Health: Five Lay Sermons to Working-People Part 3

This is just a dance in honor of poor old pagan Jingo; measured movements arising from and giving happiness. We have no right to keep ourselves or others from natural pleasures; and we are all too apt to interfere with and judge harshly the pleasures of others; hence we who are stiff and given to other pleasures, and who, now that we are old, know the many wickednesses of the world, are too apt to put the vices of the jaded, empty old heart, like a dark and ghastly fire burnt out, into the feet and the eyes, and the heart and the head of the young. I remember a story of a good old Antiburgher minister. It was in the days when dancing was held to be a great sin, and to be dealt with by the session. Jessie, a comely, and good, and blithe young woman, a great favorite of the minister's, had been guilty of dancing at a friend's wedding. She was summoned before the session to be "dealt with,"--the grim old fellows sternly concentrating their eyes upon her, as she stood trembling in her striped short-gown, and her pretty bare feet. The Doctor, who was one of divinity, and a deep thinker, greatly pitying her and himself, said, "Jessie, my woman, were ye dancin'?"

"Yes," sobbed Jessie.

"Ye maun e'en promise never to dance again, Jessie."

"I wull, sir; I wull promise," with a courtesy.

"Now, what were ye thinking o', Jessie, when ye were dancin'? tell us truly," said an old elder, who had been a poacher in youth.

"Nae ill, sir," sobbed out the dear little woman.

"Then, Jessie, my woman, aye dance," cried the delighted Doctor.

And so say I, to the extent, that so long as our young girls think "nae ill," they may dance their own and their feet's fills; and so on with all the round of the sunshine and flowers G.o.d has thrown on and along the path of his children.

_Lastly_, your duty to your own bodies: to preserve them; to make, or rather let--for they are made so to go--their wheels go sweetly; to keep the _girs_ firm round the old barrel; neither to over nor under work our bodies, and to listen to their teaching and their requests, their cries of pain and sorrow; and to keep them as well as your souls unspotted from the world. If you want to know a good book on Physiology, or the Laws of Health and of Life, get Dr. Combe's _Physiology_; and let all you mothers get his delightful _Management of Infancy_. You will love him for his motherly words. You will almost think he might have worn petticoats,--for tenderness he might; but in mind and will and eye he was every inch a man. It is now long since he wrote, but I have seen nothing so good since; he is so intelligent, so reverent, so full of the solemnity, the sacredness, the beauty, and joy of life, and its work; so full of sympathy for suffering, himself not ignorant of such evil,--for the latter half of his life was a daily, hourly struggle with death, fighting the destroyer from within with the weapons of life, his brain and his conscience. It is very little physiology that you require, so that it is physiology, and is suitable for your need. I can't say I like our common people, or indeed, what we call our ladies and gentlemen, poking curiously into all the ins and outs of our bodies as a general accomplishment, and something to talk of. No, I don't like it. I would rather they chose some other _ology_. But let them get enough to give them awe and love, light and help, guidance and foresight.

These, with good sense and good senses, humility, and a thought of a hereafter in this world as well as in the next, will make us as able to doctor ourselves--especially to act in the _preventive service_, which is your main region of power for good--as in this mortal world we have any reason to expect. And let us keep our hearts young, and they will keep our legs and our arms the same. For we know now that hearts are kept going by having strong, pure, lively blood; if bad blood goes into the heart, it gets angry, and shows this by beating at our b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and frightening us; and sometimes it dies of sheer anger and disgust, if its blood is poor or poisoned, thin and white. "He may dee, but he'll never grow auld," said a canty old wife of her old minister, whose cheek was ruddy like an apple.

_Run for the Doctor_; don't saunter to him, or go in, by the by, as an old elder of my father's did, when his house was on fire. He was a perfect Nathanael, and lived more in the next world than in this, as you will soon see. One winter night he slipped gently into his neighbor's cottage, and found James Somerville reading aloud by the blaze of the licht coal; he leant over the chair, and waited till James closed the book, when he said, "By the by, I am thinkin' ma hoose is on fire!" and out he and they all ran, in time to see the auld biggin' fall in with a glorious blaze. So it is too often when that earthly house of ours--our cottage, our tabernacle--is getting on fire. One moment your finger would put out what in an hour all the waters of Clyde would be too late for. If the Doctor is needed, the sooner the better. If he is not, he can tell you so, and you can rejoice that he had a needless journey, and pay him all the more thankfully. So run early and at once. How many deaths--how many lives of suffering and incapacity--may be spared by being in time! by being a day or two sooner. With children this is especially the case, and with workingmen in the full prime of life. A mustard plaster, a leech, a pill, fifteen drops of Ipecacuanha wine, a bran poultice, a hint, or a st.i.tch in time, may do all and at once, when a red-hot iron, a basinful of blood, all the wisdom of our art, and all the energy of the Doctor, all your tenderness and care, are in vain.

Many a child's life is saved by an emetic at night, who would be lost in twelve hours. So send in time; it is just to your child or the patient, and to yourself; it is just to your Doctor; for I a.s.sure you we Doctors are often sorry, and angry enough, when we find we are too late. It affronts us, and our powers, besides affronting life and all its meanings, and Him who gives it. And we really _enjoy_ curing; it is like running and winning a race,--like hunting and finding and killing our game. And then remember to go to the Doctor early in the day, as well as in the disease. I always like my patients to send and say that they would like the Doctor "to call before he goes out!" This is like an Irish message, you will say; but there is "sinse" in it. Fancy a Doctor being sent for, just as he is in bed, to see some one, and on going he finds they had been thinking of sending in the morning, and that he has to run neck and neck with death, with the odds all against him.

I now wind up with some other odds and ends. I give you them as an old wife would empty her pockets,--such wallets they used to be!--in no regular order; here a bit of string, now a bit of gingerbread, now an "aiple," now a bunch of keys, now an old almanac, now three _bawbees_ and a bad shilling, a "wheen" b.u.t.tons all marrowless, a thimble, a bit of black sugar, and maybe at the very bottom a "goold guinea."

_Shoes._--It is amazing the misery the people of civilization endure in and from their shoes. n.o.body is ever, as they should be, comfortable at once in them; they hope in the long-run and after much agony, and when they are nearly done, to make them fit, especially if they can get them once well wet, so that the mighty k.n.o.b of the big toe may adjust himself and be at ease. For my part, if I were rich, I would advertise for a clean, wholesome man, whose foot was exactly my size, and I would make him wear my shoes till I could put them on, and not know I was in them.[1] Why is all this? Why do you see every man's and woman's feet so out of shape? Why are there corns, with their miseries and maledictions?

Why the virulence and unreachableness of those that are "soft"? Why do our nails grow in, and sometimes have to be torn violently off?

[1] Frederick the Great kept an aid-de-camp for this purpose, and, poor fellow! he sometimes wore them too long, and got a kicking for his pains.

All because the makers and users of shoes have not common sense, and common reverence for G.o.d and his works enough to study the shape and motions of that wonderful pivot on which we turn and progress. Because FASHION,--that demon that I wish I saw dressed in her own crinoline, in bad shoes, a man's old hat, and trailing petticoats, and with her (for she must be a _her_) waist well nipped by a circlet of nails with the points inmost, and any other of the small torments, mischiefs, and absurdities she destroys and makes fools of us with,--whom, I say, I wish I saw drummed and hissed, blazing and shrieking, out of the world,--because this contemptible slave, which domineers over her makers, says the shoe must be elegant, must be so and so, and the beautiful living foot must be crushed into it, and human nature must limp along Princess Street and through life natty and wretched.

It makes me angry when I think of all this. Now, do you want to know how to put your feet into new shoes, and yourself into a new world? Go and buy from Edmonston and Douglas sixpence worth of sense, in _Why the Shoe Pinches_; you will, if you get your shoemaker to do as it bids him, go on your ways rejoicing; no more k.n.o.bby, half-dislocated big toes; no more secret parings, and slashings desperate, in order to get on that pair of exquisite boots or shoes.

Then there is the _Infirmary_.--Nothing I like better than to see subscriptions to this admirable house of help and comfort to the poor, advertised as from the quarry men of Craigleith; from Mr. Milne the bra.s.sfounder's men; from Peeblesshire; from the utmost Orkneys; and from those big, human mastiffs, the navvies. And yet we doctors are often met by the most absurd and obstinate objections by domestic servants in town, and by country people, to going there. This prejudice is lessening, but it is still great. "O, I canna gang into the Infirmary; I would rather dee!" Would you, indeed? Not you, or, if so, the sooner the better. They have a notion that they are experimented on, and slain by the surgeons; neglected and poisoned by the nurses, etc., etc. Such utter nonsense! I know well about the inner life and work of at least our Infirmary, and of that n.o.ble old Minto House, now gone; and I would rather infinitely, were I a servant, 'prentice boy, or shopman, a porter, or student, and anywhere but in a house of my own, and even then, go straight to the Infirmary, than lie in a box-bed off the kitchen, or on the top of the coal-bunker, or in a dark hole in the lobby, or in a double-bedded room. The food, the bedding, the physicians, the surgeons, the clerks, the dressers, the medicines, the wine and porter,--and they don't scrimp these when necessary,--the books, the Bibles, the baths, are all good,--are all better far than one man in ten thousand can command in his own house. So off with a grateful heart and a fearless to the Infirmary, and your mistress can come in and sit beside you; and her doctor and yours will look in and single you out with his smile and word, and cheer you and the ward by a kindly joke, and you will come out well cured, and having seen much to do you good for life. I never knew any one who was once in, afraid of going back; they know better.

There are few things in human nature finer than the devotion and courage of medical men to their hospital and charitable duties; it is to them a great moral discipline. Not that they don't get good--selfish good--to themselves. Why shouldn't they? n.o.body does good without getting it; it is a law of the government of G.o.d. But, as a rule, our medical men are not kind and skilful and attentive to their hospital patients, because this is to make them famous, or even because through this they are to get knowledge and fame; they get all this, and it is their only and their great reward. But they are in the main disinterested men. Honesty is the best policy; but, as Dr. Whately, in his keen way, says, "that man is not honest who is so for this reason," and so with the doctors and their patients. And I am glad to say for my profession, few of them take this second-hand line of duty.

_Beards._--I am for beards out and out, because I think the Maker of the beard was and is. This is reason enough; but there are many others. The misery of shaving, its expense, its consumption of time,--a very corporation existing for no other purpose but to shave mankind. Campbell the poet, who had always a bad razor, I suppose, and was late of rising, said he believed the man of civilization who lived to be sixty had suffered more pain in littles every day in shaving than a woman with a large family had from her lyings-in. This would be hard to prove; but it is a process that never gets pleasanter by practice; and then the waste of time and temper,--the ugliness of being ill or unshaven. Now, we can easily see advantages in it; the masculine gender is intended to be more out of doors, and more in all weathers than the smooth-chinned ones, and this protects him and his Adam's apple from harm. It acts as the best of all respirators to the mason and the east-wind. Besides, it is a glory; and it must be delightful to have and to stroke a natural beard, not one like bean-stalks or a bottle-brush, but such a beard as Abraham's or Abd-el-Kader's. It is the beginning ever to cut, that makes all the difference. I hazard a theory, that no hair of the head or beard should ever be cut, or needs it, any more than the eyebrows or eyelashes. The finest head of hair I know is one which was never cut. It is not too long; it is soft and thick. The secret where to stop growing is in the end of the native untouched hair. If you cut it off, the poor hair does not know when to stop; and if our eyebrows were so cut, they might be made to hang over our eyes, and be wrought into a veil.

Besides, think of the waste of substance of the body in hewing away so much hair every morning, and encouraging an endless rotation of crops!

Well, then, I go in for the beards of the next generation, the unshorn beings whose beards will be wagging when we are away; but of course they must be clean. But how are we to sup our porridge and kail? Try it when young, when there is just a shadowy down on the upper lip, and no fears but they will do all this "elegantly" even. Nature is slow and gentle in her teaching even the accomplishment of the spoon. And as for women's hair, don't plaster it with scented and sour grease, or with any grease; it has an oil of its own. And don't tie up your hair tight, and make it like a cap of iron over your skull. And why are your ears covered? You hear all the worse, and they are not the cleaner. Besides, the ear is beautiful in itself, and plays its own part in the concert of the features. Go back to the curls, some of you, and try in everything to dress as it becomes you, and as you become; not as that fine lady, or even your own Tibbie or Grizzy chooses to dress, it may be becomingly to her. Why shouldn't we even in dress be more ourselves than somebody or everybody else?

I had a word about _Teeth_. Don't get young children's teeth drawn. At least, let this be the rule. Bad teeth come of bad health and bad and hot food, and much sugar. I can't say I am a great advocate for the common people going in for tooth-brushes. No, they are not necessary in full health. The healthy man's teeth clean themselves, and so does his skin. A good dose of Gregory often puts away the toothache. It is a great thing, however, to get them early stuffed, if they need it; that really keeps them and your temper whole. For appearance' sake merely, I hate false teeth, as I hate a wig. But this is not a matter to dogmatize about. I never was, I think, deceived by either false hair, or false teeth, or false eyes, or false cheeks, for there are in the high--I don't call it the great--world, plumpers for making the cheeks round, as well as a certain dust for making them bloom. But you and I don't enjoy such advantages.

_Rheumatism_ is peculiarly a disease of the workingman. One old physician said its only cure was patience and flannel. Another said six weeks. But I think good flannel and no drunkenness (observe, I don't say no drinking, though very nearly so) are its best preventives. It is a curious thing, the way in which cold gives rheumatism. Suppose a man is heated and gets cooled, and being very well at any rate, and is sitting or sleeping in a draught; the exposed part is chilled; the pores of its skin, which are always exuding and exhaling waste from the body, contract and shut in this bad stuff; it--this is my theory--not getting out is taken up by a blunder of the deluded absorbents, who are always prowling about for something, and it is returned back to the centre, and finds its way into the blood, and poisons it, affecting the heart, and carrying bad money, bad change, bad fat, bad capital all over the body, making nerves, lungs, everything unhappy and angry. This vitiated blood arrives by and by at the origin of its mischief, the chilled shoulder, and here it wreaks its vengeance, and in doing so, does some general good at local expense. It gives pain; it produces a certain inflammation of its own, and if it is not got rid of by the skin and other ways, it may possibly kill by the rage the body gets in, and the heat; or it may inflame the ill-used heart itself, and then either kill, or give the patient a life of suffering and peril. The medicines we give act not only by detecting this poison of blood, which, like yeast, leavens all in its neighborhood, but by sending it out of the body like a culprit.

_Vaccination._--One word for this. Never neglect it; get it done within two months after birth, and see that it is well done; and get all your neighbors to do it.

_Infectious Diseases._--Keep out of their way; kill them by fresh air and cleanliness; defy them by cheerfulness, good food (_better_ food than usual, in such epidemics as cholera), good sleep, and a good conscience.

When in the midst of and waiting on those who are under the scourge of an epidemic, be as little very close to the patient as you can, and don't inhale his or her breath or exhalations when you can help it; be rather in the current to, than from him. Be very cleanly in putting away all excretions at once, and quite away; go frequently into the fresh air; and don't sleep in your day clothes. Do what the Doctor bids you; don't crowd round your dying friend; you are stealing his life in taking his air, and you are quietly killing yourself. This is one of the worst and most unmanageable of our Scottish habits, and many a time have I cleared the room of all but one, and dared them to enter it.

Then you should, in such things as small-pox, as indeed in everything, carry out the Divine injunction, "_Whatsoever_ ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them." Don't send for the minister to pray with and over the body of a patient in fever or delirium, or a child dying of small-pox or malignant scarlet fever; tell him, by all means, and let him pray with you, and for your child. Prayers, you know, are like gravitation, or the light of heaven; they will go from whatever place they are uttered; and if they are real prayers, they go straight and home to the centre, the focus of all things; and you know that poor fellow with the crust of typhus on his lips, and its nonsense on his tongue,--that child tossing in misery, not knowing even its own mother,--what can they know, what heed can they give to the prayer of the minister? He may do all the good he can,--the most good maybe when, like Moses on the hillside, in the battle with Amalek, he uplifts his hands apart. No! a word spoken by your minister to himself and his G.o.d, a single sigh for mercy to him who is mercy, a cry of hope, of despair of self, opening into trust in him, may save that child's life, when an angel might pour forth in vain his burning, imploring words into the dull or wild ears of the sufferer, in the vain hope of getting _him_ to pray. I never would allow my father to go to typhus cases; and I don't think they lost anything by it. I have seen him rising in the dark of his room from his knees, and I knew whose case he had been laying at the footstool.

And now, my dear friends, I find I have exhausted our time, and never yet got to the sermon, and its text--"_That the way of G.o.d_"--what is it? It is his design in setting you here; it is the road he wishes you to walk in; it is his providence in your minutest as in the world's mightiest things; it is his will expressed in his works and word, and in your own soul it is his salvation. That it "_may be known_," that the understandings of his intelligent, responsible, mortal and immortal creatures should be directed to it, to study and (as far as we ever can or need) to understand that which, in its fulness, pa.s.ses all understanding; that it may be known "_on the earth_," here, in this very room, this very minute; not, as too many preachers and performers do, to be known only in the next world,--men who, looking at the stars, stumble at their own door, and it may be _smoor_ their own child, besides despising, upsetting, and extinguishing their own lantern. No! the next world is only to be reached through this; and our road through this our wilderness is not safe unless on the far beyond there is shining the lighthouse on the other side of the dark river that has no bridge. Then "_His saving health_"; His health--whose?--G.o.d's--his soundness, the wholeness, the perfectness, that is alone in and from him,--health of body, of heart, and brain, health to the finger-ends, health for eternity as well as time. "_Saving_"; we need to be saved, and we are salvable, this is much; and G.o.d's health can save us, that is more. When a man or woman is fainting from loss of blood, we sometimes try to save them, when all but gone, by transfusing the warm rich blood of another into their veins. Now this is what G.o.d, through his Son, desires to do; to transfuse his blood, himself, through his Son, who is himself, into us, diseased and weak. "_And_" refers to his health being "_known_,"

recognized, accepted, used, "_among all nations_"; not among the U.P.s, or the Frees, or the Residuaries, or the Baptists, or the New Jerusalem people,--nor among us in the Canongate, or in Biggar, or even in old Scotland, but "among all nations"; then, and only then, will the people praise thee, O G.o.d; will all the people praise thee. Then, and then only, will the earth yield her increase, and G.o.d, even our own G.o.d, will bless us. G.o.d will bless us, and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.

And now, my dear and patient friends, we must say good night. You have been very attentive, and it has been a great pleasure to me as we went on to preach to you. We came to understand one another. You saw through my jokes, and that they were not always nothing but jokes. You bore with my solemnities, because I am not altogether solemn; and so good night, and G.o.d bless you, and may you, as Don Quixote, on his death-bed, says to Sancho, May you have your eyes closed by the soft fingers of your great-grandchildren. But no, I must shake hands with you, and kiss the bairns,--why shouldn't I? if their mouths are clean and their breath sweet? As for you, _Ailie_, you are wearying for the child; and he is tumbling and fretting in his cradle, and wearying for you; good by, and away you go on your milky way. I wish I could (unseen) see you two enjoying each other. And good night, my bonnie _wee wifie_; you are sleepy, and you must be up to make your father's porridge; and _Master William Winkie_, will you be still for one moment while I address you?

Well, Master William, _wamble_ not off your mother's lap, neither rattle in your excruciating way in an airn jug wi' an airn spoon; no more crowing like a c.o.c.k, or skirlin' like a kenna-what. I had much more to say to you, sir, but you will not bide still; off with you, and a blessing with you.

Good night, _Hugh Cleland_, the best smith of any smiddy; with your bowly back, your huge arms, your big heavy brows and eyebrows, your clear eye, and warm unforgetting heart. And you, _John n.o.ble_, let me grip your h.o.r.n.y hand, and count the queer k.n.o.bs made by the perpetual mell. I used, when I was a Willie Winkie, and wee, to think that you were born with them. Never mind, you were born for them, and of old you handled the trowel well, and built to the plumb. _Thomas Bertram_, your loom is at a discount, but many's the happy day I have watched you and your shuttle, and the interweaving treadles, and all the mysteries of setting the "wab." You are looking well, and though not the least of an a.s.s, you might play Bottom must substantially yet. _Andrew Wilson_, across the waste of forty years and more I snuff the fragrance of your shop; have you forgiven me yet for stealing your paint-pot (awful joy!) for ten minutes to adorn my rabbit-house, and for blunting your pet _furmer_? Wise you were always, and in the saw-pit you spoke little, and wore your c.r.a.pe. Yourself wears well, but take heed of swallowing your shavings unawares, as is the trick of you "wrights"; they confound the interior and perplex the Doctor.

_Rob Rough_, you smell of rosin, and your look is stern, nevertheless, or all the rather, give me your hand. What a grip! You have been the most sceptical of all my hearers; you like to try everything, and you hold fast only what you consider good; and then on your _crepida_ or stool, you have your own think about everything human and divine, as you smite down errors on the lapstane, and "yerk" your arguments with a well-rosined lingle; throw your window open for yourself as well as for your blackbird; and make your shoes not to pinch. I present you, sir, with a copy of the book of the wise Switzer.

And nimble _Pillans_, the clothier of the race, and quick as your needle, strong as your corduroys, I bid you good night. May you and the cooper be like him of Fogo, each a better man than his father; and you, _Mungo_ the mole-catcher, and _Tod Laurie_, and _Sir Robert_ the cadger, and all the other odd people, I shake your fists twice, for I like your line. I often wish I had been a mole-catcher, with a brown velveteen, or (fine touch of tailoric fancy!) a moleskin coat; not that I dislike moles,--I once ate the fore-quarter of one, having stewed it in a Florence flask, some forty years ago, and liked it,--but I like the killing of them, and the country by-ways, and the regularly irregular life, and the importance of my trade.

And good night to you all, you women-folks. _Marion Graham_ the milkwoman; _Tibbie Meek_ the single servant; _Jenny Muir_ the sempstress; _Mother Johnston_ the howdie, thou consequential Mrs. Gamp, presiding at the gates of life; and you in the corner there, _Nancy Cairns_, gray-haired, meek and old, with your crimped mutch as white as snow; the shepherd's widow, the now childless mother, you are stepping home to your _bein_ and lonely room, where your cat is now ravelling a'

her thrums, wondering where "she" is.

Good night to you all, big and little, young and old; and go home to your bedside, there is Some One waiting there for you, and his Son is here ready to take you to him. Yes, he is waiting for every one of you, and you have only to say, "Father, I have sinned,--take me"--and he sees you a great way off. But to reverse the parable; it is the first-born, your elder brother, who is at your side, and leads you to your Father, and says, "I have paid his debt"; that Son who is ever with him, whose is all that he hath.

I need not say more. You know what I mean. You know who is waiting, and you know who it is who stands beside you, having the likeness of the Son of Man. Good night! The night cometh in which neither you nor I can work,--may we work while it is day; whatsoever thy _hand_ findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work or device in the grave, whither we are all of us hastening; and when the night is spent, may we all enter on a healthful, a happy, an everlasting to-morrow!

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