The Healthy Life Part 1

The Healthy Life.

by Various.

AN INDICATION.

Some laymen are very fond of deprecating the work of specialists, holding that specialisation tends to narrowness, to inability to see more than one side of a question.

It is, of course, true that the specialist tends to "go off at a tangent" on his particular subject, and even to treat with contempt or opposition the views of other specialists who differ from him. But all work that is worth doing is attended by its own peculiar dangers. It is here that the work of the non-specialist comes in. It is for him to compare the opposing views of the specialists, to reveal one in the light thrown by the other, to help into existence the new truth waiting to be born of the meeting of opposites.

Specialisation spells division of labour, and apart from division of labour certain great work can never be done. To do away with such division, supposing an impossibility to be possible, would simply mean reversion to the state of the primitive savage. But we have no call to attempt the abolition of even the minutest division of labour. What is necessary is to understand and guard against its dangers.

Specialisation _may_ lead to madness, as electricity _may_ lead to death. But no specialist need go far astray who, once in a while, will make an honest attempt to come to an understanding with the man whose views are diametrically opposed to his own. For thus he will retain elasticity of brain, and gain renewed energy for, and perhaps fresh light on, his own problems.--[EDS.]

CAMPING OUT.

IV. THE FIVE-FOOT SAUSAGE.

The question of blankets and mattresses may be taken as settled. We can now sleep quite comfortably, take our fresh air sleeping and waking, and find shelter when it rains. But that same fresh air brings appet.i.te and we must see how that appet.i.te is to be appeased.

Take a frying-pan. It should be of aluminium for lightness; though a good stout iron one will help you make good girdle-cakes, if you get it hot and drop the flour paste on it. You must find some other way of making girdle-cakes, and if you take an iron frying pan with you, don't say that I told you to.

Though it is obviously necessary that a frying-pan should have a handle, I was bound to tell Gertrude that I do not find it convenient to take handled saucepans when I go camping. I take for all boiling purposes, including the making of tea, what is called a camp-kettle.

Most ironmongers of any standing seem to keep it, and those who have it not in stock can show you an ill.u.s.tration of it in their wholesale list. It is just like the pot in which painters carry their paint, except that it has an ordinary saucepan lid. You should have a "nest"

of these--that is, three in diminishing sizes going one inside the other. The big lid then fits on the outer one and the two other lids have to be carried separately.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Five-Foot Sausage_]

You hang these camp-kettles over the fire by their bucket handles, from the tripod or other means of getting over the fire. Sometimes the bough of a tree high out of the reach of the flames will do. Sometimes a stick or oar thrust into the bank or in a crevice of the wall behind the fire is more convenient than a tripod. Again, you can do without any hanging at all, making a little fireplace of bricks or stones and standing the saucepans "on the hob."

It is a simple thing to tie the tops of three sticks together and make a tripod. Then from the place where they join you dangle a piece of string, pa.s.s it through the handle of the kettle and tie it to itself, in a knot that can be adjusted up or down to raise or lower the kettle from the fire. This knot is our old friend the two half-hitches. Pa.s.s the loose end round the down cord, letting it come back under the up cord, then round again with the same finish, and lo! the up cord makes two half-hitches round the down cord. You can slip, them up and put them where you like and they will hold, but you have to undo them to take the kettle clean away from the fire. So we add to our equipment a few pot-hooks or pieces of steel wire shaped like an S. Their use will be obvious. If we have three of them it is quite easy to keep three kettles going over one fire. They swing cheek by jowl when they all want the same amount of fire, but each can be raised or lowered an inch or several inches to let them respectively boil, simmer or just keep warm.

These are the cooking utensils. A biscuit tin would make an oven and Gertrude says she must have an oven. For my part I would not attempt baking when camping out and I will say no more about ovens, except that all the biscuit tins in the world won't beat a hole in the ground first filled with blazing sticks and then with the things to be baked and covered with turves till they are done.

I had great difficulty in persuading Gertrude to feed out of tin dishes like those which we use sometimes for making shallow round cakes or setting the toffee in. They are ever so much better than plates, being deep enough for soup-plates and not easy to upset when you use them on your lap. Any number of the same size will go into one another and a dozen scarcely take up more room than one.

It was worse still when it came to a still more useful subst.i.tute, the camp equivalent of the teacup. In the first place we abolish the saucer, for the simple reason that we have no earthly use for it in camp. We take tin mugs with sloping sides and wire bucket handles.

They fit into one another in the same accommodating way as the eating dishes. Gertrude was nearly put off this device altogether by Basil's remark that he had only seen them in use in poulterers' shops, where they are put under hares' noses....

"Basil, you, you monster," cried Gertrude, and I had to push those tin mugs as though I had been a traveller interested in the sale of them.

The drinking of hot tea out of these mugs is quite a beautiful art.

You hold the wire handle between finger and thumb and put the little finger at the edge of the bottom rim. It is thus able to tilt the mug to the exact angle which is most convenient for drinking. When Gertrude had learnt the trick, she became perfectly enamoured of the mugs. She sometimes brings one out at ordinary afternoon tea and insists that the tea is ever so much better drunk thus than out of spode.

Smaller mugs of the same shape do for egg-cups, and the egg-spoons I take to camp are the bone ones, seldom asked for but easy to get in most oil-and-colour shops. Dessert spoons and forks and table knives are of the usual pattern, but the former can be had in aluminium and therefore much lighter than Britannia metal.

The camping-out valise is by all means the rucksack. Never the knapsack. I am almost ashamed to say this, because as far as my knowledge goes the knapsack is now obsolete. It may be, however, that it lingers here and there. If you see one, buy it for a museum if you like but not for use. The bundle should be allowed to fit itself to the back, as it does in a canvas bag. Suppose now that you fix the V point of a pair of braces somewhere near the top of the sack and bringing the webs over your shoulders, fix them, nicely adjusted, to the lower corners of the sack, it will ride quite comfortably upon your back--that is, you have made it from a plain sack into a rucksack or back-sack. Get or make as many good large strong ones as you have shoulders in the party to carry them. Have them made of a waterproof canvas, green or brown, to reeve up tight with strong cord pa.s.sed through a series of eyelet-holes and, if you would be quite certain of keeping out the rain, with a little hood to cover the reeved bag end.

The great bulk of your luggage you will generally find it best to carry by wheeling it on a bicycle. Spread your ground-sheet on the floor. On that lay your blankets, doubled so as to make a smaller square, tent, mattress cover and bed suits on that, then your camping utensils and all other paraphernalia and roll the whole up into a sausage about five feet long, when the loose ends of the ground-sheet have been tucked over as in a brown-paper parcel. Tie it well with whipcord and fasten it to the top bar of your bicycle frame, leaving freedom of course for the handles and the front wheel to move and steer. Push the tent-poles through the lashings and start for your camp at a comfortable four or five miles an hour. You will find it easy to move camp at the rate of twenty miles a day and will see a great deal of country in the course of a fortnight.

The sausage on the bicycle shown in the ill.u.s.tration may be taken to contain all the gear and a little food. The rucksacks will take the rest and each man's most precious personal belongings. There is a small parcel tied to the handle-bar, scarcely to be seen because it is smaller than the end of the sausage. It is a complete tent tied up in its ground-sheet.

C.R. FREEMAN.

HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT: A WARNING.

_This article, by one of the pioneers of modern dietetics, is in the nature of a challenge, and is certain to arouse discussion among all who have studied the food question closely._--[EDS.]

When men lived on their natural food, quant.i.ties settled themselves.

When a healthy natural appet.i.te had been sated the correct quant.i.ty of natural food had been taken.

To-day all this is upside down, there is no natural food and only too often no natural healthy appet.i.te either. Thus the question of quant.i.ty is often asked and many go wrong over it. The all-sufficient answer to this question is: "Go back to the foods natural to the human animal and this, as well as a countless number of other problems, will settle themselves."

But supposing that this cannot be done, suppose, as is often the case, that the animal fed for years on unnatural food has become so pathological that it can no longer take or digest its natural food?

Those who take foods which are stimulants are very likely to overeat, and when they leave off their stimulants they are equally likely to underfeed themselves. Flesh foods are such stimulants, for it is possible to intoxicate those quite unaccustomed to them with a large ration of meat just as well as with a large ration of alcohol. The one leads to the other, meat leads to alcohol, alcohol to meat. Taking any stimulant eventually leads to a call for other stimulants.

How are we to tell when a given person is getting enough food, either natural or partly natural? Medically speaking, there is no difficulty; there are plenty of guides to the required knowledge, some of them of great delicacy and extreme accuracy. The trouble generally is that these guides are not made use of, as the cause of the disaster is not suspected. A physiologist is not consulted till too late, perhaps till the disorder in the machinery of life is beyond repair.

Diminishing energy and power, decreasing endurance, slowing circulation, lessening blood colour, falling temperature, altered blood pressure, enlarging heart and liver, are some of the most obvious signs with which the physician is brought into contact in such cases. But every one of these may, and very often does, pa.s.s unnoticed for quite a long time by those who have had no scientific training.

The public are extremely ignorant on such matters because the natural sciences have been more neglected in this country in the last fifty years than anywhere else in Europe, and that is saying a good deal.

Hence diet quacks and all those who trade on the ignorance and prejudices of the public are having a good time and often employ it in writing the most appalling rubbish in reference to the important subject of nutrition.

Being themselves ignorant and without having studied physiology, even in its rudiments, they do not appear to consider that they should at least abstain from teaching others till they have got something certain for themselves.

If the public were less ignorant they would soon see through their pretensions; but, as it is, things go from bad to worse, and it is not too much to say that hundreds of lives have been lost down this sordid by-path of human avarice.

On one single day a few weeks ago the writer heard of three men, two of whom had been so seriously ill that their lives were in danger, and one of whom had died. The certified cause of death in this case might not have led the uninitiated to suspect chronic starvation, but those who were behind the scenes knew that this was its real cause. A further extraordinary fact was that two out of these three men were members of the medical profession, whose training in physiology ought, one would have thought, to have saved them from such errors.

The conclusion seems to be that they did not use their knowledge because at first they had no suspicion of the real cause of their illness. In other words, chronic starvation is insidious and, if no accurate scientific measurements are made, its results, being attributed to other causes, are often allowed to become serious before they are properly treated.

These three men went wrong by following a layman quite dest.i.tute of physiological training, who APPEARED to have produced some wonderful results in himself and others on extraordinarily small quant.i.ties of food.

If the above tests had been made at once by a trained hand the error involved in such results could not have escaped detection, and none of these men would have endangered their lives. I myself examined the layman in question and finding him not up to standard refused to follow him. The writer has no difficulty in recalling at least a dozen cases similar to those above mentioned which have been under his care in the last twelve months, and the three above mentioned were none of them under his care at the time of their danger.

What, then, must be our conclusions in reference to these and similar facts of which it is only possible to give a mere outline here? I suggest that they are:--

1. Food quant.i.ties are of extreme importance.

2. These quant.i.ties were settled by physiologists many years ago, and no good reasons have since been adduced for altering them.