effects of wrong living. This will bring crises, and unless they know
that this is Nature's attempt to rid the body of unwanted and effete
matter they may be duped into returning to their high feeding, either
by those whom "M.D." calls diet quacks or by qualified quacks.
I do not believe it possible for anyone to die for lack of indication
that they were eating too little.
The opposite is what people die of. If we carefully read Dr
Rabagliati's article in the same issue we shall rightly ask what would
be the results of analyses and measurements in such a case.
About a year ago we had a young woman under our care who had suffered
with deafness and other troubles for years. She had tried dietetic
treatments, "uric-acid-free" and otherwise, and had at last been told
that her deafness was incurable, being due to heredity and deficiency
in the organs of hearing. She was extremely thin when she came to us,
but we did not measure her, nor analyse unclean excreta, nor weigh
her.
She saw an M.D. who was in sympathy with the philosophy of fasting,
and she fasted (taking water only) for 28 days. She then had four days
of fruit juice, and was so disappointed at having broken her fast
prematurely that she continued it for another 12 days, making 44 in
all--40 days actual fasting.
[_During this period she was living an almost complete out-door
life._--EDS.]
During the fast many interesting phenomena were witnessed, chief among
which was the discharge from ears and nose--significant indeed to all
who study Nature's ways. Result: normal hearing restored. This was
nearly twelve months ago; and, having heard of her recently, we find
that, though she had had a cold, there has been no recurrence of
deafness. I wonder what assistance measurements would have been in
this true cure. The patient (an adult) weighed 4st. 8 lbs. at the end
of her fast and could then walk short distances.
The way in which "M.D." dismisses "a little gout" in his last
paragraph but one almost leads one to think that he is unaware of the
failure of the natural defences of the body that must have gone on in
a very serious degree before the manifestation of gout became
possible.
I respectfully submit this problem to "M.D.":--If a very thin patient
can go without food entirely for 40 days, with only benefit accruing,
_how many centuries_ will it take for a fairly fat person to die
through slightly under-eating?
As Dr Haddon has said, the proteid myth will die hard, but there are
physiologists who, with their faces to the light, are finding the
truth of man's requirements in food and who know that absolute purity
and simplicity are the ideals to be sought and that all food we eat
more than is absolutely necessary is a diversion of energy to carnal
channels.
ERNEST STARR.
A DOCTOR'S REASONS FOR OPPOSING VACCINATION.
In opposing vaccination I am aware that it is a thankless task to
brave the abuse and antagonism which everyone who attempts to move
forward in the work of medical progress is sure to encounter.
In order that I may not be regarded as prejudiced against the dogma of
vaccination, I will preface my remarks with the confession that I was
at one time myself a confiding dupe of the "tradition of the
dairymaids." While attending medical college I was told that
inoculation with cow pox virus was a certain preventive of small-pox,
and like most other medical students I accepted with childlike faith
and credulity the dictum of my teachers as so much infallible wisdom.
After an experience derived from treating a number of cases of
post-vaccinal small-pox in patients who gave evidence of having been
recently and successfully vaccinated, I awoke to a realisation of the
unpleasant fact that "protective vaccination" was not all that was
claimed for it. I thereupon began a study of the vaccination problem
in all its bearings. After several years of reading, observation and
experience I became fully convinced that "successful" vaccination not
only fails to protect its subjects from small-pox, but that, in
reality, it renders them more susceptible to this disease by impairing
their health and vitality, and by diminishing their power of
resistance.
Personally, I have known of recently vaccinated patients dying from
small-pox while having the plainest foveated vaccine marks upon their
bodies, and I have seen other individuals who had never submitted to
vaccine inoculation have variola in its mildest and most benign type.
In view of such experience I refused to ignore the evidence of my own
senses, and determined to follow the dictates of reason instead of the
dogmas of faith, and have, consequently, for the past fifteen years
refused to pollute the blood of a single person with vaccine virus.
I oppose vaccination because I believe that health is always
preferable to disease. The principle and practice of vaccination
involves the introduction of the contagion of disease at least twice,
and, according to numerous authorities, many times, into the human
organism. The disease conveyed by vaccination causes an undeniable
impairment of health and vitality, it being a distinctly vaccine
"lymph," is taken from a lesion on the body of a diseased beast, and
inserted by the vaccinator into the circulation of healthy children.
The performance of such an insanitary operation, in the very nature of
the case, is a violation of the cardinal principles of hygiene and of
sanitary science.... Moreover, this operation is in direct
controversion of the basic principles of aseptic surgery, the
legitimate aim of which is to _remove_ from the organism the products
of disease, but never to _introduce_ them.
The prime aim of the modern surgeon is to make every wound aseptic and
to keep it so. The careful operator employs every means at his command
to clear the field of operations of all bacteria. He utilises every
particle of the marvellously minute and intricate technique of asepsis
to prevent the entrance through the wounded tissues of any disease
elements before, during or after the operation. He fears sepsis
equally with death, and yet, under the blighting and blinding
influence of an ancient and venerated myth inherited from his ignorant
and superstitious forbears of a pre-scientific age, he will
deliberately inoculate the virulent infective products of diseased
animal tissues into the circulation of a healthy person. And as if to
cap the climax of his stupidity and inconsistency, he performs the
operation under "aseptic precautions."
The poisonous matter which nature wisely eliminates from the body of a
diseased calf in an effort to save its life and restore it to health
is seized upon by the vaccinator and implanted into the wholesome body
of a helpless child. Think of the unparalleled absurdity of purposely
infecting the body of a healthy person in this era of sanitary science
with the poison from a diseased beast, under the senseless pretext of
protecting the victim of the ingrafted disease from the contagion of
another disease! Can inconsistency go further?
I oppose the practice of vaccination because it is not known what
vaccine virus is, except that it is a mixed contagion of disease. We
hear much these days about "pure" virus and "pure calf lymph." Nothing
could be more absurd and meaningless than the flippant talk indulged
in by vaccinators and the purveyors of vaccine virus about "pure calf
lymph," a hybrid product of diseased animal tissues. "Pure virus"
translated into plain English is pure "animal poison." The phrase
"pure calf lymph" is applied to an brand of vaccine virus now in use
is a misnomer for two reasons. It is not "pure" and it is not "calf
lymph."
Calf lymph is the normal nutrient fluid which circulates in the
lymphatic vessels of the calf. Lymph is described by physiologists as
a "transparent, colourless, nutrient alkaline fluid which circulates
in the lymphatic vessels and thoracic ducts of animal bodies." Lymph
is a physiological product, while the so-called "pure calf lymph" used
by vaccinators is a pathological product, derived from a lesion on a
diseased calf. The difference between calf lymph and so-called "pure
calf lymph" is as great as is the difference between a food and a
poison. The vaccine mixture now most generally used by the medical
profession is known under the name of "glycerinized vaccine lymph,"
but it is not _lymph_ at all. It is made by utilising practically the
entire lesion or pock on the heifer when it is in the vesicular stage.
Such a lesion is broken open and scraped with a Volkmann spoon until
the whole of the tissue is forcibly and roughly curetted away,
consisting of pus, morbid serum, epithelium, fibrous tissue of the
skin, and any foreign matter on or in it, constituting what is called
"pulp." This pulp is then passed between glass rollers for trituration
and afterwards mixed with a definite amount of glycerine and distilled
water. This complex pathologic product of unknown origin is injected
into the wholesome bodies of helpless children under the false but
plausible name of "pure calf lymph." ...
I oppose the practice of vaccination because under whatever pretext
performed the implantation of disease elements into the healthy human
organism is irrational and injurious. It is subversive of the
fundamental principles of sanitary science, while the attainment of
health as a prophylactic measure is rational and in harmony with the
ascertained laws of hygiene and consistent with the canons of
common-sense. I am firmly convinced that the absurd and unreasonable
dogma which assumes to conserve health by propagating disease should
receive the open condemnation of every scientific sanitarian. That
this health-blighting delusion conceived in the ignorance of a past
generation should find lodgment in the minds of intelligent people
enjoying the light of the world's highest civilisation is to my mind
inexplicable....
Sanitation and isolation of the infected offer the only rational and
effective antidote for these disorders. Away, then, with the
abominable and filthy subterfuge! Give us health instead of disease.
Health is the great prophylactic.
No man in perfect health can be truly said to be susceptible to the
infection of small-pox, nor to that of any other zymotic disease.
Vigorous health confers immunity from disease-producing agents as
nothing else can. It is usually after the vital functions have become
impaired by the effects of vaccination or some other injurious cause
that individuals become susceptible to small-pox infection.
J.W. HODGE, M.D.
[_The above article can be obtained in pamphlet form from the
publisher. Wm. J. Furnival, Stone. Staffs._--EDS.]
THE NEW RACE.
(_Specially written for THE HEALTHY LIFE._)
A new race on the ruins of the old
Build we: a temple of the human form
Fairer than marble, since with life-blood warm,
Well crowned with its appointed crown of gold,
Russet or ebony; lines clear and bold
Beneath--a citadel no ills can storm,
Buttressed with health; a type to be the norm
In that great age the world shall yet behold.
For now the laws of Health and Heaven are seen
In their identity, life's body and soul;
Though, like divorce, disease may come between
What God hath joined; but at the human goal,
Where the New Race rules, splendid and serene,
Sit Health and Holiness, made one and whole.
S. GERTRUDE FORD.
THE PLAY SPIRIT.
We all long for reality. Most of the amusements in the world are
imitations of the reality for which we long. They promise a
satisfaction they are unable to give. Drink, mechanical love-making,
all snatched gratification of the senses, religious excitement,
revivalist meetings, and so forth, most theatre-going and sports, all
simulate the real glory of life. They bring an illusion of well-being.
They produce a glow in the nervous system. They cause the outlines of
everyday life as we know it to grow suffused. They give us a momentary
sense of heightened power and freedom. We float easily in a happy
world. A sort of relaxation has been achieved. The less common forms
of amusement bring us nearer to the gateway of reality. For some, they
have been the rivers leading to the ocean of truth itself.
Art, for instance, the interpretation of life in terms of beauty; the
"artist," the man in whom sensuous perception is supreme, offers us a
sublime aspect of reality. He dwells in the universe constructed for
him by his senses and tells us of its glories. He achieves "freedom."
The veil covering reality is woven for him far thinner than for common
men. He sees life moving eternally behind the forms he separates and
"creates." And to those of us who are akin to him, who are
temperamentally artistic, he offers freedom of a kind. The
contemplation of a work of art releases the tension of the nerves. To
use the language of psychology it "arrests" us, suspends the functions
of our everyday surface personality, abolishes for a moment time and
space, allows the "free," generally suppressed subconscious self to
come up and flood the surface intelligence, allows us for a moment to
be ourselves. But, still, this momentary relaxation, this momentary
"play," this holiday from the surface "I," remains an affair dependent
upon suggestive symbols coming from "without." The supreme artist
achieves freedom. We, who in matters of art are the imitative mass,
can only have "change," a new heaven and earth, a fresh "culture."
Then there is love. That promises, at the outset, complete escape into
freedom and reality. And supreme lovers, both of individuals and of
"Humanity," have indeed found freedom and the pathway to reality in
love. But ordinary everyday people rushing idolatrously out to find
themselves in others find in the end only another I. The religions
perhaps work best and longest. But even here average humanity, where
the mystical sense is feeble, are thrown back in the end upon
ethics--and go somewhat grimly through life doing their duty, living
upon the husks of doctrine, the notions and reports of other men.
If the play spirit within us, that longing for the real joy of life,
for real relaxation and re-creation, fares so poorly for most of us in
the amusements large and small that life offers to our leisure
moments, is it any better in the "games" the individual chooses for
himself--hobbies, for instance? Can these generally "instructive" and
"useful," generally also solitary, occupations be called play? Are
they not merely a reversal of life's engine, rather than an unmaking
and a remaking. They are merely a variant of life. They are very truly
called a "change of occupation." They are led and dominated, commonly,
by the intelligence. They contain no element of freedom. The same
defect is found in all organised "games."
* * * * *
Real play, like every other reality, comes from what our mechanical
and practical intelligences have called "within."
Real play arises when the "I" is in direct contact with the myself,
with Life, with God, with the actuality moving beneath all symbolic
representations.
It is only when "I," the practical, intelligent, abstract-making,
idealising, generalising, clever, separated "I," the "I" which has a
past, a present and a future, renounces its usurpation of the
steering apparatus, that play can be. "I," to play or to pray or to
love, must be born again. "I" must relinquish all. "I" must have
neither experience nor knowledge, neither loves nor hates, neither
"thought" nor "feeling" nor "will"--nor anything that can arrest the
action of the inner life. When this complete relaxation, which has its
physical as well as its mental aspect, is achieved, then and then only
can "I" rise up and play. Then "I" shall rediscover all the plays in
the world in their origin. "I" shall understand the war-dance of the
"savage." "I" shall know something about the physical convulsions of
primitive "conversion." The arts may begin to be open doors to me. "I"
shall have stood "under," understood my universe, in the brief moment
when "I" abandoned myself to the inner reality. The words of the great
"teachers" will grow full of meaning. My own "experiences" will be
re-read. I shall see more clearly with my surface intelligence what I
must do. I shall be personal in everything, personal in my play.
Surface self-consciousness which holds me back from all spontaneous
activity will disappear in proportion as "I" am immersed in the
greater "me."
Look at that woman walking primly down the lane to the sea with her
bathing-dress. She is a worker on a holiday. But she cannot play. She
goes down every day to bathe in the Cornish sea, the sea that on a
calm sunny day is like liquid Venetian glass and flings at you, under
the least breeze, long, green, foam-crested billows that carry you off
our feet if you stand even waist-high. She potters in the shallows and
splashes herself to avoid taking cold. Her intelligent "I" is
uppermost. Her world of every day never leaves her. She will go back
to it as she came, unchanged. Her wistful face betrays the seeker lost
amidst unrealities. If the "I" were a little more intelligent, she
might try to defy the surrounding ocean, to pit her powers against it,
to swim. She would learn a most practical and useful and withal
invigorating accomplishment. If her busy, watchful "I" could be
arrested she might "see" the billows, the sky and the headlands reared
on either side of her bay. She might dance into the water, and see her
world dance back. She would fling herself amongst the wavelets where
she stands and splashes. She might give herself up and know nothing
but the beauty and strength around her. It would not teach her to
swim, but she would have taken a step towards the great game of
walking upon the waters.
D.M. RICHARDSON.
TRAVELS IN TWO COLOURS.
One is often tempted to suspect that in some schools there is a
deep-laid plot to destroy in the bud any love for poetry which
children may possess. Otherwise how is it that little boys and girls
are made to commit to memory William Blake at his highest reach of
mystical fire, as in _Tiger, Tiger, burning bright_, or William
Wordsworth at his lowest ebb of uninspired simplicity, as in _We are
seven_? These are very popular, apparently, as poems for children to
recite; yet in the one case it is beyond any teacher's power to show
children the unearthly flaming beauty which alone gives the poem its
peculiar quality and undefinable power; and in the other the maudlin
sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively
dangerous to the child's health of mind. Both types of recitation work
out in the end to this--that when the child attains adolescence, and
the great world of literature dawns on the hungry mind, an evil
association of ideas has been established--the association of poetry,
the highest of all arts, either with the saying of lines without
meaning, or with the learning of "poems" devoid of what wholesome
youth really desires or enjoys.
People may wrangle all night as to whether the normal healthy child is
at heart a mystic or a realist; whether he likes fairy tales because
they show him a magical world where flowers can talk and umbrellas are
turned into black geese, or because they tell of strange romantic
things happening to a real human boy like himself; but there can be no
shadow of doubt that much of the verse intended for children is either
too clever in its humour to make them laugh, or too bald in its matter
or tone to stir the romance that is never quite asleep in their
hearts. There are really surprisingly few versifiers who have
altogether avoided these errors. Some of George Macdonald's _Poems for
Children_ are almost perfect, both as regards lyrical form, simplicity
of language and in the unobtrusiveness of the inner truth they convey.
For example,
"The lightning and thunder
They go and they come;
But the stars and the stillness
Are always at home."
But others come perilously near mere versified moralising. Lewis
Carroll's nonsense verses in the two famous _Alice_ books are supreme
among their kind; but are they not sometimes just a shade too
ingenious, or too adult in wit? Probably Stevenson, in those seemingly
artless poems in _A Child's Book of Verse_, comes nearest to a level
perfection. Who has ever approached him in his power to understand and
express the small child's world, desires and delights, without a trace
of the grown-up's condescension or self-consciousness?
Well, these great ones are no longer in the world; yet, with the
recognition of their genius, there is the usual danger of bemoaning
the lack of worthy successors. Not but what there is some excuse for
such lamentation; for this reason that every Christmas there is a
veritable flood of children's verse, a great deal of which is either
painfully didactic, painfully sentimental, painfully funny or
painfully foolish.
What I wish to do at the moment is to call attention to the fact that
there is one man alive in England--one of many, I do not doubt: but
one at a time!--who is doing "nonsense verses" for children which are
guiltless of all the faults I have indicated above.
Jack Goring is known among some of his friends as "The Jolly
Rhymster." He writes his verses first for his own children, and then
publishes them from time to time for the pleasure of other children.
The secret of his success is partly that he knows that even small
children like a story to be an adventure; partly that he understands
how their own romances, the things they picture or hum to themselves
when well-meaning adults are not worrying them, or rather, trying to
amuse them, begin--wherever they may end!--with a perfectly tangible
object, such as a pillar-box, a rag-doll or a toy locomotive. One of
"The Jolly Rhymster's" best things begins--
"Finger-post, finger-post, why do you stand
Pointing all day with your silly flat hand?"
--which is exactly the sort of question that a very small child in all
probability does really ask itself when it has seen a finger-post day
after day at a cross-roads. How the poem continues and where it ends
you must find out for yourself. It's all in a book called _The Ballad
of Lake Laloo_.
In the recently published volume[15] that now lies before me, this
telling of a tale of wonder which begins with an ordinary thing is
again evident. Nip and Flip, aged six and four respectively, are the
adventurers; and they make three voyages in this little book. In the
first, _The Fourpenny-Ha'penny Ship_, they circumnavigate the world.
Now please note how Mr Goring strikes the right note at the very
outset:
"Nip and Flip
Took a holiday trip
On a beautiful fourpenny-ha'penny ship
With a dear little handkerchief sail;
And they sang, 'Yo ho!
We shall certainly go
To the end of the world and back, you know,
And capture the great Seakale.'"
[15] _Nip and Flip._ By Jack Goring. Illustrated by Caterina
Patricchio. 1s. net (postage 1+1/2d.). C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 3 Tudor Street,
London, E.C.
And there follows a picture (in black and gold) of this strange
monster, just to make sure that no one will suppose they were out
after a vegetable.
The tale moves along, as such stories should, very rapidly. Thus--
"And when they came to the end of the world,
Their dear little handkerchief sail they furled
And put on the kettle for tea."
But you have only just time to look at the tea things when--
"But alas! and alack
About six o'clock
The good ship strack
On the Almond Rock
And split like a little split pea."
So the story goes on, through divers adventures,
"From Timbuctoo to Timbucthree"
and so at last home again.
The next voyage is to the land of Make-Believe on a Christmas Eve, "in
a long, long train of thought." In the course of this tale we are
given a little picture of Flip herself, and here it is for you to look
at. Only, in the book her shoes and stockings, the inside of her
skirt, and the squiggly things on the top of her head are a bright
golden colour.
[Illustration]
The third voyage is all the fault of a toy monkey--"six
three-farthings and cheap at the price"--and takes them among whales,
mermaids, sea-serpents and other deep-sea creatures.