Good Health And How We Won It: The New Hygiene

Ten years ago, when I was a student at college, I fell a victim to a new and fashionable ailment called "la grippe." I recollect the date very well, because it was the first time I had been sick in fourteen years-the last difficulty having been the whooping-cough. I have many times had occasion to recall the interview with the last physician I went to see. I made a proposition, which might have changed the whole course of my future life, had he only been capable of understanding it.

I said: "Doctor, it has occurred to me that I would like to have someone who knows about the body examine me thoroughly and tell me how to live." I can recollect his look of perplexity. "Was there anything the matter with you before this attack?" he asked. "Nothing that I know of," I answered; "but I have often reflected that the way I am living cannot be perfect; and I want to get as much out of my body and mind as I can. I should like to know, for instance, just what are proper things for me to eat"

"Nonsense," he interrupted. "You go right on and live as you have been living, and don't get to thinking about your health."

And so I went away and dismissed the idea. It was one that I had broached with a great deal of diffidence; so far as I knew, it was entirely original, and I was not sure how a doctor would receive it. All doctors that I had ever heard of were people who cured you when you were sick; to ask one to take you when you were well and help you to stay well, was to take an unfair advantage of the profession.