Irving Fisher

“ The insidious encroachment of the chronic diseases that sap the vitality of the individual and impair the efficiency of the race is a matter of increasing importance. The mere extension of human life is not only in itself an end to be desired, but the well digested scientific facts presented in this volume clearly show that the most direct and effective means of lengthening human life are at the same time those that make it more livable and add to its power and capacity for achievement. ”

“ The purpose of the Life Extension Institute embraces the extension of human life, not only as to length, but also, if we may so express it, as to breadth and depth. It endeavors to accomplish this purpose in many ways, but especially through individual hygiene.
Thoroughly carried out, individual hygiene implies high ideals of health, strength, endurance, symmetry, and beauty; it enormously increases our capacity to work, to be happy, and to be useful; it develops, not only the body, but the mind and the heart; it ennobles the man as a whole. ”

“ With our superior scientific knowledge, our health ideals ought, as a matter of fact, to excel those of any other age. They should not stop with the mere negation of disease, degeneracy, delinquency, and dependency. They should be positive and progressive. They should include the love of a perfect muscular development, of integrity of mental and moral fiber.
There should be a keen sense of enjoyment of all life’s activities. As William James once said, simply to live, breathe and move should be a delight. The thoroughly healthy person is full of optimism ”

“ On much the same principle as the Indians used when their young men were trained to endure pain self-inflicted, we might well devote a few minutes each day to the difficult task of changing at will our attention from the thing which is engrossing it to anything else we choose; or, what is more difficult still, to blank nothingness. When we have sufficiently strengthened this power, we can turn off the current of our thoughts as we turn off the lights and lie down to sleep in peace, as a trained sailor does in a storm. ”

“ Work was once considered simply a curse of the poor. The real gentleman was supposed to be one who was able to live without it. The king, who set the styles, was envied because he “did not have to work,” but had innumerable people to do work for him. His ability to work, his efficiency, his endurance, were the last things to which he gave consideration. To-day kings, emperors, presidents are trying to find out how they can keep in the fittest condition and accomplish the greatest possible amount of work. Even among society women, some kind of work is now “the thing.” ”

“ Much of our drugging, some of our wrong food habits and not a little of our immorality are simply crude and unscientific attempts to compensate for disturbances or deviations from a normal life. We wake ourselves up, as it were, with caffein, move our bowels with a cathartic, induce an appetite with a cocktail, seek rest from the day’s fatigue and worries in nicotin, and put ourselves to sleep with an opiate. ”

“ In fact, hygiene is one of the few precious gifts which can be had almost for the asking. Most people can sleep out-of-doors, if they will—if in no other way than by the so-called indoor window-tent—or can take deep-breathing exercises without cost. It costs nothing to stand, sit, and walk erect, to evacuate thoroughly, regularly, and frequently. It costs less than nothing to avoid overeating and overweight, and to be totally abstinent from alcohol and tobacco. ”

“ In short, we find that besides the hygienic factor in life which we may call environment, there is something else on which the health of the individual depends. This something else is heredity, or “the nature of the breed.” Back of all the individual can do by hygiene lies his inheritance. To change this the individual can do nothing, but the parents of the individual can affect his inheritance, and we as parents can affect the inheritance of our offspring. ”

“ Just as the cure for the evils of Democracy is said to be more Democracy; so the cure for the evils of civilization must be more civilization. The equilibrium of Nature having been upset by civilization, science, one of the great products of civilization, must now work out the remedies. Just as the waste of the soil which civilization has brought is to be compensated by that great product of civ ilization, scientific agriculture, so the waste of vital resources is to be compensated by scientific hygiene. ”

“ The decision which is perhaps the hardest to make and, at the same time, the most important from the standpoint of health and working-power, is the decision not to care too much about the objects we are seeking to achieve. We need not subscribe to the Nirvana philosophy. A certain intensity of desire is normal, but modern life tends to a morbid frenzied intensity. Most of us need, in the interest of mental health or sanity, to moderate our desires. A business man who had set his heart on fulfilling a large responsibility nearly wrecked his health from worry over the outcome. ”

“ Race hygiene or eugenics, which has been mentioned as the third and most important branch of hygiene, aims to conserve the health of future generations, through the action of those now living. Hygiene (individual and public) teaches us how to create for ourselves healthful conditions of living, but on every side we see evidences of the fact that we cannot entirely control conditions of health through hygiene only. Not all maladies by any means can be attributed to unnatural or unhygienic conditions of living. ”

“ While it is true that to the public mind there is a more lurid and spectacular menace in such diseases as small-pox, yellow fever and plague, medical men and public health workers are beginning to realize that, with the warfare against such maladies well or ganized, it is now time to give attention to the heavy loss from lowered physical efficiency and chronic, preventable disease, a loss exceeding in magnitude that sustained from the more widely feared communicable diseases. ”

“ There was a time when the inherent personality of a man, the color of his eyes, the capacity of his mind, the quality of his character, seemed clearly subject to the caprice of forces beyond the reach of mortal perception. ”

“ If a person’s work is drudgery but has to be endured, the making up of the mind to endure it cheerfully, the relinquishment of the doubtful but fascinating pleasure of dwelling upon one’s misery, is found to largely obviate the burden. It is the making up of the mind which presents the difficulty. The truth is that we instinctively shrink from making, without reservation, important decisions as to our future course of conduct. We balk even at really committing ourselves not to worry. ”

“ In fact, meat, eggs, and like foods are among the most expensive and the least desirable. If we compare the cost of flour and of the other cheapest food materials, with the cost of oysters, one of the dearest, we find that the latter is fifty times as expensive as the former for the same food value. This takes no account, of course, of the expenses involved in cooking either of them. It has been proved by actual experience that one can live in the best of health on food costing as low as ten cents a day, exclusive of the labor of preparing, cooking and serving. ”

“ First, we can carry through life uninjured the essential germ plasm which has been entrusted to our care. We should never forget that this germ plasm, which we receive and transmit, really belongs, not to us, but to the race; and that we have no right, through alcoholic or other unhygienic practises, to damage it; but that, on the contrary, we are under the most solemn obligation to keep it up to the highest level within our power. We are the trustees of the racial germ plasm that we carry. ”

“ It is a good idea to consult a physician in regard to one’s diet, and endeavor intelligently to follow his advice and not insist on one’s own diet, selected from the standpoint of mere self-indulgence or custom. Moreover, since many, without being aware of the fact, are affected with Bright’s disease, diabetes, etc., in their early stages, in which dietetic precautions are especially necessary, it is well, even for those who are apparently in good health, to be medically examined as a preliminary to a rearrangement of their diet along the best lines. ”

“ Thus public hygiene is that which is practised by the government for its citizens, while individual hygiene is that which is practised by the citizens for themselves. Public hygiene consists chiefly in efforts by the government to maintain a wholesome environment in which to live, including good outdoor air—without smoke or foul odors—clean streets, pure water, good sewers, quarantine, and legal regulations concerning houses, schools, prisons, hospitals, and other public institutions, foods sold in markets, and conditions of employment. ”

“ We seldom see such overflowing vitality except among children. When middle life is reached, or before, our vital surplus has usually been squandered. Yet it is in this vital surplus that the secret of personal magnetism lies. Vital surplus should not only be safeguarded, but accumulated. It is the balance in the savings bank of life. Our health ideals must not stop at the avoidance of invalidism, but should aim at exuberant and exultant health. They should savor not of valetudinarianism, but of athletic development. ”

“ Most of the rules of hygiene cost nothing to observe. But even when hygiene is costly at first, the cost is usually repaid in the end many times over. To ventilate a house in winter always costs a certain additional expenditure for coal, but it is better to pay the coal bill than the doctor’s bills. To sleep out-of-doors costs some extra blankets, bedding, clothing, and roll curtains, but these not only save the cost of heating an indoor sleeping-room, but save also the cost of ill-health. There is no better economy than to keep one’s working-power. ”

“ The question of what traits are desirable and what traits are undesirable might seem, on first thought, rather a difficult matter to determine. Few of us would like to have our neighbor’s taste in the matter constituted as a standard of judgment upon our own traits. There is one standard of judgment, however, that is so broad and impersonal and so founded on the elements in society to which all individuals are subject, that it can justly serve as a line of division between the desirability and undesirability, broadly speaking, of individual traits for perpetuation. ”

“ It would be impossible to enumerate all the inventions of civilization which have brought us difficult problems of individual hygiene. We shall name only a few more. The invention of chairs, though adding to human convenience, has tended to produce wrong posture, from which spinal, nervous and digestive disturbances follow. The invention of the alphabet and of printing has made possible the accumulation of knowledge, but has promoted eye-strain with a great train of attendant evils. ”

“ As teachers and writers on hygiene, as trainers for college athletes, as advisers for the welfare departments of large industrial plants, and in many other directions, physicians are finding fields for practising preventive medicine. Even the family physician is in some cases being asked by his patients to keep them well instead of curing them after they have fallen sick.
Furthermore, the preventive methods of modern medicine are being applied by the people themselves, as witness the great vogue to-day of sleeping out of doors; the popularity, not always deserved, of health foods and drinks ”

“ Thus is it possible to apply the laws of heredity as laid down by Mendel in a thoroughly practical way and to get results immediately in one short generation. It seems, and it is, a colossal task to change average human nature one iota. Yet in the light of modern eugenics we could make a new human race in a hundred years if only people in positions of power and influence would wake up to the paramount importance of what eugenics means. ”

“ There is a mistaken notion that the hygiene of food means “giving up all the things that taste good.” While it is true that, in many cases, sacrifices have to be made, the net result of reforming one’s diet is not to diminish but to increase the enjoyment of food. In general, it is extremely unhygienic to eat foods which are not relished. Experiments by Pavlov and others have shown that the taste and enjoyment of food stimulate the flow of digestive juices. ”

“ Section IV—Teeth and Gums
There is one source of poisoning and infection so universal as to need special mention. This is infection through the mouth. Considered from the standpoint of efficiency, the modern mouth is out of adjustment with modern conditions—or, perhaps we should say, modern conditions are out of adjustment with it. Notwithstanding the numerous bacteria that flourish within its portals, mouth secretions and the mucous membranes do not seem to have the protecting power which is often manifest in other regions of the body and which protects an animal in a state of nature. ”

“ The hurry habit, another unfortunate by-product of civilized life, is one of the chief promoters of indigestion. In civilization we live by the clock. We schedule our trains and crowd our meal-time to catch them. We make engagements in neglect of the requirements of digestion. We have, in consequence, as one of the institutions of civilization, the “quick-lunch counter.” At first we bolted a meal purposely and consciously. Later we formed the habit of food-bolting, and it now seems quite natural. ”

“ But if laboratory and clinical evidence shows that alcohol in so-called moderate quantities (social moderation) produces definite ill effects, such as lowering the resistance to disease, increasing the liability to accident and interfering with the efficiency of mind and body and thus lessening the chances for success in life, to say nothing of any toxic degenerative effect upon liver, kidneys, brain and other organs, the excess mortality that unquestionably obtains among moderate drinkers as compared to total abstainers must be ascribed chiefly to alcohol. ”