The seat of empire is the Belly:
From hence are sent out those supplies,
Which make us either stout or wise;
The strength of every other member
Is founded on your Belly-timber;
The qualms or raptures of your blood
Rise in proportion to your food,
Your stomach makes your fabric roll,
Just as the bias rules the bowl:
That great Achilles might employ
The strength designed to ruin Troy,
He dined on lions' marrow, spread
On toasts of ammunition bread;
But by his mother sent away,
Amongst the Thracian girls to play,
Effeminate he sat and quiet;
Strange product of a cheese-cake diet.
Observe the various operations,
Of food and drink in several nations.
Was ever Tartar fierce or cruel,
Upon the strength of water-gruel?
But who shall stand his rage and force,
If first he rides, then eats his horse!
Salads and eggs, and lighter fare,
Turn the Italian spark's guitar;
And if I take Dan Congreve right,
Pudding and beef make Britons fight."
Good cooking is the beauty of a dinner. It really does a man as much
good again if he eats his food with a relish, and with a little
attention, it is as easy to cook well as ill. And let me tell the wives,
that your husbands would like you all the better, and be less likely to
go off to the public-house, if their bit of meat or their drop of broth
were well cooked. Laboring men should eat well. They should, if
possible, have meat--_butcher-meat_--ever day. Good broth is a capital
dish. But, above all, keep whiskey out of your stomachs; it really plays
the very devil when it gets in. It makes the brain mad, it burns the
coats of the stomach; it turns the liver into a lump of rottenness; it
softens and kills the heart; it makes a man an idiot and a brute. If you
really need anything stronger than good meat, take a pot of wholesome
porter or ale; but I believe you are better without even that. You will
be all the better able to afford good meat, and plenty of it.
With regard to your _bowels_,--a very important part of your
interior,--I am not going to say much, except that neglect of them
brings on many diseases; and laboring men are very apt to neglect them.
Many years ago, an odd old man, at Green-cock, left at his death a
number of sealed packets to his friends, and on opening them they found
a Bible, L50, and a box of pills, and the words, "Fear God, and keep
your bowels open." It was good advice, though it might have been rather
more decorously worded. If you were a doctor, you would be astonished
how many violent diseases of the mind, as well as of the body, are
produced by irregularity of the bowels. Many years ago, an old minister,
near Linlithgow, was wakened out of his sleep to go to see a great lady
in the neighborhood who was thought dying, and whose mind was in
dreadful despair, and who wished to see him immediately. The old man,
rubbing his eyes, and pushing up his Kilmarnock nightcap, said, "And
when were her leddyship's booels opened?" And finding, after some
inquiry, that they were greatly in arrears, "I thocht sae. Rax me ower
that pill-box on the chimney-piece, and gie my compliments to Leddy
Margret, and tell her to tak thae twa pills, and I'll be ower by and by
mysel'." They did as he bade them. They did their duty, and the pills
did theirs, and her leddyship was relieved, and she was able at
breakfast-time to profit by the Christian advice of the good old man,
which she could not have done when her nerves were all wrong. The old
Greeks, who were always seeking after wisdom, and didn't always find it,
showed their knowledge and sense in calling depression of mind
Melancholy, which means black bile. Leddy Margret's liver, I have no
doubt, had been distilling this perilous stuff.
My dear friends, there is one thing I have forgot to mention, and that
is about keeping common-stairs clean; you know they are often abominably
filthy, and they aggravate fever, and many of your worst and most deadly
diseases; for you may keep your own houses never so clean and tidy, but
if the common-stair is not kept clean too, all its foul air comes into
your rooms, and into your lungs, and poisons you. So let all in the
stair resolve to keep it clean, and well aired.
But I must stop now. I fear I have wearied you. You see I had nothing
new to tell you. The great thing in regulating and benefiting human
life, is not to find out new things, but to make the best of the old
things,--to live according to Nature, and the will of Nature's
God,--that great Being who bids us call him our Father, and who is at
this very moment regarding each one of us with far more than any earthly
father's compassion and kindness, and who would make us all happy if we
would but do his bidding, and take his road. He has given us minds by
which we may observe the laws he has ordained in our bodies, and which
are as regular and as certain in their effects, and as discoverable by
us as the motions of the sun, moon, and stars in the heavens; and we
shall not only benefit ourselves and live longer and work better and be
happier, by knowing and obeying these laws, from love to ourselves, but
we shall please him, we shall glorify him, and make him our
_Friend_,--only think of that! and get his blessing, by taking care of
our health, from love to him, and a regard to his will, in giving us
these bodies of ours to serve him with, and which he has, with his own
almighty hands, so fearfully and wonderfully made.
I hope you will pardon my plainness in speaking to you. I am quite in
earnest, and I have a deep regard, I may say a real affection, for you;
for I know you well. I spent many of my early years as a doctor in going
about among you. I have attended you long ago when ill; I have delivered
your wives, and been in your houses when death was busy with you and
yours, and I have seen your fortitude, energy, and honest, hearty,
generous kindness to each other; your readiness to help your neighbors
with anything you have, and to share your last sixpence and your last
loaf with them. I wish I saw half as much real neighborliness and
sympathy among what are called your betters. If a poor man falls down in
a fit on the street, who is it that takes him up and carries him home,
and gives him what he needs? it is not the man with a fine coat and
gloves on,--it is the poor, dirty-coated, hard-handed, warm-hearted
laboring man.
Keep a good hold of all these homely and sturdy virtues, and add to them
temperance and diligence, cleanliness and thrift, good knowledge, and,
above all, the love and the fear of God, and you will not only be happy
yourselves, but you will make this great and wonderful country of ours
which rests upon you still more wonderful and great.
SERMON V.
MEDICAL ODDS AND ENDS.
My dear friends,--We are going to ring in now, and end our course. I
will be sorry and glad, and you will be the same. We are this about
everything. It is the proportion that settles it. I am, upon the whole,
as we say, sorry, and I dare say on the whole you are not glad. I
dislike parting with anything or anybody I like, for it is ten to one if
we meet again.
My text is, "_That His way may he known upon earth; His saving health to
all nations._" You will find it in that perfect little Psalm, the 67th.
But before taking it up, I will, as my dear father used to say,--you all
remember him, his keen eye and voice; his white hair, and his grave,
earnest, penetrating look; and you should remember and possess his
Canongate Sermon to you,--"The Bible, what it is, what it does, and what
it deserves,"--well, he used to say, let us _recapitulate_ a little. It
is a long and rather kittle word, but it is the only one that we have.
He made it longer, but not less alive, by turning it into "a few
recapitulatory remarks." What ground then have we travelled over?
_First_, our duties to and about the Doctor; to call him in time, to
trust him, to obey him, to be grateful to, and to pay him with our money
and our hearts and our good word, if we have all these; if we have not
the first, with twice as much of the others. _Second_, the Doctor's
duties to us. He should be able and willing to cure us. That is what he
is there for. He should be sincere, attentive, and tender to us, keeping
his time and our secrets. We must tell him all we know about our
ailments and their causes, and he must tell us all that is good for us
to know, and no more. _Third_, your duties to your children; to the wee
Willie Winkies and the little wifies that come toddlin' hame. It is your
duty to _mind_ them. It is a capital Scotch use of this word: they are
to be in your mind; you are to exercise your understanding about them;
to give them simple food; to keep goodies and trash, and raw pears and
whiskey, away from their tender mouths and stomachs; to give them that
never-ending meal of good air, night and day, which is truly food and
fire to them and you; to _be_ good before as well as to them, to speak
and require the truth in love,--that is a wonderful expression, isn't
it?--the truth in love; that, if acted on by us all, would bring the
millennium next week; to be plain and homely with them, never _spaining_
their minds from you. You are all sorry, you mothers, when you have to
spain their mouths; it is a dreadful business that to both parties; but
there is a spaining of the affections still more dreadful, and that need
never be, no, never, neither in this world nor in that which is to come.
Dr. Waugh, of London, used to say to bereaved mothers, Rachels weeping
for their children, and refusing to be comforted, for that simplest of
all reasons, because they were not, after giving them God's words of
comfort, clapping them on the shoulders, and fixing his mild deep eyes
on them (those who remember those eyes well know what they could mean),
"My woman, your bairn is where it will have two fathers, but never but
one mother."
You should also, when the time comes, explain to your children what
about their own health and the ways of the world they ought to know, and
for the want of the timely knowledge of which many a life and character
has been lost. Show them, moreover, the value you put upon health, by
caring for your own.
Do your best to get your sons well married, and soon. By "well married,"
I mean that they should pair off old-fashionedly, for love, and marry
what deserves to be loved, as well as what is lovely. I confess I think
falling in love is the best way to begin; but then the moment you fall,
you should get up and look about you, and see how the land lies, and
whether it is as goodly as it looks. I don't like walking into love, or
being carried into love; or, above all, being sold or selling yourself
into it, which, after all, is not it. And by "soon," I mean as soon as
they are keeping themselves; for a wife, such a wife as alone I mean, is
cheaper to a young man than no wife, and is his best companion.
Then for your duties to yourselves. See that you make yourself do what
is _immediately_ just to your body, feed it when it is really hungry;
let it sleep when it, not its master, desires sleep; make it happy, poor
hard-working fellow! and give it a gambol when it wants it and deserves
it, and as long as it can execute it. Dancing is just the music of the
feet, and the gladness of the young legs, and is well called the poetry
of motion. It is like all other natural pleasures, given to be used, and
to be not abused, either by yourself or by those who don't like it, and
don't enjoy your doing it,--shabby dogs these, beware of them! And if
this be done, it is a good and a grace, as well as pleasure, and
satisfies some good end of our being, and in its own way glorifies our
Maker. Did you ever see anything in this world more beautiful than the
lambs running races and dancing round the big stone of the field; and
does not your heart get young when you hear,--
"Here we go by Jingo ring,
Jingo ring, Jingo ring;
Here we go by Jingo ring,
About the merry ma tanzie."
This is just a dance in honor of poor old pagan Jingo; measured
movements arising from and giving happiness. We have no right to keep
ourselves or others from natural pleasures; and we are all too apt to
interfere with and judge harshly the pleasures of others; hence we who
are stiff and given to other pleasures, and who, now that we are old,
know the many wickednesses of the world, are too apt to put the vices of
the jaded, empty old heart, like a dark and ghastly fire burnt out, into
the feet and the eyes, and the heart and the head of the young. I
remember a story of a good old Antiburgher minister. It was in the days
when dancing was held to be a great sin, and to be dealt with by the
session. Jessie, a comely, and good, and blithe young woman, a great
favorite of the minister's, had been guilty of dancing at a friend's
wedding. She was summoned before the session to be "dealt with,"--the
grim old fellows sternly concentrating their eyes upon her, as she stood
trembling in her striped short-gown, and her pretty bare feet. The
Doctor, who was one of divinity, and a deep thinker, greatly pitying her
and himself, said, "Jessie, my woman, were ye dancin'?"
"Yes," sobbed Jessie.
"Ye maun e'en promise never to dance again, Jessie."
"I wull, sir; I wull promise," with a courtesy.
"Now, what were ye thinking o', Jessie, when ye were dancin'? tell us
truly," said an old elder, who had been a poacher in youth.
"Nae ill, sir," sobbed out the dear little woman.
"Then, Jessie, my woman, aye dance," cried the delighted Doctor.
And so say I, to the extent, that so long as our young girls think "nae
ill," they may dance their own and their feet's fills; and so on with
all the round of the sunshine and flowers God has thrown on and along
the path of his children.
_Lastly_, your duty to your own bodies: to preserve them; to make, or
rather let--for they are made so to go--their wheels go sweetly; to keep
the _girs_ firm round the old barrel; neither to over nor under work our
bodies, and to listen to their teaching and their requests, their cries
of pain and sorrow; and to keep them as well as your souls unspotted
from the world. If you want to know a good book on Physiology, or the
Laws of Health and of Life, get Dr. Combe's _Physiology_; and let all
you mothers get his delightful _Management of Infancy_. You will love
him for his motherly words. You will almost think he might have worn
petticoats,--for tenderness he might; but in mind and will and eye he
was every inch a man. It is now long since he wrote, but I have seen
nothing so good since; he is so intelligent, so reverent, so full of the
solemnity, the sacredness, the beauty, and joy of life, and its work; so
full of sympathy for suffering, himself not ignorant of such evil,--for
the latter half of his life was a daily, hourly struggle with death,
fighting the destroyer from within with the weapons of life, his brain
and his conscience. It is very little physiology that you require, so
that it is physiology, and is suitable for your need. I can't say I like
our common people, or indeed, what we call our ladies and gentlemen,
poking curiously into all the ins and outs of our bodies as a general
accomplishment, and something to talk of. No, I don't like it. I would
rather they chose some other _ology_. But let them get enough to give
them awe and love, light and help, guidance and foresight.
These, with good sense and good senses, humility, and a thought of a
hereafter in this world as well as in the next, will make us as able to
doctor ourselves--especially to act in the _preventive service_, which
is your main region of power for good--as in this mortal world we have
any reason to expect. And let us keep our hearts young, and they will
keep our legs and our arms the same. For we know now that hearts are
kept going by having strong, pure, lively blood; if bad blood goes into
the heart, it gets angry, and shows this by beating at our breasts, and
frightening us; and sometimes it dies of sheer anger and disgust, if its
blood is poor or poisoned, thin and white. "He may dee, but he'll never
grow auld," said a canty old wife of her old minister, whose cheek was
ruddy like an apple.
_Run for the Doctor_; don't saunter to him, or go in, by the by, as an
old elder of my father's did, when his house was on fire. He was a
perfect Nathanael, and lived more in the next world than in this, as you
will soon see. One winter night he slipped gently into his neighbor's
cottage, and found James Somerville reading aloud by the blaze of the
licht coal; he leant over the chair, and waited till James closed the
book, when he said, "By the by, I am thinkin' ma hoose is on fire!" and
out he and they all ran, in time to see the auld biggin' fall in with a
glorious blaze. So it is too often when that earthly house of ours--our
cottage, our tabernacle--is getting on fire. One moment your finger
would put out what in an hour all the waters of Clyde would be too late
for. If the Doctor is needed, the sooner the better. If he is not, he
can tell you so, and you can rejoice that he had a needless journey, and
pay him all the more thankfully. So run early and at once. How many
deaths--how many lives of suffering and incapacity--may be spared by
being in time! by being a day or two sooner. With children this is
especially the case, and with workingmen in the full prime of life. A
mustard plaster, a leech, a pill, fifteen drops of Ipecacuanha wine, a
bran poultice, a hint, or a stitch in time, may do all and at once, when
a red-hot iron, a basinful of blood, all the wisdom of our art, and all
the energy of the Doctor, all your tenderness and care, are in vain.
Many a child's life is saved by an emetic at night, who would be lost in
twelve hours. So send in time; it is just to your child or the patient,
and to yourself; it is just to your Doctor; for I assure you we Doctors
are often sorry, and angry enough, when we find we are too late. It
affronts us, and our powers, besides affronting life and all its
meanings, and Him who gives it. And we really _enjoy_ curing; it is like
running and winning a race,--like hunting and finding and killing our
game. And then remember to go to the Doctor early in the day, as well as
in the disease. I always like my patients to send and say that they
would like the Doctor "to call before he goes out!" This is like an
Irish message, you will say; but there is "sinse" in it. Fancy a Doctor
being sent for, just as he is in bed, to see some one, and on going he
finds they had been thinking of sending in the morning, and that he has
to run neck and neck with death, with the odds all against him.
I now wind up with some other odds and ends. I give you them as an old
wife would empty her pockets,--such wallets they used to be!--in no
regular order; here a bit of string, now a bit of gingerbread, now an
"aiple," now a bunch of keys, now an old almanac, now three _bawbees_
and a bad shilling, a "wheen" buttons all marrowless, a thimble, a bit
of black sugar, and maybe at the very bottom a "goold guinea."
_Shoes._--It is amazing the misery the people of civilization endure in
and from their shoes. Nobody is ever, as they should be, comfortable at
once in them; they hope in the long-run and after much agony, and when
they are nearly done, to make them fit, especially if they can get them
once well wet, so that the mighty knob of the big toe may adjust himself
and be at ease. For my part, if I were rich, I would advertise for a
clean, wholesome man, whose foot was exactly my size, and I would make
him wear my shoes till I could put them on, and not know I was in
them.[1] Why is all this? Why do you see every man's and woman's feet so
out of shape? Why are there corns, with their miseries and maledictions?
Why the virulence and unreachableness of those that are "soft"? Why do
our nails grow in, and sometimes have to be torn violently off?
[1] Frederick the Great kept an aid-de-camp for this purpose,
and, poor fellow! he sometimes wore them too long, and got a kicking for
his pains.
All because the makers and users of shoes have not common sense, and
common reverence for God and his works enough to study the shape and
motions of that wonderful pivot on which we turn and progress. Because
FASHION,--that demon that I wish I saw dressed in her own crinoline, in
bad shoes, a man's old hat, and trailing petticoats, and with her (for
she must be a _her_) waist well nipped by a circlet of nails with the
points inmost, and any other of the small torments, mischiefs, and
absurdities she destroys and makes fools of us with,--whom, I say, I
wish I saw drummed and hissed, blazing and shrieking, out of the
world,--because this contemptible slave, which domineers over her
makers, says the shoe must be elegant, must be so and so, and the
beautiful living foot must be crushed into it, and human nature must
limp along Princess Street and through life natty and wretched.
It makes me angry when I think of all this. Now, do you want to know how
to put your feet into new shoes, and yourself into a new world? Go and
buy from Edmonston and Douglas sixpence worth of sense, in _Why the Shoe
Pinches_; you will, if you get your shoemaker to do as it bids him, go
on your ways rejoicing; no more knobby, half-dislocated big toes; no
more secret parings, and slashings desperate, in order to get on that
pair of exquisite boots or shoes.
Then there is the _Infirmary_.--Nothing I like better than to see
subscriptions to this admirable house of help and comfort to the poor,
advertised as from the quarry men of Craigleith; from Mr. Milne the
brassfounder's men; from Peeblesshire; from the utmost Orkneys; and from
those big, human mastiffs, the navvies. And yet we doctors are often met
by the most absurd and obstinate objections by domestic servants in
town, and by country people, to going there. This prejudice is
lessening, but it is still great. "O, I canna gang into the Infirmary; I
would rather dee!" Would you, indeed? Not you, or, if so, the sooner the
better. They have a notion that they are experimented on, and slain by
the surgeons; neglected and poisoned by the nurses, etc., etc. Such
utter nonsense! I know well about the inner life and work of at least
our Infirmary, and of that noble old Minto House, now gone; and I would
rather infinitely, were I a servant, 'prentice boy, or shopman, a
porter, or student, and anywhere but in a house of my own, and even
then, go straight to the Infirmary, than lie in a box-bed off the
kitchen, or on the top of the coal-bunker, or in a dark hole in the
lobby, or in a double-bedded room. The food, the bedding, the
physicians, the surgeons, the clerks, the dressers, the medicines, the
wine and porter,--and they don't scrimp these when necessary,--the
books, the Bibles, the baths, are all good,--are all better far than one
man in ten thousand can command in his own house. So off with a grateful
heart and a fearless to the Infirmary, and your mistress can come in and
sit beside you; and her doctor and yours will look in and single you out
with his smile and word, and cheer you and the ward by a kindly joke,
and you will come out well cured, and having seen much to do you good
for life. I never knew any one who was once in, afraid of going back;
they know better.
There are few things in human nature finer than the devotion and courage
of medical men to their hospital and charitable duties; it is to them a
great moral discipline. Not that they don't get good--selfish good--to
themselves. Why shouldn't they? Nobody does good without getting it; it
is a law of the government of God. But, as a rule, our medical men are
not kind and skilful and attentive to their hospital patients, because
this is to make them famous, or even because through this they are to
get knowledge and fame; they get all this, and it is their only and
their great reward. But they are in the main disinterested men. Honesty
is the best policy; but, as Dr. Whately, in his keen way, says, "that
man is not honest who is so for this reason," and so with the doctors
and their patients. And I am glad to say for my profession, few of them
take this second-hand line of duty.