Two lectures on the conditions of health and wealth educationally considered / by W.B. Hodgson.

  • Hodgson, W. B. (William Ballantyne), 1815-1880.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Two lectures on the conditions of health and wealth educationally considered / by W.B. Hodgson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    be amazed at the elasticity and conservative forces of nature which allow life itself to be at all sustained in spite of so ex- tensive an infringement of its primary conditions. Let us cast a hurried glance at a few of the various forms of that infring- ment. To drunkenness it is not necessary here to do more than allude, though it is still the dominant vice of this our country,—a vice hideous in itself, and the fruitful parent of other vices. The very fact that the much wider terra—in- temperance—has come, in popular speech, to mean drunken- ness, alone strikingly attests the prevalence of this evil. We are all agreed as to its destructiveness to bodily and mental health, and deplore it as heartily from the sanitary as from the moral or religious point of view. But it is worthy of, at least, a passing remark, that drunkenness itself, in a great number of cases, is but the result of other violations of health-condi- tions. Nervous exhaustion, whether by muscular or by men- tal labour ; deficient, excessive, or improper food ; exposure to noxious vapours or impure air ; neglect of cleanliness ;—each and all do much to produce that craving for stimulant which intoxicating liquors for the time assuage, while the indulgence in them aggravates the mischief, and breeds the necessity for their more and more frequent and copious use. Drunkenness is thus an effect as well as a cause of evil. It is too often, perhaps, regarded solely as a cause. Neither is it needful here to say much of intemperance in eating,* or in other indulgences which injure thousands, and, in the long run, even slay many more than either pestilence or famine. There are other and subtler forms of intemperance. There is intemperance in thinking as well as in drinking or in eat- ing,—an intemperance which civilisation tends, in some re- spects, to increase, and which assumes not unfrequently the aspect of a virtue rather than of a vice. It is not the sensual and the grovelling, it is rather the spiritual and the aspiring, * “ All people above the condition of labourers are ruined by excess of stimulus anil nourishment, clergy included I never yet saw any geutleman who ate and drank as little as was reasonable.”—Rev. Sidney Smith, Memoir, vol. ii. p. 120. 1S55.