Benjamin Ward Richardson

“ The housewife must not be shocked when she hears that the kitchens of our model city, and all the kitchen offices, are immediately beneath these garden roofs; are, in fact, in the upper floor of the house instead of the lower. In every point of view, sanitary and economical, this arrangement succeeds admirably. The kitchen is lighted to perfection, so that all uncleanliness is at once detected. The smell which arises from cooking is never disseminated through the rooms of the house. ”

“ Thus the old Greeks, fathers of true mirth, who looked on prolonged, grief as an offense, and attached the word madness to melancholy, even they were so far imbued with sorrow when the child or youth died, that they bore the lifeless body to the pyre in the break of the morning, lest the sun should behold so sad a sight as the young dead; while we, who court rather than seek to dismiss melancholy, who find poetry and piety in melancholic reverie, and who indulge too often in what, after a time, becomes the luxury of woe, experience a gradation of suffering as we witness the work of death. ”

“ It is my object to put forward a theoretical outline of a community so circumstanced and so maintained by the exercise of its own freewill, guided by scientific knowledge, that in it the perfection of sanitary results will be approached, if not actually realised, in the co-existence of the lowest possible general mortality with the highest possible individual longevity. I shall try to show a working community in which death,—if I may apply so common and expressive a phrase on so solemn a subject,—is kept as nearly as possible in its proper or natural place in the scheme of life. ”

“ To say nothing of the expense to which it subjects many struggling men, to the loss of time it inflicts on them, to the neglect it inflicts at the fireside and home, to the spirit of contest of mind and fever of mind which it engenders; to say nothing, I repeat, of these things—all of which, nevertheless, are detrimental, indirectly, to the health of the men themselves and of those who surround them in family union—there is a direct harm often inflicted by the service, call it recreation if you like, which is not to its credit. ”

“ Our object, to make the present existence better and happier; to inquire, in this particular section of our Congress:—What are the conditions which lead to the pain and penalty of disease; what the means for the removal of those conditions when they are discovered? What are the most ready and convincing methods of making known to the uninformed the facts: that many of the conditions are under our control; that neither mental serenity nor mental development can exist with an unhealthy animal organisation; that poverty is the shadow of disease, and wealth the shadow of health? ”

“ Perfect sleep is the possession, as a rule, of childhood only. The healthy child, worn out with its day of active life, suddenly sinks to rest, sleeps its ten or twelve hours, and wakes, believing, feeling, that it has merely closed its eyes and opened them again; so deep is its twinkle of oblivion. The sleep in this case is the nearest of approaches to actual death, and at the same time presents a natural paradox, for it is the evidence of strongest life. ”

“ Suffice it if I have proved the general propositions, that disease is now as it was in the beginning, except that in some examples of it it is less virulent; that the science for extinguishing any one disease has yet to be learned; that, as the bases of disease exist, untouched by civilisation, so the danger of disease is ever imminent, unless we specially provide against it; that the development of disease may occur with original virulence and fatality, and may at any moment be made active under accidental or systematic ignorance. ”

“ Thus we are led to feel this greater object: that to whatever extent we, by our exertions, confer benefits on those who live, we extend the advantage to those who have to live; that one good thought leading to practical useful action from one man or woman, may go to the virtue of thousands of generations; that one breath of health wafted by our breath may, in the aggregate of life saved by it, represent in its ultimate effect all the life that now is or has been. ”

“ The costumes of the trim shopman, the slovenly mechanic, the country laborer, the flourishing squire, the tight-laced soldier, the club exquisite, the lugubrious doctor, the devil-may-care artist, and the awful ecclesiastic in his demented hat and sacred pinafore—these costumes and others betray a want of national taste and national unity which I for one, health-seeker as I would be, utterly repudiate. There can be no amalgamation of mind and heart while these distinctive outside declarations exist among us. ”

“ We now often really transform play into work; and our minds are so constituted that what is one person's work is another person's play. What a backwoodsman would call his horse-like labor, a foremost statesman may call his light of pleasure. How shall we define it? What is play or recreation?
Men differ, I think, on the definition of work and play more than on almost any other subject: differ in practice as much as in theory in regard to it. I have had the acquaintance, and I may say the friendship, of a man who lives, it is said, for nothing but recreation, or pleasure, or play. ”

“ Here the insane live, in small communities, under proper medical supervision, with their own gardens and pastimes.
The houses of the helpless and aged are, like the asylums, the same as the houses of the rest of the town. No large building of pretentious style uprears itself for the poor; no men badged and badgered as paupers walk the place. Those poor who are really, from physical causes, unable to work, are maintained in a manner showing that they possess yet the dignity of human kind ”

“ To my mind—and I wish to be as open to conviction on this point as any one can be—I fail to discern a single opening for the use of these lethal agents in the service of mankind save in the most exceptional conditions of disease, and then only under skilled and thoughtful supervision, from hands that know the danger of infusing a false movement and life into so exquisite an organism as a living, breathing, pulsating, impressionable human form. ”

“ Where the physical conditions of life are so unequal, where we waste in structure of body, whether we will it or not, at certain fixed seasons, and gain, whether we will it or not, at other fixed seasons, it is impossible to attain such excellence by any diversion of mind or variation of pursuit. For universal gladness the sun must play his part, doing his spiriting gently, but never actually hiding the brightness of his face. ”

“ There are times in the life of man when the heart is oppressed, when the resistance to its motion is excessive, and when blood flows languidly to the centres of life, nervous and muscular. In these moments alcohol cheers. It lets loose the heart from its oppression, it lets flow a brisker current of blood into the failing organs; it aids nutritive changes, and altogether is of temporary service to man. So far alcohol is good, and if its use could be limited to this one action, this one purpose, it would be among the most excellent of the gifts of Nature to mankind. ”

“ It really matters little which of the intoxicants it is that is learned to be craved for; the craving for it will continue when it has struck an abiding impression. We know this fact well from the wide experience that has been gained of it in the cases of alcohol, tobacco, opium, chloral, hasheesh, absinthe, and arsenic. More incongruous things could scarcely be; incongruous to the senses, to the sensibilities, to the methods of taking, to the result of them; yet the craving for any one of them as it is may be established. The devotee to one will laugh at the devotee to another ”

“ The automatism of recreation is bad in every sense, and it is specially bad in the present day, because of the quality of it, as well as the limited quantity. There is no such diversity of recreation as is wanted to keep the body in health by the exercise of the mind. With one man the recreation is all taken out in cards, with another in chess, with a third in billiards, with a fourth in debate or gossip on some one persistent topic of discourse or argument, and so on, for what may be called the in-door recreative life. ”

“ They try their best, but they have found few conducive to health, many that are fatal. They are to be pitied and pardoned for these errors of their finding. What if they do discover recreation of the worst kind in the bar and saloon of the spirit-seller? Have they not the example of the wealthier classes before them, teaching that the same indulgence, in another style, is recreation? May they not ask how many other obtainable pleasures are provided for them, and whether many, too many, of obtainable pleasures so called, and so bad, are not positively thrust upon them? ”

“ Life was an enjoyment which nothing sullied except death, and which was purified even from death by the quick-consuming fire, that the life might begin again instantaneously and incorruptibly.
If by some grand transformation we could in our day approach to this conception which has been rendered to us by the history of art, and could act upon it, we should, in a generation or two, attain a degree of health which no sanitary provision, in the common meaning of that term, can ever supply. ”

“ We get, in fact, a little light on the nature of healthful recreation as we let our minds rest on this one and almost exceptional class of men of varied life and action of a mental kind. They come before us showing what recreation can effect through the mere act of varying the labor. The brain-worker who is divested of worry is at once the happiest and the healthiest of mankind—happiest, perchance, because healthiest; a man constantly re-created, and therefore of longest life. ”

“ This is death by Nature, and when mankind has learned the truth, when the time shall come—as come it will—that "there shall be no more an infant of days, nor an old man who hath not filled his days," this act of death, now, as a rule, so dreaded because so premature, shall, arriving only at its appointed hour, suggest no terror, inflict no agony. ”

“ The corset and the waist-belt I must once more condemn as opposed to all that is healthful and all that is beautiful. By these appliances, through which an unequal pressure is exerted on one part of the body, the functions of the lungs, of the heart, and of the digestive organs are all kept under imperfect condition. The breathing is suppressed, the heart-beat is suppressed, the digestive power is suppressed. In this way the tripod of life—for life rests on the digestion, the respiration, and circulation—is made imperfect, and with that imperfection every other part of the body sympathizes. ”

“ For the loss of the child and the youth we mourn in the perfect purity of sorrow; for the loss of the man in his activity, we feel grief mingled with selfish regret that so much that was useful has ceased to be. In the loss of the aged, in their days of second childishness and mere oblivion, we sympathize for something that has passed away, and for a moment recall events saddening to the memory ”

“ There is much difference, in fact, between the three classes of the community called the domestic, the agricultural, and the industrial, in respect to the work, the recreation, and the resultant health pertaining to each class. The domestic class as a whole is, by comparison with the industrial, fairly favored. The members of it lead, it is true, a monotonous life, and see often but little of the beauties of external nature, but they find in the amusements they provide for those who are about them some intervals of change which are, as far as they go, of service. ”

“ If we could turn our houses into models of sanitary perfection; if we could release our toiling millions from half their daily labor; if we could tell want to depart altogether; if we could give means of education to every living human being—we should not remove care, and therefore we should not secure health, unless with it all we could also remove the idea of the distinction of labor and pleasure, the morbid notion that some must work and some must play, that the world may make its round. ”

“ The well-proven fact that alcohol, when it is taken into the body, reduces the animal temperature, is full of the most important suggestions. It shows that alcohol does not in any sense act as a supplier of vital heat, as is so commonly supposed, and that it does not prevent the loss of heat, as those imagine "who take just a drop to keep out the cold." It shows, on the contrary, that cold and alcohol in their effects on the body run closely together, an opinion most fully confirmed by the experience of those who live or travel in cold regions of the earth. ”

“ From the day that he is completely enamored of the special pursuit it is little indeed that he is good for out of it in hours apart from the common vocation of his life. He becomes fretful if for a day he be deprived of his peculiar gratification; irritable if he joins with others in it who are not so skillful as himself; envious if he meets with a rival who is better at it than himself; and often actually sleepless in thinking and brooding over some event or events that have been connected with the previous play or venture. ”

“ When it is physiologically understood that what is called stimulation or excitement is, in absolute fact, a relaxation, I had nearly said a paralysis, of one of the most important mechanisms in the animal body—the minute, resisting, compensating circulation—we grasp quickly the error, in respect to the action of stimulants, in which we have been educated, and obtain a clear solution of the well-known experience that all excitement, all passion, leaves, after its departure, lowness of heart, depression of mind, sadness of spirit. ”

“ It is well always to have a standard before us, though it be seemingly unapproachable, and the illustrations I have endeavored to supply of all work and all play, and of long-continued recreation thereupon, form the standard I now wish to set up for observation.
To make all England, and all the world, for the matter of that, a recreation ground; to make all life a grand recreation; to make all life thereby healthier, happier, and longer—this is the question before us. ”

“ The effects of fear are all but indentical with those of rage, and like rage grow in force with repetition. The phenomena are so easily developed in the majority of persons, they may actually be acquired by imitation, and may be intensified and perhaps induced by listening to the mere narratives of events which act as causes of fear. I am daily more and more convinced that not half the evils resulting from what may be called the promptings of fear in the young and the feeble are duly appreciated, and that fear is the worst weapon of physical torture the thoughtless coward wields. ”

“ A man who can not sleep, owing to the cares and anxieties of his life, must take chloral hydrate or opium to obtain sleep. A man who can not finish a certain amount of work against time, by his own natural powers, must whip himself up to the work by means of wine; must force his heart and brain on against time at all risks and sacrifices. A man who has forced himself on against time, and has thereby obtained a momentum which he can not arrest by ordinary means, must calm himself down by tobacco, must literally put the reins on his heart, and pull the heart up sharply and decisively. ”

“ In this climate the regulation of dress in relation to health is an actual necessity during the varied seasons that prevail. We may take it as a general rule that, when the body requires more food and more sleep to meet the cold, it requires also more clothes than it does at times when sleep and food are also less wanted. There is a very remarkable physiological truth bearing on this point which every one ought to know, inasmuch as a knowledge of it becomes a guide to us in our daily life, not only in relation to dress, but to food, exercise, labor, and repose. ”