Health Hints
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Health-Hints
The weather—health dates back—the Scalpel—Nature's cures—Pork and Potatoes—Ventilation—our County Jail—Eating Houses—Sewers—What is Miasm?Lager Bier—some sense and some highfaluten—our summing up—don't kill yourself by trying to be well.
This is the weather when the lurking seeds of any form of illness that may be waiting in the human system, sprout out and make themselves seen and felt. Few persons realise the comfort of perfect health at any time—and especially in the hot months of summer. For health is something that dates back a great way.
We say health dates back for its causes a great way—yes, even before birth. Then childhood, youth, early manhood or womanhood—the diet, the social customs, the air, drink, labor, exercise, amusement, the state of the mind, hope, ennui—all these have to do with the healthful condition of latter age. Indeed, the lesson of health is one continued lesson—not of direct gratifications, but of the certainty and sternness of future results.
In an afternoon's excursion, the current week, we found the hour of return so profitably occupied in reading the articles of that "expositor," the Scalpel,1 the last number, that we will even make up our Health Hints as far as they go by a series of running extracts therefrom. We give the statements and physiological views, not because we endorse them; many of them are too intense and ardent to be philosophical. But we give them to arouse suggestions in the mind of the reader.
In the first place, mark the motto on the title-page:
"Nature is ever busy, by the silent operation of her own forces, endeavoring to cure disease. Her medicines are air, warmth, light, food, water, exercise, and sleep. Their use is directed by instinct, and that man is most worthy the name of physician, who most reveres its unerring laws."
Very good; those forces, joined with simplicity, ought to be inculcated by the physician, sions.
Next we come to a vehement splurge against "Pork and Potatoes." Here is a sample:
"If any body has ever killed a hog, and found an abscess of matter in the neck or near the kidneys, or with all the internal organs studded with tubercles, which we have often seen packed for Eastern use, they have only put out of the world a miserable mass of scrofula; they did not kill anything fit to eat—nor would they, had the hog been healthy, and those who pride themselves on killing and eating fat hogs, must not be surprised if they swell up and burst. A fat hog is the very quintessence of scrofula and carbonic acid gas; and he who eats it, must not expect thereby to build up a sound physical organism. While it contributes heat, there is not a twentieth part of it nitrogen, the base of muscle.["]
"This is sound practice truth. Fat pork was never designed for human food, it is material for breath, nothing more; see Liebig2 and other organic chemists and physiologists; it makes the red meat or muscle; the prizefighter is not allowed to eat it; all that is not consumed by the lungs, remains to clog the body with fat. The popular idea of boils and other unsightly eruptions being produced by excess of grease in diet, is undoubtedly correct; not withstanding the vital necessity of a good portion of wholesome beef and mutton fat and butter, in all persons who are of low degree of life-force or at all inclined to scrofula. We have most extensively treated that subject in many of our past numbers. Suffice it here to say, that fat is a vital necessity, and none can be healthy without it; but it requires a corresponding degree of exercise to throw it off by the lungs; its specific purpose in the economy is to supply material, that is, carbon, for breath, and to prevent the too rapid waste of the red meat or muscle of the body, which must and does take its place when the fat of the body is all consumed, and the individual eats none, or not enough to supply the waste-by-breathing."
Not quite so fast, Doctor. Excessive or exclusive pork diet is of course bad—but for all that, pork is wholesome under the same reasonable observances as any thing else. Of the ancient Greeks the most esthetic, subtle-brained, and beautiful of men, the favorite and prevailing diet was pork.
We presently have an article on "Ventilation." Sweeping and shocking as are its assumptions, we fear they are strictly true. Plenty as it is, we fear nothing is so little used by those who live in the civilized state as pure air. We recollect examining our City Hospital in Raymond street, some years ago, when it was just finished; it was entirely unprovided with any means of ventilation, one of the very first requisites of a good hospital; and we dare say it remains so to this day.
Architects and builders, note this:
"There is not a solitary public or private building in this city that is properly ventilated; the theatres and churches, long before their audiences are dismissed, are foul with pent-up breaths, and every kind of noisome exhalation from the body. Our prisons are inhuman and vile holes, unworthy of a Christian country. The Tombs are nothing better than a human Cloaca. A few weeks ago we were requested by the District Attorney of King's county to visit an unfortunate youth imprisoned for arson in Brooklyn Jail. We found it a horrible receptacle of filth. A long and narrow hall with windows four feet from the floor! was flanked on the other side with a row of narrow cells not more than five feet wide by ten deep, and eight high, with a narrow window tightly closed; there were from two to four prisoners in each—more than half Irish, with their filthy pipes; and open-mouthed privies opening in each, and no running water to cleanse them! Half of our citizens sleep in holes under the garret eves with the door shut: infant schools and free schools, with hundreds of inmates, have windows four feet from, and no other opening even with, the floor but a door. It is quite common for teachers to assure you that the rooms are well ventilated, when they drop the windows a little. Now the merest child in chemistry can tell you that the carbonic acid or poison air thrown off from the lungs is heavier than atmospheric air, and must therefore fall and accumulate below the windows; moreover, all the exhalations from the body, and from urinals and water–closets, fall to the lower parts of rooms; all cellars and kitchens, vaults, etc., contain constantly a large portion of this air."
The eating-houses also come in for a rough wipe:
"Let any one look into even the best refractories between twelve and three o'clock, and witness the immense amount of something which is bolted down within ten minutes; let them go a little farther, and order several dishes of this same something, which courtesy denominates beef, mutton, lamb, veal, pork, etc.; let them call for a plate of each, and if they can distinguish any difference in favor or appearance to warrant so many names, or if they can distinguish any marked difference except the variation from positively bad to unbearably worst, I have lived and eaten in them for years is little experience."
Then Sewers. Perfect and large and well-built Sewers are needed both in Brooklyn and New York. This is a want that stands next in imperious necessity to that of water, and now that the latter is nobly accomplished, let attention be turned to the former.
Without perfect sewers, we accrue disease, fetid odors, miasm, death. Another extract:
"What is the subtle poison, called miasm? It is a gas thrown off from decayed living creatures, that is, plants and animals; we do not mean dead trees nor elephants; we mean the disorganized and decayed and decaying elements of all plants and animals, mosses and infusoria, so minute that the most powerful of microscope can not detect their ultimate atoms. The whole animated world is made of these; every creature that lives, from the minutest gnat up to man, from the slightest atom of moss up to the oak, is evolved from the gases and the earths, and only resists decay by the mysterious principle of life; take this away, and decomposition at once commences the mysterious process of evolving the gases, and restoring them to the air and earth, whence they derived their being. In some stages of this decomposition, it is known, that in sufficient quantities they are deadly poisons, and exert so depressing an influence upon the human body, that, when breathed into the lungs, they at once inoculate and poison the whole body, and so depress the life-power that it sinks into typhus and yellow fevers. This is the origin of yellow fever at New Orleans and Norfolk, and other Southern ports; there, in the low grounds and swamps that surround the cities, vegetation is so rife, and the heats of summer are so powerful, that the yellow fever poison is originated in its complete and full degree; here, our filth has hitherto been sufficient to prepare the necessary degree of atmospheric poison to receive the imported leaves, and set it going as an epidemic; whether we may not yet succeed in evolving it without the imported poison, is merely a question of time. We can assuredly produce genuine typhus in all its horrors; that we know from past experience."
Skipping over several other articles, we come to "The Lager Bier Mania," which was originally published during the period when the Scalpel took the quarto form, and is now repeated in the old size to admit of its being bound up with past numbers of the journal. This is a slasher, cutting right and left—red-hot and denunciatory, as if the doctor "meant it." Ye drinker of "lager," listen to the judgments that impend over you, and tremble for the wrath to come!
"There can be little doubt that by retarding the decomposition of the tissues in the human organism, lager-bier causes an unnatural deposit of fat all over the system in persons of sedentary habits, for we find that they suffer more from its injurious effects than those who by active exercise accelerate its conversion into its elements, carbonic acid and water. As an instance of this, compare the effects of lager bier on our clerks and young men about town, and the German Turners, and the difference of its effect, or rather the effect of the counteracting influences which are working against it, will be immediately perceived.["]
"Its effect upon the external form, and upon the action of man, is already beginning to awaken attention. The depressed and broad heads, the flat though wide shoulders and breast; the straight back, and cow-like tread of its victims, is already known to keen observers.["]
"A great change takes place in the eye, when lager-bier is habitually drunk. It has invariably a turbid and sleepy look, while its muscles are so much relaxed as to make it, as it were, hang in a defenseless state.["]
"The effects of lager-bier in other respects, are marked. The diameter of the head between the ears appears enlarged, and with it the back part of the jaws, giving to the countenance of three-cornered look; the neck becomes thick, often hanging over the shirt-collar in wrinkles, in the region where phrenologists locate the organ of a amatativeness; the skin becomes red, with a blown up, spongy surface, from which large quantities of fatty matter of an offensive odor, are produced, giving the whole surface a greasy and disagreeable aspect. The habitual imbibers of this beverage are generally obliged to hold their segars to their mouths, which being used entirely as funnels for their favorite drink, seem incapable of much muscular tenacity. On men addicted to sexual excess, the neck appears to diminish in size, while the head swells out like that of a young sparrow in proportion to his limbs, and their skin, although retaining its greasy aspect, loses its color and is more translucent.["]
"The effect of lager-bier on the voice is very marked, and the rapid decay in the voices of the tenor singers of the German glee-clubs, who lose not only the quality of tone, but the high range, produces in such societies always a great want of tenors, it has become a by-word among them to call a harsh, drawling voice a beer-barred voice.["]
"This fact is well known to opera singers, who instinctively avoid it.["]
"In the intelligent circles in Germany, the effects of [illegible]/> popularity as a beverage. We allude to weizen or wheat beer, now generally known as Berlin white beer, from its pale color."
Here then is a terrible state of things! which those who look on the hearty, friendly, robust gatherings solacing themselves with "lager," of a holiday, in the suburban gardens, would never dream of. But since the doctor says so, who dare deny it? Tremble then! we say once more, you drinkers of lager, lest you come to tread like cows, and attain large ears!
Meantime, be it remembered while such ardent talk as that of the Scalpel serves to suggest to people some salutary thoughts, there is nothing to be gained by a constant system of dread, tee-totalism, and suspicion. The votaries of such a system, in all their modes and departments, are a more sorrowful set of beings than the greatest gluttons and liquor-bibbers can ever be. We can easily tell the unhappy race by their pale countenance, careworn air, and gaunt figures. The care of their health is an oppression to them—they run to such an extreme. Reader! look you that you do not come to dwell with enthusiasm on "health reform," especially in your own case.
So much we say to prevent a morbid disposition, which is itself the worst enemy of comfort and health. For all that, we also say to you, exercise rationally a daily and hourly use with respect to your physical well-being, until it becomes an instinct. Eating and drinking, like wheat cast into the overflow of the Nile, will "return after many days."
It is in such points of view, and not because they are strictly physiologically correct, that we commend the above diet-hints, and indeed nearly all the reading one meets with upon disease, medicine, cures, health, to the thoughtful regards of any man or woman.
Notes:
1. The Scalpel was published quarterly in New York by editor and doctor Edward H. Dixon (1808—1880). [back]
2. Dr. Justus Freiherr von Liebig (1803–1873) was a German organic chemist, whose work had a profound influence on Whitman, who positively reviewed Liebig's work and incorporated lessons from it into his poetry. For more information, see John T. Matteson, "Liebig, Justus (1803–1873)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]