Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/175

Rh proved by the immunity of fruit-eaters in the swampiest regions of the equatorial coast-lands, as well as by the frequency of yellow-fever epidemics in such places as Vera Cruz and Pernambuco, whose neighborhood rivals that of Persepolis in sandy aridity. In other words, fevers are caused by the folly of aggravating the influence of the summer heat by superfluous clothing and calorific food (meat, greasy-made dishes, and ardent spirits), and not by fruit or cold water.

—According to the theory of the anti-naturalists, a man's instincts conspire for his ruin; whatever is pleasant to our senses must be injurious; repulsiveness and healthfulness are synonymous terms. To every poison known to chemistry or botany they attribute remedial virtues; to sweetmeats, fruits, fresh air, and cold spring-water all possible morbific qualities. But, for consistency's sake, they make an exception in favor of mineral springs. Spas, impregnated with a sufficient quantity of iron or sulphur to be shockingly nauseous, must therefore be highly salubrious. Solitary mountain regions afflicted with such spas become the favorite resort of invalids; dyspeptics travel thousands of miles to reach a spring that tastes like a mixture of rotten eggs and turpentine. Faith does wonders, but the cure of a large proportion of the many thousands who annually visit such watering-places as Ems, Carlsbad, and White Sulphur Springs, need not be ascribed to the effects of imagination alone. The motion and the excitement of traveling exert a beneficial influence on many disorders. Mountain-air is almost a panacea. Woodland rambles, changes of diet and of general habits, conversation, and even music, are not unimportant co-agents of materia medica. But the spa itself—in the case of bona fide health-seekers, at least—is a decided drawback upon such advantages. Saline and sulphur springs are purgative; the system hastens to rid itself of an injurious substance. A very small dose might operate as a moderate aperient; but the trouble is that the digestive organs come to rely on such excitants as they would upon alcoholic tonics, hence the chronic constipations that so often follow upon the return from a watering-place trip: the stimulant being withdrawn, the organs become remiss in their functions. From a hygienic standpoint a sanitarium without a spa is therefore by no means a Hamlet-drama minus the Prince; the mountain-air of Meran in the Tyrol or the sweet grapes of a Rhenish Trauben-Kur are worth a million sulphur-springs; and, if people knew half the value of up-hill pedestrian exercise, there would be a "Hygienic Home" wherever a steep mountain overlooks a populous plain.

—The origin of asceticism is widely different from that of the frugal philosophy which consoles itself with the reflection that the reduction of our wants is equivalent to the enlargement of our means. A man of simple habits may be both happier and healthier than the lover of artificial luxuries, but the anti-naturalists make war upon earthly enjoyments as such; they try to suppress