A Query

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A QUERY.

Certain modern enlightenment with regard to physical education must be productive of much benefit to the community. One would imagine that with our improved knowledge of the art of health, disease would of itself "disappear and die"—that deformities would cease to exist and that a golden age of bodily perfection and of consequent mental purity and beauty would be inaugurated. We find the study of Physiology and Hygiene introduced into all our schools, and our little girls and boys talk learnedly of cerebrum and cerebellum, of pericardium and duodenum, of ducts and arteries, and Heaven knows what! We find our table from time to time, journals, weekly, monthly and quarterly, devoted to the so-called exposition of nature's laws, replete with learned argument and unimpeachable advice, plainly setting forth that people have no business to get sick and if they do it is only in consequence of their perverse refusal to follow the said excellent advice. Lecturers, too, on the same important topic occasionally edify country and city audiences, and reap both fame and profit. Really, really, it is passing strange that with the aid of all this flood of enlightenment the doctor's occupation should be still in a flourishing condition, the bills of mortality show pretty much the same average of disease and death, and the apothecary shops and patent medicine dealers dispense annually about the same quantity of drugs.

We recollect seeing the query raised in one of the daily journals, by a sensible writer, whether, after all, this wide-spread but superficial knowledge on physiological subjects does not in a certain degree defeat its own ends. We believe, ourselves, that medical reading will exert a most pernicious effect in some instances, where the reader is of a nervous and impressible temperament. He is very apt to fancy himself possessed of all the diseases whose symptoms are so minutely described. Some old religious writer tells us that the next thing to making a child an infidel is to let him know that there are infidels. And so it may be with diseases. Says a writer in a popular magazine of the day, "That medical professors have at all time believed the imagination to possess a strange and powerful influence over mind and body is proved by their writing, by some of their prescriptions, and by their oft-repeated directions in the sick-chamber to diver the patient's mind from dwelling on his own state and from attending to the symptoms of his complaint. They consider the reading of medical books which occasionally describe the symptoms of disease a most liable in many cases to produce through the reciprocating action between mind and body, these very ailments themselves". One of the learned lecturers in the New York Medical College assures us that it not unfrequently happens that in a discourse on heart-disease, a neophyte among the students would suddenly clap his hand to his breast, and make a sudden and unceremonious bolt from the lecture room, under the impression that he himself was laboring under the symptoms so minutely set forth by the speaker. Some of the most nervous, sickly, hypochondrical people we have ever met with, have been most persevering readers of this kind of literature, and the worst instance of the kind we can call to mind, was a maiden lady who could not exist a moment without a volume of Miss Beecher¹, together with a shower-bath and a case of homoœpathic pills.

We would not have our readers imagine that we quite coincide with the old lady who indignantly protested that it was "flying in the face of Providence" for a man to know "what is inside of him," but we simply throw out the query whether in some cases ignorance is not more blissful than wisdom, and whether a thing which every one has hitherto considered an unqualified good may not, like many other good things, contain the germ of evil.

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