HEALTH AND CIVILIZATION
By OUR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT
THE articles that follow are devoted to a consideratiOn of some of the outstanding hygienic disabilities peculiarly associated with our civilization. We have successfully overcome many of the gravest and, hitherto, most Widely spread diseases of man ; but, in their place, a number of- other disorders have become increasingly common. Probably, none of these are entirely new to recent times; .'but, from being rare and occasional, they have come to-figure prominently in the list of the causes of our illness and of our deaths.
Man surpasses all other animals in power of adaptation to variation in .external conditions. By the exercise of ingenuity- and inventiveness, he has been able to withstand extremes of heat and of cold, covering a range such as no other creature can compass. So with diet ; so; also, with many of the other usually established habits of physiological life. But, after all, our power of adaptation is limited ;-- and it would seem to be because we have failed _to _take account of these _limits _that many of our new evils have arisen. Our ingenuity has, been ill balanced ; and we have -assumed an omnipotence over the .automatic regulative forces within us that we do not in.fact possess. We are apt to fOrget that, though the life of man, regarded as a composite organism, has changed -very much in the course of the ages, the life of the individual cells, whose harmonic interrelation is the structural -basis of our existence,. has -changed hardly at all. Their capacity for adaptation to . circumstances is pretty much what it always was. Civilization has modified them as little as it has modified the ant or the bee. Thus is philosophically explained the increase recently noticeable in what are called metabolic disorders —that is, disturbances in those chemical processes which are the phenomenal expression of the workings of that elaborate bodily machinery which is controlled and ordered, not by our conscious and reasoning mind, but by that internal deity which has been called the uncon- scious 0a,,the emotional, :even More than on What we call the physical,,plane,..civilization.has raised* many difficult problems. It is often supposed that wholesale neurosis is a post-War product. But more ,than half a century ago Dr. George Beard, in- a book called American Nervous- ness, wrote : new crop of - diseases has sprung up in Anirica„of which. Great Britain until lately knew nothing, -,or but_little., A .class of functional diseases of the nervous system, now beginning to be known i.ve7where . seem . to have first taken root under an American sky, whence-their seed is being distributed. Tbe :chief and primary cause of this development and .very. rapid increase of nervousU2Ss is:modern civilization, which is distinguished from the rneient by these five. .eharacteristics : steam-Power, the.. periodical, pless, the telegraph,, the- sciences,,.- and the mental activity of Women. All .this is inOdern; and no age, no . country and no fOrm. of not Greece, nor Rothe, nor Spain, nor the Netherlands, in the days -of their glory, possessed -such Maladies."
Our emotional capacities are born in us ; so- also is their tendency• to react to certain special --proyoeants. In the absence -Of those- prov ocants,--the. complementary emotions- - are - apt to :remain dormant. Our emotions are the subjective manifestations of our relation with the outside world ; and they are intimately associated with the harmonious working of our most fundamental and most essential . bodily processes. In these days, we hear much about sublimation, and it is true that effective substitutes can often be found for those primitive stimuli to which our emotions have traditionally reacted. But the. sublimate or substitute, it' it is to serve, must have much in commoo with the primitive thing it would replace.
Figures of average longevity do not provide a complete index to the health of a people. Owing to our mastery of many of those disorders which formerly were responsi- ble for the destruction of large numbers of young lives, our average longevity has materially increased. This does not, however, prove that average health has cor- respondingly improved. Among the insured population of this country, there were, last year, over twenty-nine million weeks of certified sickness ; but very rarely was the sickness due to causes that figure prominently in the Registrar-General's Mortality Tables. These people were sick, but not mortally sick.
Though, of course, the best way to deal with the evil fruits of civilization is, so 1'ar as is possible, to prevent their maturation, this ideal line of therapy is not in every -instance practicable. What is our second line of defence ? That which the ingenuity of man has brought about, the further exercise of that ingenuity can, not infrequently, so modify as to bring it into harmony with man's psycho- physiology, -which is too firmly established to adapt itself to every new circumstance. We cannot give up reading books, because readin may injure the Sight ; or Machinery, because the normal car is not attuned to its noise. We can, of course, improve our printing, and lessen offensive sound. But here the optician, the acoustic mechanician, the artificer of shoes and of cloth- ing, all have their parts to play and their contributions to make.
However life may be on the moral plane, the physio- logical life of man is evidently one of endless compromise and endless adaptation. of making ends meet. There is nothing sacred or anathema, either in that initial gift which we call " nature;" or in that developed and realized " talent " which we call artificiality or civilization. But our possible range is limited by the length of our leash. Our social impulses arc responsible for much of the com- plication of our lives, but it is in the further development of these impulses that our hope of salvation -lies. True - hygiene_-is intimately associated with. the fundamental sociologioal doctrine of . Christianity--Ahe doctrine that every Man; woman and child has a life- to live, a. soul to save,' and a part in the-great cosmic drama to act. - Man has travelled far from the world into which: his forbears -Weie borne - He finds- himself in:.a :strange country, previously unexplored: It is small wonder if occasionally - he -finds himself wandering along :courses- which he needs must retrace.- - His .ultithate success. will depend on his readiness to recognize his liability to error, and on his ability to find his way back to. the line along which alone ..cohtinued _progress is .possible.
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