Lifebelt

“ The iron mould, growing ever more rigid, held in its core that nobler part incarcerate. And this iron flesh, our kind and goodly servitor, at once our gaoler and our bodyguard, is the blind subject of its own strict laws; which we too thus come to follow and obey. And this body which is death is the sole vehicle of life. ”

“ You get into the habit of lingering near your assigned life-boat. The locality has a homelike feel. You time yourself to see how long it takes to get from your stateroom to the life-boat, and it gives a certain confidence to learn that you can easily make it in two or three minutes without running.
At night you put your warmest clothes where you can get into them quickly. Your life belt is always where you can grasp it in a second. When you approach the danger zone the life belt is never out of sight. ”

“ After one has looked at those gray bones, thrown away like gourds in the autumn, what pleasure is there left in life!
After a stronghold has been made of the bones, it is covered with flesh and blood, and there dwell in it old age and death, pride and deceit. ”

“ Our bodies, which remembered all the stones of the field, all the gaps in the soil, and the greasy humidity of the woods, the harsh dryness of the stubble-fields; our bodies, bruised by nights of bivouac, by the straps of our equipment, by our shoes, by the weight of the knapsack, by all the harness of wanderers who know no roof—our bodies at present were unable swiftly to accustom themselves to so much softness and pleasure, all at one and the same time. ”

“ Our Belt has now been in extensive use for a long time, and the fact that it has won the patronage of the first medical autho­rities of the land, and been adopted by the highest personages of the empire, is a guarantee of its utility. ”

“ In the next place I come to consider, how much a certain Quantity of Air is requisite to preserve a single Animal Body, and the Knowledge of that, is what I account one of the chief Preservatives of Health. I have often been concern’d to find a Family of six or seven pinn’d up in a Room, that has not contain’d Air enough for the Maintenance of Health in one single Person; but such is the Hardship of our Poor in many Places, and is frequently the Occasion of their Death. ”

“ To bring it to the surface as a shoulder-load in the ordinary way would, under the circumstances, be impossible; there could be nothing for it but to haul it up with a rope, tearful mourners clambering up in the wake and lending a steadying hand. ”

“ Every rope must be in its right place and securely fixed. But how many men are out on the voyage of life, with the gear of mind and heart all loose! In fine weather, even, they make no real headway; in storms they are in peril of being cast away. ”

“ We are by their side on all the gory fields—in all the hospitals of pain—on all the weary marches. We stand guard with them in the wild storm and under the quiet stars. We are with them in ravines running with blood—in the furrows of old fields. ”

“ You have been brought to this dungeon; you have been stripped of your clothes; you have been laid on your back naked on the ground; your limbs have been stretched and tied to the four pillars of the law; a sheet of iron has been placed on your chest, and as many stones as you can bear have been heaped on your belly, 'and more,' says the law. ”

“ Myriads of human skulls, grim, bare, and fleshless, with grinning jaws and eyeless sockets, piles of human bones, gaunt arms and jointed thighs, basket-like ribs and ridgy vertebræ, were ranged in frightful mockery along the sides of the vaulted alleys or avenues of this subterranean city of Death. ”

“ As this vitalized blood circulates, it carries its life-giving new strength and energy to every part of the body, so that the whole man feels the increased vigor. But let the air be impure, death instead of life is given to the blood. Hence, where possible, all vigorous exercise should be taken out of doors in the pure air and sunlight, and if this is not possible, every door, window, and avenue through which outside air can be brought inside should be placed wide open, and kept open during the whole time of the exercises. ”

“ The plank bed, the crank, the bread-and-water diet, unauthorized but none the less effectual clubbing at the hands of warders, the cold in the punishment cells penetrating to the very marrow of the bones, weakness, sickness and unpitied death are the certain portion of the rebel. ”

“ And then, one after another, living men are pushed off the benches which are drawn from under their feet, and by their own weight suddenly tighten the nooses round their necks, and are painfully strangled. Men, alive a minute before, become corpses dangling from a rope ”

“ Nothing else, indeed, could be expected for the suit of the pallid, deformed youth, whose blood barely circulated, whose feeble limbs bent beneath the weight of a body even so attenuated, and whose heart and lungs scarcely discharged their office. All active life seemed concentrated in his brain, which throve and energised at the expense of every other organ. ”

“ It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? ”

“ These Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and organising function, with the One Life of the Universe, [7] and when they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely organised body. During bodily life they are marshalled as an army; marching in regular order under the command of a general, performing various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single body. ”

“ Do we think enough, as we pass from bed to bed, that we are ourselves partakers of the same mortality, and that in due time we shall be called to take our places in the sick room, and on the bed of death? ”

“ Take, for example, our corporeal life. This has its laws; and these laws must be obeyed if we expect to enjoy physical health. Our bodies require food, and drink, and exercise, and sleep, and pure air, and protection from rain and frost. These requirements are the body's laws—unchangeable, God-appointed laws. And in the degree that they are transgressed, the body suffers. ”

“ By a most unholy will he devised that his body should be kept unburied for the space of twenty years, and that under whatever roof I might choose to reside he also should there find a resting-place for the time being; the dead and the living were, in fact, to keep each other company all that time. ”

“ To touch a dead body, to enter a tent where a corpse lay, rendered a person “unclean for seven days;” to come in contact with a forbidden animal, a bone, a grave; to be next to any one struck with sudden death; to be afflicted with certain kinds of bodily disease and infirmity; unwittingly to lay a finger on a person unclean, occasioned defilement, and necessitated a purification or an atonement. ”

“ There was but little probability of my being released before the expiration of a half-year: a long term—long and hard to be borne either by captive or criminal—hard even in a lighted chamber, with bed and fire, and well-cooked food, in daily converse with human beings, and the sound of human voices almost continually ringing in your ears. ”

“ Gradually, on hooks above the blue and yellow drapery, appear the coats and bonnets of my neighbors, while their boots and shoes, in every imaginable attitude, assert themselves below, as if their owners had committed suicide in a body. A violent creaking, scrambling, and fussing, causes the fact that people are going regularly to bed to dawn upon my mind. ”

“ Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to 'move on.' You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. ”

“ This is the law of the city, to which Claude Bernard has given the name of the law of the constitution of organisms.
Death by Lesion of the Major Organs. Vital Tripod.—Thus we understand what life is, and at the same time what is the death of a complex living being. The city perishes if its more or less complicated mechanisms which look after its revictualling and its discharge are seriously affected at any point. The different groups may survive for a more or less lengthy period, but progressively deprived of the means of food or of discharge, they are finally involved in the general ruin. ”

“ How quickly in Nature every animal becomes wilder!
Let but blood be tasted.
See, once more come people from the village, one carrying a coffin lid, two others a coffin, and they run to overtake their cart. ”

“ Give me a hut on shore and a rifle with easy access of game, and I would defy scurvy in the Arctic Regions; but to live on board a ship, to live in a hot forecastle or cabin, and to live on tinned provisions, is the best means of courting the disease. ”

“ There is another and more permanent injury of this kind, however, carried out by boys, even by men, which consists in wearing a belt for the purpose of giving what is called support. Boys who are about to run in races, or to leap, put on the belt and strap it tightly, in order, as they say, to hold in their wind or breath. Workingmen who are about to lift weights or carry heavy burdens put on a belt for the same purpose, their declaration being that it gives support. Actually there is not a figment of truth in this belief. It is the expression of a fashion, and nothing more. ”

“ An excellent and cheap life belt, for persons proceeding to sea, bathing in dangerous places, or learning to swim, may be thus made:—Take a yard and three quarters of strong jean, double, and divide it into nine compartments. ”

“ As the circle in which I stood inclosed by this time was much thinned, and death seemed to be approaching with hasty strides, it was proposed by some of the most resolute to make one vigorous effort, and endeavour to force our way through the savages, the only probable method of preserving our lives that now remained. ”

“ The belt is made from skin of the mountain lion, the black-tail deer, the white-tail deer, and the antelope—animals which give birth to their young without trouble. Medicine-men are called in to pray to the spirits of these animals when a woman approaching confinement puts on the belt. It is worn for a day or so only, but constantly during the critical period, not being removed until after the child is born. Prayers are made, first by a mother or father for their daughter, then by a medicine-man, and lastly by the patient to the gods and elements depicted on the belt. ”

“ It includes, therefore, not only what belongs to the art of medical men, properly so called, but also food and drink, clothing and shelter, and every means of covering and protection to guard our bodies against injuries and mishaps from without as well as from within. For hunger and thirst, and cold and heat, and all violence from without, produce loss of that health which is the point to be considered. ”

“ Fatality enters your rooms while your landlady's back is turned; you come home and find it in possession bearing a man's name, clothed in flesh--wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots--lounging against the stove. ”

“ For, you see, if these little matters be not rigidly and minutely attended to, if a rope be out of its place or a screw not rightly home, such trifling accidents as mutilation and loss of life are not unlikely to happen. ”

“ Where it is absolutely necessary, a great number of dead bodies must be deposited in one small piece of ground, I would recommend a plan to be observed, something similar to the following, which I am of opinion, would prevent great confusion and danger, when a new grave is about to be opened. Let burying grounds in future, be divided into regular sections, of sufficient length and breadth, to admit of the largest human body, male or female. ”

“ Every moment we have to walk across bodies flung across it. At every ten or twelve yards, soon at every five or six paces, we are compelled to stride over a corpse, or even bunches of corpses, some slashed and torn, others in a running posture as if they had been overtaken while in full activity. ”

“ On savoit au juste ce qu’il falloit pour conserver seulement le corps en bon état ou pour traiter un malade—pour former un militaire ou pour faire un athlète—et en particulier, un lutteur, un coureur, un sauteur, un pugiliste. ”

“ Neither age nor sex was spared; all had to work rubber, to perform impossible tasks, to abandon home and cultivation of their forest clearings, and to search week by week and month by month for the juice of rubber-yielding trees, until death came as sudden penalty for failing strength and non-compliance, or more gently overtook them by the way in the form of starvation or disease. ”

“ This easy method, which nature has contriv’d to preserve the human Body on its side, is a sufficient recommendation of that position, and a strong precaution against lying on the Back, which is the posture of dead Bodies. ”

“ Their bodies which have been cherished, cared for, kissed! And we go on hoping for them, thinking them alive, safe and sound. When shall we know whether they are dead or alive, whether strong and healthy or moaning upon a bed in hospital? ”

“ It is when that guard is set, that the process of fossilization, so to speak, begins; and if no relaxing agency intervenes, the heart becomes cold and hard, even before white hairs gather upon the head. ”

“ He suggested that culprits ought, for reasons of humanity, not to be choked to death. By carefully ascertaining a criminal's weight, and by employing a proportionate length of rope, he showed that the descent of the body into the pit beneath the scaffold would instantaneously dislocate the vertebræ, and thus cause immediate death. ”