60 to
L80 per annum to learn cookery, laundry and housework at a school of
domestic economy. Properly conducted, the relations between employer
and employee, "mistress" and "servant," are those of mutual aid. Such
relations _may_ be, and too often _are_, those of an inefficient
little drudge for a "mistress" almost equally ignorant and
inefficient. But when the employer is an intelligent woman with a
sense of justice (I prefer a sense of justice to sentimental theories
about sisterhood--people do not always treat their sisters justly) the
weekly money payment and food will be but a small part of the girl's
wage. In addition she will receive a training that will equip her for
the "higher" branches of domestic service, or for homemaking on her
own account. Not every girl has the sense to appreciate this when she
gets it, nor the intelligence to profit by it; while it is certainly
rather trying to the employer when the girl is "all agog" to "better
herself" as soon as she has gained a bare smattering of how to do
certain things properly. But all this is "the fortune of war." Some
girls never cease to be grateful to their first teachers and leave
them reluctantly, while other girls never realise that they have
anything to be grateful for. When gratitude and affection come they
are pleasant to receive. But the motive power of the really
conscientious woman is not the expectation of gratitude or affection.
A word to the unconventional homemaker. The young "general" is a bird
of passage. Age and experience bring with them the necessity of
earning more, and if her first employer cannot periodically raise the
girl's wages the latter must in time seek better paid employment,
probably with a mistress who is not unconventional. It is unkind,
therefore, to refrain from teaching the girl how she will be expected
to do things in the ordinary conventional house. I do not mean that
the employer ought to slavishly run her home on conventional lines for
the instruction of her "help." But it is kinder, for instance, to help
a girl regard a cap and apron with good-humoured indifference, or as
on a par with a nurse's uniform, rather than as "a badge of
servitude." It is kinder, too, to show her that it is not only
"servants" who are expected to address their employers as "Sir" and
"Ma'am," but that well-mannered young people in all conditions of life
can be found who use this form of address to persons older than
themselves. I do not suggest for one moment that any attempt should be
made to delude a girl into the belief that she will not be expected,
in conventional households, to behave with equal deference to persons
younger than herself. Such deception would be unpardonable. But it is
anything but kind to allow a young girl to drift into careless and
familiar habits of speech bound to lead to dismissal for "impudence"
in her next "place." There is a type of person, for example, who seems
to believe that, in order to show that he is "as good as anybody
else," it is necessary to be rude and familiar. But good manners are
not necessarily associated with servility. And it is no kindness to
help to unfit a girl for getting her living in the world as it is.
It may seem that, in this article, I am more concerned for the "hired
help" than the homemaker for whom I am ostensibly writing. But the
points I have touched on are just those about which I know many
thoughtful women are puzzled. I cannot solve their individual problems
for them, of course, I can only just barely indicate some of the
thoughts that have come to me on a subject that is so intimately bound
up with the whole of our present unsatisfactory social and economic
conditions that it cannot be adequately discussed in a little tract
upon domestic economy.
FLORENCE DANIEL.
THE CARE OF CUPBOARDS.
There are three methods in general use of caring for cupboards. Some
housewives prefer their cupboard shelves of bare wood, to be well
scrubbed with soap and water at the periodical "turn-out." Others
cover all shelves with white American cloth, which only needs wiping
over with a wet house-flannel; while still others prefer to dispense
with the necessity for wetting the shelves and line them with white
kitchen paper, or even clean newspaper, which is periodically renewed.
Of the three methods I prefer the last, with the addition of a good
scrubbing at the spring clean. The weekly or fortnightly scrubbing is
apt to result in permanently damp cupboards, unless they can be left
empty to dry for a longer time than is usually convenient. The use of
American cloth is perhaps the easiest, most labour-saving method, but
the cloth soon gets superficially marked and worn long before its real
usefulness is impaired, so that the cupboard shelves never look quite
so neat as after scrubbing or relining with white paper.
The larder should be thoroughly "turned out" once a week. Once a
fortnight is enough for the store-cupboard and for china cupboards in
daily use. While cupboards in which superfluous china and other
non-perishable goods are stored, and that are seldom opened, need not
be touched oftener than once or twice a year.
In very small houses one cupboard often must house both china and
groceries, thus combining the offices of storeroom and china cupboard.
The larder, strictly speaking, is for the food consumed daily. But
when larder and store-cupboard have to be combined, the groceries may
be packed away on the upper shelves, which can be tidied once a
fortnight; but the shelves doing duty for the larder proper should
never be left for longer than a week.
Nothing betrays the careless housewife like an ill-smelling larder.
All food should be examined daily and kept well covered. Hot food
should be allowed to cool before storing in the larder. In the summer
time special precautions must be taken against flies, all receptacles
for food which are minus well-fitting lids being covered with
wire-gauze covers or clean butter muslin. If the shelves are lined
with paper, care should be taken at the weekly change to examine the
wood for stains caused by spilt food that has
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