Volume 1

The philosophy of health ; or, an exposition of the physical and mental constitution of man, with a view to the promotion of human longevity and happiness / by Southwood Smith.

  • Smith, Southwood, 1788-1861.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The philosophy of health ; or, an exposition of the physical and mental constitution of man, with a view to the promotion of human longevity and happiness / by Southwood Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    and painful thought, and the rules deducible from those laws, having for their object such a deter- mination of voluntary human conduct, as may secure the pleasurable and avoid the painful. Yet nothing would seem a fitter study for man than the nature of man in this sense of the term. A knowledge of the structure and functions of the body is admitted to be indispensable to whoever undertakes, as the business of his profession, to protect those organs from injury, and to restore their action to a sound state when it has become disordered; but surely some knowledge of this kind may be useful to those who have no intention to practise physic, or to perform operations in surgery; may be useful to every human being, to enable him to take a rational care of his health, to make him observant of his own altered sensations, as indications of approaching sickness; to give him the powTer of communicating intelligibly with his medical adviser respecting the seat and the succession of those signs of disordered function, and to dispose and qualify him to co-operate with his physician in the use of the means employed to avert impending danger, or to remove actual disease. But if to every human being occasions must continually occur, when knowledge of this kind