Health and common sense

Front matter

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Contents

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I The Ancestry of Health. How the Human Machine has Developed 1

II Diet Delusions, or Coaling the

Chapter I

THE ANCESTRY OF HEALTH. HOW THE HUMAN MACHINE HAS DEVELOPED

It isn’t so very dangerous to be alive. One would really think it was, to hear the preacher moralise upon the shortness and uncertainty of human life and the doctor discourse on the everywhereness of germs. In the first place we are apt to forget how long we have been at it. If any one were to ask us how long we had been alive, we would promptly give him the number of years which had elapsed since the date of our birth — twelve, twenty-five, or sixty — as the case might be. But we would be wrong. As a matter of fact we are all the same age — and that is at least twelve million years. The torch of life which burns in us has never been quenched since its first appearance on the planet. Each successive generation has kept it alive and passed it on undimmed to the next. There never has been a single break. We have never lost an ancestor by death. If we had we wouldn’t be here. There is an absolutely unbroken thread of life, which connects us with our earliest ancestor on this planet, the father of all living things. Just think what we must have been through in all that time, and particularly what it means to us in resisting power.

We are the descendants of the victors, the survivors of countless generations. We have been in the habit of meeting difficulties and overcoming them for eons. Are we likely to forget these proud triumphs and weakly succumb now? If there is, by any possibility, anything which can come upon us in the way of heat, or cold, or hunger, or wounds, or disease, which our ancestors have not met and conquered, it would be hard to imagine it. Remember then, we represent the dominant strains of millions of generations, and that it is the breath of our nostrils to meet dangers and overcome them. It took nature some thirteen millions of years to make us, and she is not given to wasting her time.

Herein lies one of the secrets of the perfection of the human machine. It is so wonderfully adaptable. It is no carpet knight or fair-weather sailor, or, to use a more modern and appropriate simile, automobile, to run just when the weather is favourable and the roads are good and break down the minute it meets with difficulties. It is ready for all emergencies, and will fight its way out of them in surprising manner, if we only give it a fair chance. We are really wonderful beings, and have good right to be proud of ourselves, physically.

In the second place, it is so easy to notice defects. We don’t have to recognise them, they introduce themselves and insist upon our attention in the most annoying manner. When we agree with the Psalmist that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, it is our fearful liability to break down and get out of order that we are thinking of. This is only natural, for it is always the evil in things that most sharply impresses us. Comfort is a passive, hazy sort of sensation compared with the clear-cut acuteness of pain. Besides there is little need to pay much attention to the good qualities of things. They’ll never hurt you. “Well enough” can be safely let alone. Health will take care of itself, disease must be cured at once.

“A healthy man doesn’t know that he has such a thing as a stomach, a dyspeptic doesn’t know that he has anything else.” Hence the defects of the human machine bulk hugely out of proportion in our memories and imaginations. I am afraid that we doctors are apt to drift unconsciously into this attitude toward the human machine. We are kept so constantly engaged in tinkering and fixing it that we come to look on it as a bundle of defects. Even as sanitarians we seem to delight in populating the heavens above, the waters, the earth beneath, the dust of our streets, and the food upon our tables with hosts and swarms of tiny savages to whom the human body is a helpless prey whenever pounced upon. Both the laity and the profession are apt to forget that the human body is not a pulpy victim of circumstances, but the toughest, most resisting, most marvellously adaptable and most ferocious organism that the sun shines on. It can flourish where nothing else can, and kill, eat, and grow fat on any other living creature, not even excepting disease germs.

Another thing which has probably misled us has been the way in which man has avoided specialisation. Because he has not the speed of the deer, or the strength of the horse, or the size of the elephant, or the teeth and claws of a tiger, we have come to regard him as a feeble and inferior sort of animal. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact man’s chief superiority consists and has consisted in the singular way in which he has, so to speak, kept in the middle of the road and not gone to any extremes. By the law of compensation, just in so far as an animal has acquired great efficiency in one direction it has weakened itself in another. Man has kept practically all his teeth, all his toes, all his fingers, instead of losing from one-third to two-thirds of them as other animals have, in order to specially develop those that are left. And he has with them retained a power in and over all imaginable circumstances such as is possessed by no other animal.

Man is the best fighting animal in the world. There is not a bird or beast or fish that he cannot beat at its own game, if he sets himself about it. The Blackfoot or Viscayan will settle into his long, springy stride that “eats up the long miles like fire,” run down a deer, and kill it with his hunting knife. The Yellow Knife camps on the trail of the wolf in winter and follows him day after day, relentlessly as fate, until even the grey leader of the pack succumbs. The negro of Mozambique will spring right into the water and kill the man-eating shark in single combat with his crooked knife. The Sikh will face a tiger, with his short, heavy cimeter. Club or sword in hand, man is a match for the most ferocious beast of prey in a fair, stand-up fight, and the club or its descendant is as much a part of us as our bones or skin. It was only after acquiring it that we allowed our teeth and claws to degenerate into such feeble objects. Its use has made us right-handed; right-handedness has specialised the brain-cortex to such a degree that speech was possible, and speech makes thought possible. So that our mental superiority is an outgrowth and a part of our muscular superiority.

In the language of Tommy Atkins in Kipling’s ballad, homo sapiens is, “a pore, benighted ’eathen, but a first-class fitin’-man,” and two-thirds of his virtues — moral, physical, and mental — are the fruits thereof. And yet we talk of him professionally as if he were a clam without a shell.

This middle-of-the-road policy has made him extraordinarily resistant to extremes of climate. There is no known organism that can defy the elements as he can. No other mammal and no bird has half the year-round geographic range of the human species. His best chum, the dog, will accompany him almost everywhere, but only by having his food, shelter, and snow boots provided for him by his superior. We speak of being “as rugged as a bear,” but it takes three distinct species of Ursus to keep pace with man from the tropics to the pole. Half a dozen species of deer are required for the same match. His domestic animals are far inferior to him in toughness, and one of the chief obstacles to his progress in many regions is the difficulty of finding any beast of burden, or milkgiver, that will live in the climate. Some of this power of defying the elements is, of course, due to man’s power of constructing shelter and making clothing; but this many animals possess also.

Still more depends upon his astonishingly wide range of food materials. He can live on anything that is digestible by any other known animal. In contrast with almost any other animal he can live on some food upon which that animal would starve to death. Thus while the pure carnivora, or flesh-eaters, can beat him at both catching and utilising flesh foods, he can live on a diet of roots and herbs or grubs and insects, or fruits, or fish, which they would starve on. On the other hand, the herbivora will make a better living on leaves and grass than he will ; but are, of course, totally unable to either capture or utilise animals, birds, insects, fish, nuts, etc., on any of which man can survive indefinitely. He can pick fruit and nuts with the monkey, catch fish with the seal, dig grubs or roots with the wild pig, eat ants’ eggs with the ant-eater, and grasshoppers with the snake. As a food getter and eater he has no equal. And it is well for him to keep up this wide range of food materials to-day, both because it agrees best with him and because it is necessary to enable him to adjust himself to possible changes in the future. We never can tell what the future may have in store for us dietetically, or otherwise, and it is well to “keep all the pores open.” It is this capacity, retained even by the modern white man, of living on rice and fruits in the tropics, and seal oil and bear meat in the arctic regions which has made him such a wonderful colonizer. The worst fault any modern diet can have is monotony.

The same toughness is shown in the way in which he adjusts himself to city life. Crowd him as you will into human hives, deprive him of air, sunlight, pure water, and green grass, he will manage somehow to acclimate himself and resist even his new surroundings. The death rate even in our mediaeval cities, abominable as they were, was never so very much above that of country districts, and to-day, in our modern metropolises, with even the imperfect victory won by sanitarians, is actually in some cases lower than that of country villages. It is a singular fact that the one race which has been subjected incessantly to this terrific test of overcrowding for nearly fifteen hundred years — the Jewish — has attained a rate of mortality, even in its ghettos, far below that of the surrounding Gentile population in the open country. The Jew, compelled by class and religious hatred to become a city dweller, has risen to the emergency and scored another of his memorable racial triumphs.

We need not fear that civilised man is going to become degenerate from city dwelling or any of the other strains of civilisation. Contrary to popular belief, the white man of to-day has a lower death rate, a higher average length of life, is taller, heavier, and stronger than any of his predecessors, or any known race of savages. Almost any company of American and English soldiers will contain men who can outrun, outwrestle, and outswim the best athletes of any native tribe.

Moreover his “net” birth rate is higher and his death rate lower than that of any savage tribe. Infant mortality among savages is something frightful, compared with even the most ignorant of white communities. Adult savages are perhaps, on an average, slightly freer from certain defects than white men, but for the obvious and simple reason that all who possessed these defects perished in childhood, or famine. Now that reports are fairly well in from army surgeons and medical missionaries, the old superstition that savages have fewer diseases than the civilised man, has been completely exploded. Child-birth, even, has just as many pains and dangers in savage women as in civilised, only nobody takes the trouble to record them, until the explorer or missionary comes. The savage mother, as her time of trial approaches, retires into the depth of the forest, or jungle. If she returns alive with the baby, all is well. If she doesn’t, it isn’t considered good manners to inquire about her. Her husband simply buys another wife, and the episode is closed. It has been said that, savages living in a state of nature, have no idiot children; but this is readily accounted for by their crude but not wholly irrational habit of knocking them on the head, or leaving them to starve. The only diseases peculiar to civilised man are certain contagions and infections. Even to these he has become toughened to so great a degree that infections which have gradually been worn down to what we term “diseases of childhood,” such as chicken-pox, measles, whooping-cough, and scarlet fever, or even influenza, will sweep like wildfire through a savage tribe and kill two-thirds of those they attack.

Altogether civilised man has every reason to be proud of his past, and confident of his future.

It is a good thing occasionally to try and “see oursel’s as ithers see us.” It gives us a new respect for ourselves, and we’re worth it. We are not worms of the dust” any more. We passed that stage seven million years ago. If we could get a good look at ourselves from the point of view of the other animals, it would really surprise us to find what highly respectable, formidable animals we are. If there is an animal, no matter how large, who doesn’t shiver and make tracks as soon as he sees or, especially, smells man, it’s only because he hasn’t had the honor of our previous acquaintance.

Let us size ourselves up physically from the point of view of, say, an observant and open-minded lion, who since his birth in the fastnesses of his desert has never seen one of our species; or from the point of view of the convent-bred jeune femme who when she saw a man is reported to have asked her mother, “What animal is that, mamma?”

Nor will the point of view be so very foreign to many of us over forty, for by our mediaeval “classical” system of education we have been carefully trained not only to be ignorant of our bodies but proud of the fact as well.

This is how we should probably strike the lion: a queer, upright animal, with only two legs and a big, round knob at the top. In crawling closer the knob is evidently the head, for the eyes can be seen. But what’s it for — a battering ram? No, for there are on it neither horn-bosses like the buffalo, nor spikes like the antelope, nor a biting-forceps, for the teeth and jaws don’t project enough to be seen. A little nearer and there they are tucked in under that funny bump over the eyes, but not big enough to punish anything. Where is the fighting end of the creature? Its feet look like flippers, neither claws to scratch nor hoofs to kick. It must be its short fore legs, hanging on each side of its chest. Now I see one of them clasps in its paw a broken branch with a sharp thorn at the end of it. I’ll keep my distance, or it may throw it at me, like those old baboons threw broken pieces of rock the other day when I tried to catch a couple of their babies!

And Leo would be perfectly right.

It is the hand, which has marked man from other animals, which has made him what he is. It was to keep his hand from bearing the weight of his body and leave it free for the club and the stone that he originally rose up on his hind legs and acquired the erect position of which we are so proud. It was the new uses to which the hand was put with the weapon, the tool, that built up the brain so that speech and thought became possible. As shrewd old Benjamin Franklin said a hundred years ago, “Man is a toolusing animal.”

Yet a large body of respectable taxpayers protest against the introduction of manual training into our schools as a waste of public money ! Train the hand, then answer half the questions that the brain which it builds will ask — and you have education at its best.

THE ANCESTRY OF HEALTH n

Look closely at this fore paw of ours. Not only a tool user, but itself the most wonderful tool in the world. It can grip and twist like a monkey-wrench, hang on like a grappling-hook, crack like a nutcracker, pick like a pair of tweezers, tear like jawforceps — the Japanese dentist pulls teeth with his fingers — and grub like a gopher. It can twist and turn like a snake, swim like a seal, climb like a monkey, strike like a horse’s hoof. With a stone it becomes a hammer; with a sharp flint, an axe; with a jagged one, a saw; with a thorn, a sewing-machine. No wonder the anatomist finds that it has some thirty muscles in and attaching to it !

It is a tool that needs infinite variety of use to bring it to its highest pitch and keep it there, and while you are giving it this you’re developing the brain to similar degrees of complexity and perfection. The thing that marks off the human brain most distinctively from that of any other animal is not its size. A swallow or a titmouse has a larger brain in proportion. Restrict the hand in its movements and the hand and arm area — the so-called Rolandic or central region of the cortex — fails to develop ; narrow it down to one thing or one tool, and it becomes cramped and unsymmetrical. Give children every kind of handwork that their play-instincts — the deepest and most useful in their nature — call for, and then brain development will follow. Glue them to the desk, the loom, the handle of any tool, and you dwarf them both physically and mentally. Child labour is the worst race suicide.

No wonder the hand is “full of character.” It has done much to build character. We have good basis for distrusting the man with the flabby, nerveless, slippery hand-shake. Turn the hand over and look at the palm. There are three lines, two transverse and one longitudinal. Half close your hand and you see at once what makes them. The upper cross line which starts from the ulnar, or little-finger, side, is the wrinkle made by bending the three outer fingers, the remains of the climbing-hook by which we swung from branch to branch through the tree tops in our arboreal days.

The lower cross line, starting from the other side of the palm, is the wrinkle made by flexing the two inner fingers, index and ring, to meet the thumb, as in picking fat grubs out of a rotten log or nuts out of their shells, or in grasping a handle firmly. The lengthwise line is equally obviously the wrinkle made by the thumb in bending over to meet the fingers. All three lines can be seen in perfection in the paw of a chimpanzee or a monkey.

Yet there is a widely popular “science” of palmistry which dubs these anthropoid wrinkles the “head,” “heart,” and “life” lines, and proceeds to predict the whole future life of the individual from their degrees of development. There could hardly be a more humiliating example of the incredible ignorance of the simplest facts of our own structure in which we have been brought up. These wrinkles have about as much to do with the head, heart, and life-chances of their possessor as with the price of soap.

Now let us look through Leo’s eyes again at the knob at the upper end. Big enough, but evidently no good for fighting purposes. Throw the “featherless biped” out of a window, and its overweight will pull it down first, so that he lands on it and cracks it seven times out of ten. Why did it grow there in that absurdly exposed position, instead of in the middle of the animal — say the pit of the stomach — so that arms and legs and trunk could all be used to protect it?

The eyes didn’t determine its location, for jellyfish have eyes all round their bodies, and starfish at the end of their arms. But look a little closer. There’s a mouth. That settles it. The first brain had to grow by that. First a couple of (motor) nerve knots (ganglia) to control mouth and jaw movements, then a pair of (sensory) smell buds, then a pair of (sensory) eye lobes, next a pair of ear knots, then gullet, body muscles (motor) ganglia to match them. Then from the nose-jaw — eye knots began to sprout up an upper-brain ( cerebrum ) to link their messages and movements together. This grew and grew while the basal masses remained stationary until finally it completely “overflowed” them, bulging forward until its forehead-box came to overhang the front of the mouth instead of lying far back of its angles, pushing the eyes down and forward until they lie far below the level of the top of the head, crowding the nostrils down until they open downward instead of straight forward.

This overgrowth is what makes the jaws look so small and weak. Instead of forming three-fifths of the bulk of the head they are barely one-fifth. But open your lips and look at your teeth. Somewhat reduced in number and size, but every kind of teeth that any animal has or ever had is there and ready for business : incisors, canines, premolars, molars.

Moral : give them all something to do. The worst fault a diet can have, if it be sufficient in amount, is monotony. Eat every kind of sound food that you can get in every season of the year. Flesh, fish, fowl, and “gude red herrin’,” vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, fats, sugars — all have their uses and each its peculiar advantage. No restricted diet for this mouthful of teeth. The stomach and intestines match. They are fit to tackle anything except too much grass.

Glance at the hind paws. Nothing just like them in the world, but not so wonderful as the fore paws. Beautifully balanced, springy arches of jointed bone, braced and supported by elastic muscles and steel-wire tendons. Two of them support the body erect as securely and far more gracefully and effectively than any four paws. They have triple-spring expansions, to give elasticity and poise, lengthwise from heel to toe, crosswise at instep, and broadly across at spread of toes. What folly to cramp the last by tight shoes, or break the first by thrusting a high heel up into the middle of it. Many a backache, many a headache, and many a nervous breakdown comes of this. “A soldier on the march, me son,” says the inimitable Mulvaney in “Soldiers Three,” “is no betther than his feet.” It is equally true of many a business man or housewife, to say nothing of laborers. Like the hands, the feet are ready for any emergency. They’re the toughest long-distance runners in the world, they can climb with the goat, swim with the otter, skate over the bog with the frog.

Chapter II Some Diet Delusions, Or Coaling The Body-engine

How can a delusion exist in regard to such a matter-of-fact and every-day subject as diet? One would certainly have thought it the easiest of things to put to test and prove or disprove promptly.

Every imaginable experiment upon what would and what would not support life must have been tried thousands of years ago, and yet our most striking proofs of how highly men value their “precious right of private haziness,” as George Eliot shrewdly terms it, are to be found in the realm of dietetics. The “light that never was on sea, or land” still survives for the most matter-of-fact of us in the memory of “the pies that mother used to make,” and nowhere else do we find preferences so widely accepted as evidence, and prejudices as matters of fact, as in this arena. In fact, if we were merely to listen to what is said, and still more to read what is printed, we would come to the conclusion that the human race had established absolutely nothing beyond possibility of dispute in this realm. Every would-be diet-reformer, and we doctors are almost as bad as any of them, is absolutely certain that what nine-tenths of humanity find to be their food is a deadly poison. One philosopher is sure that animal food of every description, espedally the kind that involves the shedding of blood, is not only absolutely unfit for human food, but is the cause of half the suffering and wickedness in the world. Another gravely declares that the only thing which above all things is injurious is salt. Another takes up his parable against pork. Still another is convinced that half the misery of the world is due to the use of spices; and one dietetic, Rousseau, proclaims a return to very first principles by the abolition of cooking. Another attacks the harmless and blushing tomato, and lays at its door the modern increase of cancer, insanity, and a hundred kindred evils; while Mrs. Rohrer has gently but firmly to be restrained whenever the mild-eyed potato is mentioned in her presence.

There is almost an equally astonishing Babel when one comes to listen to the various opinions as to the amount of food required. Eighteen grave and reverend doctors assure us that overeating is the prevalent dietetic sin of the century, while the remainder of the two dozen are equally positive that the vast majority of their patients are underfed. One man preaches the gospel of dignified simplicity on one meal a day and one clean collar a week, while the learned Fletcher declares that if we only keep on masticating our one mouthful of food long enough, we shall delude the stomach into magnifying it into ten, and can dine sumptuously on a menu card and a wafer biscuit.

Fortunately, when it comes to practice, philosophers, reformers, and doctors alike have about as much ini8 fluence here as they have over conduct in other realms — and that is next to none at all. The man in the street follows his God-given instincts and plods peacefully along to his three square meals a day, consisting of anything he can find in the market, and just as much of it as he can afford, with special preference for rich meats, fats, and sugars. Here, as everywhere, instinct is far superior to reason, and a breakfast diet of sausage and buckwheat cakes with maple-syrup and strong coffee has carried the white man half round the world; while one of salads and cereals, washed down with post-mortem subterfuge, would leave him stranded, gasping, in the first ditch he came to.

The basal problems of dietetics were, by the mercy of Heaven, settled long ago, in the farmhouse kitchen, in the commissary department of the army in the field, in the cook’s galley amidships, and in the laboratory.

There is little more room for difference of opinion upon them than there is about the coaling of engines. Simply a matter of size of boiler and fire-box, the difference in heating power and ash between Welsh and Australian, and the amount of work to be got out of the machine, multiplied by the time in which it is to be accomplished.

It is true that Professor Chittenden has recently published the results of experiments upon a “starvation squad” of soldiers which lead him to the conclusion that weight, health, and vigor can be maintained upon about half the amount of food laid down in standard diet-tables. But this gravely improbable conclusion upon so narrow a basis of fact can carry but little i9 weight until it has been confirmed by tests upon a far wider scale by other observers. From the reports of colleagues who saw the soldiers at the close of their fast, restless, nervous, so eager to get back to regular rations that they would say anything about their feelings which would tend to bring the experiment to a close, it strikes me simply as a test of human endurance like Dr. Tanner’s famous fast. We are merely automobiles in human form, literally “steam-engines in breeches,” of only moderate range of power, but exceedingly economical in the matter of fuel, and of remarkable adaptability. Given our age, sex, size, horse-power, and the work to be done, the suitable fuel is only a question of cost and accessibility. Every particle of the energy which sparkles in our eyes, which moves our muscles, which warms our imaginations, is sunlight cunningly woven into our food by the living cell, whether vegetable or animal. Every movement, every word, every thought, every aspiration, represents the expenditure of precisely so much energy derived from food. Cut off our supply of second-hand sunlight and our human lamps go out like an arc-light when the current is broken. We are literally what we have eaten.

Some diet delusions are of most modern date, like the “fush” fad which is now devastating our breakfast tables, wThile others are of most respectable antiquity. Among the latter is that very ancient survival, the notion that particular foods are “good” for particular things or effects. This is an almost direct descendant of the notion held with greater or less unanimity by nearly all savage and barbarous tribes, that the flesh, or viscera of birds and animals possessing particular qualities will be likely to produce the same qualities in those who eat them. Thus Nero used to banquet on nightingales’ tongues in the hope of improving his voice, and the Ojibwa cut out and devoured the heart of the bear, the liver of the buffalo, etc., believing that the strength and courage of these animals would thereby be transferred to himself. It is probable that the most gruesome of ancestral rites — cannibalism — was largely due to the same belief, although, of course, in Neanderthal days primitive man would have no more hesitancy about eating his enemy after he had killed him than he would in devouring a bear or a deer. In fact, the early converts of the missionaries in the South Sea Islands referred to their favourite dish as “long pig.” Every knowm race has at some time been cannibal.