Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/391

Rh palate merely or mainly. "Fasting, fresh air, and exercise, is Nature's panacea," says Dr. Oswald; and so, in practice, I have found it for a wide range of "diseases" that nothing else can reach. If we agree that disease results, mainly, from the breathing of impure air, the use of unnatural food or excess, and often deficient exercise, then it would seem to follow that ease must depend upon a reform in these particulars. In all my experience with sick people I have never known of the restoration of a single patient to fairly robust health in the absence of such reform. I have rarely known a person to become sick except as the direct result of some degree of fear of pure air, and fearlessness regarding the influence of impure food. Whatever else may have contributed to the production of his disease, it is seldom, indeed, that these may not be truly regarded as the principal causes. Nature's preventive and curative agents may be summed up thus: Pure air, appropriate food, exercise (active or passive as the case may require), skin-cleanliness, with proper ventilation of the surface of the body, i. e., through the use of non-sweltering garments, supplemented by rational exposure of the entire surface of the body to the air, by means of air-baths, sunshine in the home and "sunshine in the heart"—with these, and only these, all curable cases will go on to certain recovery. Without them no medication will avail.



EW and valuable scientific discoveries and inventions are not slow at the present time in making their way from the closets and laboratories of the investigators or discoverers to popular recognition. It is somewhat otherwise with the gradual development of knowledge on subjects once thought to have been tolerably clearly understood and of no immediate practical value. The gradual modifications which take place in generally accepted theories by the slowly accumulating results of the labor of many investigators are, to be sure, appreciated by the special student in the particular department of knowledge concerned, but are slower in meeting with public recognition. It thus happens that teachers and books, not dealing as a specialty with the subject involved, often adopt and repeat as authoritative views and theories which, by the specialists in those branches, have either been abandoned or brought seriously into question. Nor is it to be otherwise expected. Chroniclers are quick to seize upon and distribute the news of brilliant or startling discoveries or inventions, but those are fewer who will track patiently the slowly accumulating evidence of many workers, appreciate the bearing of their work, and produce it in a 