The Man-Made World

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III HEALTH AND BEAUTY AMONG the many paradoxes which we find in human life is our low average standard of health and beauty, compared with our power and knowledge. All creatures suffer from conflict with the elements; from enemies without and within?the prowling devourers of the forest, and "the terror that walketh in darkness" and attacks the body from inside, in hidden millions. Among wild animals generally, there is a certain standard of excellence; if you shoot a bear or a bird it is a fair sample of the species; you do not say, "O what an ugly one!" or "This must have been an invalid!" Where we have domesticated any animal, and interfered with its natural habits, illness has followed; the dog is said to have the mostdiseases second to man; the horse comes next; but the wild ones put us to shame by their superior health and the beauty that belongs to right development. In our long ages of blind infancy we assume that sickness was a visitation from the gods; some still believe this, holding it to be a special perogative of divinity to afflict us in this way. We speak of "the ills that flesh is heir to" as if the inheritance was entailed and inalienable. Only of late years, after much study and long struggle with this old belief which made us submit to sickness as a blow from the hand of God, we are beginning to learn something of the many causes of our many diseases, and how to remove some of them. It is still true, however, that almost every one of us is to some degree abnormal; the features asymmetrical, the vision defective, the digestion unreliable, the nervous system erratic?we are but a job lot even in what we call "good health"; and are subject to a burden of pain and premature death that would make life hideous if it were not so ridiculously un...