Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/87

 composed and to realize that the best remedies are those already manufactured and compounded by Nature herself; or, in other words, they begin to know that any given form of disease indicates either the excess or absence of one or more of the elements that go to make up the body, and that means must be used to vacate the excess, or to supply the deficiency, which being done, and chemical harmony and electric and magnetic equilibrium being restored, physical, mental, and moral health follow, must follow, with mathematical certainty and precision. These physical remedies of Nature are heat, water, light, exercise, sleep, food, and fresh air, — the last being greatest, seeing that it is the most direct vehicle of life itself. Men, and women too, have existed for long years immured in vile dungeons, deprived of all light; for no blessed sun-ray ever reached their blank abodes. These same victims, and millions more, existed and exist, without exercise, and with but poor food, and a worse supply of water. Caravans on the desert, and sailors becalmed or wrecked, have gone even twenty days without water, and yet survived to tell the dreadful tale of their fearful agonies when thus deprived. We are all familiar with the records of the long periods of forced abstinence from food, not a few instances having reached the enormous period of thirty consecutive days; nor need I scarce mention the wonderful resisting power of the human body against the extremes of both heat and cold, but especially the former. In some parts of India, Australia, and Africa, men thrive under a temperature within twenty-five degrees of that of boiling water; while here, right in our midst, thousands of fools flock to see others of the same species handle bars of hot iron, wash their hands in molten lead, walk barefoot on red-hot plates, and enter ovens with raw meat, abiding therein till said flesh is thoroughly done. Pity some of these foolhardy people couldn't find some safer way to earn a livelihood than by thus sportively trifling with sacred human life!

In reference to sleep, how many of my readers have spent sleepless nights for weeks together, when, from nervous irritability, trouble, or illness, it has been utterly impossible to snatch a moment's respite from the terrible unrest! How often the poor, pale, sad-hearted mother, as she leans and lingers over the sick-bed of her fever stricken darling, finds sleep a stranger to her eyelids, and a fearfully intense wakefulness baffle all her attempts to catch