I was talking the other day with a New York physician, long retired from
practice, who after an absence of a dozen years in Europe has returned
within a year to this country. He volunteered the remark, that nothing had
so impressed him since his return as the improved health of Americans. He
said that his wife had been equally struck with it; and that they had
noticed it especially among the inhabitants of cities, among the more
cultivated classes, and in particular among women.
It so happened, that within twenty-four hours almost precisely the same
remark was made to me by another gentleman of unusually cosmopolitan
experience, and past middle age. He further fortified himself by a similar
assertion made him by Charles Dickens, in comparing his second visit to
this country with his first. In answer to an inquiry as to what points of
difference had most impressed him, Dickens said, "Your people, especially
the women, look better fed than formerly."
It is possible that in all these cases the witnesses may have been led to
exaggerate the original evil, while absent from the country, and so may
have felt some undue reaction on their arrival. One of my informants went
so far as to express confidence that among his circle of friends in Boston
and in London a dinner party of half a dozen Americans would outweigh an
English party of the same number. Granting this to be too bold a statement,
and granting the unscientific nature of all these assertions, they still
indicate a probability of their own truth until refuted by facts on the
other side. They are further corroborated by the surprise expressed by
Huxley and some other recent Englishmen at finding us a race more
substantial than they had supposed.
The truth seems to be, that Nature is endeavoring to take a new departure
in the American, and to produce a race more finely organized, more
sensitive, more pliable, and of more nervous energy, than the races of
Northern Europe; that this change of type involves some risk to health in
the process, but promises greater results whenever the new type shall be
established. I am confident that there has been within the last
half-century a great improvement in the physical habits of the more
cultivated classes, at least, in this country,--better food, better air,
better habits as to bathing and exercise. The great increase of athletic
games; the greatly increased proportion of seaside and mountain life in
summer; the thicker shoes and boots of women and little girls, permitting
them to go out more freely in all weathers,--these are among the permanent
gains. The increased habit of dining late, and of taking only a lunch at
noon, is of itself an enormous gain to the professional and mercantile
classes, because it secures time for eating and for digestion. Even the
furnaces in houses, which seemed at first so destructive to the very breath
of life, turn out to have given a new lease to it; and open fires are being
rapidly reintroduced as a provision for enjoyment and health, when the main
body of the house has been tempered by the furnace. There has been,
furthermore, a decided improvement in the bread of the community, and a
very general introduction of other farinaceous food. All this has happened
within my own memory, and gives _a priori_ probability to the alleged
improvement in physical condition within twenty years.
And, if these reasonings are still insufficient on the one side, it must be
remembered that the facts of the census are almost equally inadequate when
quoted on the other. If, for instance, all the young people of a New
Hampshire village take a fancy to remove to Wisconsin, it does not show
that the race is dying out because their children swell the birth-rate of
Wisconsin instead of New Hampshire. If in a given city the births among the
foreign-born population are twice as many in proportion as among the
American, we have not the whole story until we learn whether the deaths are
not twice as many also. If so, the inference is that the same recklessness
brought the children into the world and sent them out of it; and no
physiological inference whatever can be drawn. It was clearly established
by the medical commission of the Boston Board of Health, a few years ago,
that "the general mortality of the foreign element is much greater than
that of the native element of our population." "This is found to be the
case," they add, "throughout the United States as well as in Boston."
So far as I can judge, all our physiological tendencies are favorable
rather than otherwise: and the transplantation of the English race seems
now likely to end in no deterioration, but in a type more finely organized,
and more comprehensive and cosmopolitan; and this without loss of health,
of longevity, or of physical size and weight. And, if this is to hold true,
it must be true not only of men, but of women.