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- p. 1 - Health Preamble If the taste of mankind improves, health, or wholeness of body, will be the mark of the aristocracy of the future all over the civilized world. To-day health is comparatively rare in the civilized state. Those who possess it are already beginning to acquire distinction. But taste is not yet sound enough to give the healthy man the right to superior consideration. On the contrary, all the influences of the Age tend to give the unhealthy man that right. This is due to the influence of Socratic values, nowhere more deeply rooted than in Anglo-Saxon countries, though they have little hold on China, Japan and certain other countries of the Far East.         The man who wishes to belong to that aristocracy of the future, which will gradually raise its head above the morbid, badly functioning and suffering populations of the civilized world, will, therefore, need to cultivate a new attitude and a new outlook, of which pride of body, independence of spirit, and the mastery of life, will constitute the principal elements.         But until men regard it as beneath their dignity to consult a doctor, or to rely on pharmaceutical products in order to get through their daily round; until, in fact, they wish to be emancipated from the tyranny of medicine and medical science and regard it as a confession of bestiality, stupidity or ignorance to fall ill, nothing can be done to bring the era of an aristocracy of health within our reach.         Of all such mild or serious indispositions as the common cold, bronchial catarrh, bronchitis, pneumonia, ear-ache, mastoid abscess, duodenal or gastric ulcer, appendicitis, constipation, hæmorrhoids, heart- - p. 2 - disease (when not congenital or acquired through rheumatism in childhood 1) chyropompholix (an eruption of the hands), rheumatism, caries of the teeth, pyorrhœa alveolis (a suppurating disease of the gums), high blood pressure, tonsilitis, colitis, laryngitis, furunculosis (boils, carbuncles), consumption (when contracted in adulthood), Bright's disease, diabetes, etc. etc. — all, without exception, are usually the result of some stupid act of commission or omission, repeated over a more or less protracted period and, far from provoking pity or consideration, should inspire only contempt for those who fall victims to them. 2         Healthy life depends on the satisfactory adjustment of the spiritual and physical forces of the individual organism to the forces of the outside world. Inferior life, or sickness, where it has no congenital cause, thus indicates some fault in this adjustment. How does the adjustment become faulty?         Usually (i.e. when not congenital or due to senility) as the result of the individual sufferer's deliberate neglect. Organic life is not a force which, when once implanted, needs no renewing. It is a force that has to be built up afresh every day, every hour.         This principle, which is elementary, is, however, too often neglected by both the lay and the medical world.         What are its implications?         The most important is that the mere act of yielding to an impulse, whether to move, to breathe, or to eat, does not necessarily suffice to renew life adequately. For we see all about us people who yield without hesi-         1 Heart disease contracted in childhood as the result of rheumatism may be fatal before adolescence is survived; but it is not a man's own fault, but usually that of his ignorant parents. This also applies to consumption and many other illnesses brought on by neglect in childhood. It is the elders, in these cases, who are, of course, responsible.         2 This is true only in so far as these disorders may not be partially due to congenital disharmonies, which, in some cases, may be a contributory cause of trouble. - p. 3 - tation to these impulses, and who yet fail adequately to build afresh each day the life forces within them.         At this stage in our evolution, merely unconscious movement, or breathing, like merely haphazard eating, has not necessarily anything to do with the adequate renewal of life in the body; because there are no reliable instincts governing any one of these activities in such a way as to make it certain that life is being adequately renewed when we perform them.         Year in year out, a man may move about with great energy, breathe with such ease as to forget he is breathing and eat to repletion at all his principal meals, and yet leave some area in his organism so imperfectly renewed that he may be gradually killing or at least impoverishing life in that area.         It may be the texture of his epithelium (the surface covering of all his body inside and out) which is gradually becoming moribund or impoverished, in which case he may expect the common cold, bronchitis, typhoid, even consumption — in fact any, disease which doctors are wont to ascribe to a microbe or germ. Or it may be the texture of the brain — a process of impoverishment which may have begun when, as an infant, he was denied his mother's breast. This is very common — hence the unquestionable progress of the Age in stupidity. Or it may be his bones, the life of which he is impoverishing — hence dental caries, or caries of other bony parts, osteomalacia, etc. Or it may be his eyes — hence cataract, detached retina, premature presbyopia or hypermetropia, even myopia. Or it may be his gonads. This also is common — hence the prevalence of sexual sub-parity, impotence or merely infertility or abortion among moderns.         But whatever it may be, he cannot rise every morning a whole human being unless he has adequately renewed the life throughout his body. And if anywhere in him life has died or is moribund or reduced in tone, because it has not been adequately renewed, - p. 4 - that part of him will in time become imperfectly adjusted to the forces of the outside world and even to the exigencies of the other forces in his own body, with the result that illness of some kind will supervene.         For a doctor to say of such a man, when he has fallen ill, that his illness is due to the invasion of a strepto- or a staphylo-coccus, or a tubercle bacillus, may make the man temporarily the doctor's minion or dependent, but it is a lie. Let it be said in all fairness, however, that it is a kind of lie which the average medical man usually pronounces with less effrontery than ignorance.         What makes it, as a lie, so acceptable to the average layman is that it is the kind of statement he wishes to hear. He wishes to be told that his disability, whether temporary or permanent, slight or severe, was not his fault, and that it has come to him by means of a vis major, a power outside himself, which he could not possibly have averted even if he had tried. His life is a routine. His wife's life is a routine. Of many aspects of this routine he is very much enamoured. If, therefore, the doctor, instead of telling him he had caught some sort of "bug", began questioning him about the routine of his life and, above all, began criticising whole departments of it and recommending certain changes, the layman would probably have an impulse of revolt. In the most favourable circumstances, he would at least regret that the cause of his indisposition could not be ascribed to some external agency, wholly independent of his life's routine. If, however, the doctor insisted on pointing to this or that which was lethal or injurious in the routine, there might, instead of one form of opposition, soon be two forms, when the protests of the wife were added to those of the husband. If, moreover, to make matters still worse the doctor, instead of speaking pseudo-scientifically about "bugs", began to criticise the man himself, and told him he was beneath the beasts in the way he breathed and held himself, the chances are that the layman, with self- - p. 5 - esteem wounded and traditional superstition outraged, would simply think the doctor a nuisance and probably incompetent into the bargain, and go off to another general practitioner who was less offensive.         So that although to speak of "bugs" may be lying and now, among more enlightened modern general practitioners, deliberate lying, it is a form of lying which the layman often asks for and deserves.         Nor should it be too hastily assumed, because the diagnosis involves a lie, that the treatment is necessarily ineffective. For, although the customary bottle of medicine, or the tabloid, or the operation, in no way permanently modifies the routine of life to which the illness may originally have been due, it is usually accepted with confidence by the patient and, therefore, acting along the line of hetero- and auto-suggestion, does as a rule help to give temporary relief. And the more the treatment costs, the more potent is its help likely to be, owing to the enhanced power of the auto-suggestive influences.         The worst aspect of the orthodox medical or surgical treatment is, therefore, not that it always fails to give temporary relief, but that it actually leaves unaltered the conditions which may have led to the disability. Thus the patient, although perhaps relieved from a harassing ailment, is left to resume the very life routine which may have led to the trouble.         The doctor's only correct response to his patient in a case of, say, sore throat, common cold, boils, bronchitis, typhoid, etc. would be to say: "You have carelessly or ignorantly allowed the membranes of your throat, nose, bowel, trachæa, bronchial tubes, epidermis, or what not, to sink below the safety level of vitality, with the result that they have become infected with strepto- or staphylo-cocci, or what not, just as your corpse will become infested with maggots when you die.         "But just as your death will not be the result of the maggot infestation which follows it, so your illness - p. 6 - does not represent your local death or necrosis from staphylococci, streptococci or bacili typhosi. Your local death, or rather local impoverishment of your life, must first have occurred in order to have allowed the germs to infest you.         "All this must be due to your having failed in your routine of life — i.e., in your daily hygiene, diet and use of self — to renew life, not only in the part which allowed the infestation of the germs, but also probably elsewhere. Give me, therefore, a precise description of your habits and I will tell you how to modify them so that this disability may not recur, and the conditions which led to it may be permanently removed. Let me above all observe you closely for a week or so, during which I must ask you to conceal nothing from me, so that I may correct your use of self, make suggestions regarding your hygienic rules, and strictly superintend your diet and how you eat it and how you sit while you are eating it."         This would be the honest, scientific and effective way of dealing with every such patient. But what modern doctor has the knowledge to act in this way with his patients? What does he know about the correct use of self, not to mention the correct dieting for various avocations, and the correct hygiene for the sedentary and out-of-door worker respectively?         And even if he had the knowledge, what modern doctor would have the time to carry out such a treatment?         Finally, even if the doctor had both the knowledge and the time, what modern patient would tolerate such an investigation into his daily life, far exceeding in its offensiveness the inquisitorial tactics of the Inland Revenue Department? Moreover, if the patient were married, what wife would suffer the culminating interference with her pet routine of such an investigation?         The consequence is the doctor continues to lie about "bugs" which "are prevalent just now", and finds it - p. 7 - easier both for himself and his patient to prescribe drugs or an operation.         What. every layman and most doctors have yet to learn, therefore, is that illness is often the outcome of a routine of life that has failed adequately to renew life. And we, therefore, arrive at this ultimate definition of health, as that state of life in which there is not only a favourable initial endowment for adjusting the forces of the organism to those of the outside world, but in which the vitality in every part of this organism is also being adequately renewed every day for this adjustment. In this sense a healthy man is a fully armed man, and an unhealthy man is like a soldier sent out to face the enemy with ammunition that will not detonate, or with a sword or bayonet that snaps at the first blow.

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