Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/400

368 But while our science and our art are now steadily growing in precision and usefulness, our practical accomplishments are greatly limited, because general enlightenment regarding the things of the body has not kept pace with the acquisitions of science.

Our new outlooks in preventive medicine have made it plain, as I have said, that a very wide curtailment of suffering and a large saving of human life are possible if only the people can have an elementary knowledge of the human body and of such simple principles of hygiene and sanitation that under the increasingly complex conditions of modern life they may be able to guard against common forms of infection and against unwholesome modes of life, which not only invite infection, but many other forms of ill.

It seems to me that here the schools and the colleges have high responsibilities, and of these I wish briefly to speak.

The conviction has for some time been current that the children should be taught something about the structure and working of the human frame, and in this way already much has been achieved. Of the importance of this sort of knowledge no special demonstration is needed to-day. But in many of the public schools in this land the instruction in physiology and hygiene has been of late largely subordinated, if not actually falsified, to the interests of what some are pleased to call temperance; meaning thereby the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco, lest horrible and frequently impossible things should happen to the liver or the brain.

But I think that the distortion of truth is not liable to lead at last, no matter how worthy the motive, to the ends for which the anti-alcoholic and anti-nicotinal physiologies and hygienes of our schools have been devised. It seems to me certain that a great deal of the future physical and mental well-being of our people depends upon the acquirement early in life of absolutely accurate, though it be rudimentary, knowledge of this complex and sensitive bodily mechanism; and that the self-control and self-respect which such knowledge fosters will in the long run do more than vague fear of bodily ill to promote a temperance much more comprehensive and beneficent than that which centers itself in the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco, bad as the misuse of these may be. It is to be hoped that mistaken zeal in this direction may not long prevail to the physical and moral detriment of the children.

Many of our institutions for higher education now recognize the value of a knowledge of the body, and of the physical conditions under which man can best secure the highest usefulness and enjoyment. But I do not think that as yet this subject has