Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

194 HENRY BAIRDFAVILL
organs of the body are sound.
is a tendency to remain sound to a great age.
With some variation there
With careful
study there is a way to conserve this health.
There is a period when this care is as signally effective
as it is useless after there have occurred indelible scars,
and this age is from infancy to middle life. The world is
beginning to take care of its infants. It exercises some
supervision over its children. But the adolescent, the young
mature, the middle aged, what of them?
Is it
not the exception to find individuals who thoughtfully
and conscientiously take up this problem as a serious
and difficult matter? Who do? Those already impaired.
Who do not? Those who are well and strong. Failing
utterly to see that their vitality and resistance can carry
them into abuses, tolerance of noxious agents, extravagance
of resources, and accommodation to dissipation, and all
with a devil-may-care indifference that invites retribution,
they live by habit, imitation, caprice, not by thought.
Not only is this not an exaggeration, but it does not
begin to portray the truth. It is time there was an awakening,
and that health-care, plan, and practice should be a
function of youth and health, not of
age and decrepitude.
This is the view that is hard to impress. It seems
unnatural that the young and buoyant should make a study
of health, but let me impress the idea that it is not health
that I urge as a consideration. It is vicious habits as a
menace to health that I point out as worthy of incessant
study, and as a postulate declare and then reiterate that
many of our best established methods of life being physiologically
most vicious, it is necessary that the whole
subject be reviewed in the light of physiology, not fashion.
If it seems a far cry from weakling, pauper babies to
dissipated and thoughtless youth, and that I have strayed
from my subject, let me remind you of several facts:—
That the weakling babies are
taken merely as a prominent
and obvious example of the plainly unfit, whom we