Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin ; with 29 illustrations from drawings by the author.
- George Catlin
- Date:
- 1890
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin ; with 29 illustrations from drawings by the author. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![and no other infected district can be so near to the lungs as an infected mouth. Most habits against !N^ature, if not arrested, run into disease. The habit which has thus far been treated as a liaMty merely, with its evil conse- quences, will here be seen to be worthy of a name, and of being ranked amongst the specific diseases of mankind. Indulged and practised until the mouth is permanently distorted from its natural shape, and in the infectious state above named, acting the unnatural handmaid to the lungs, it gains the locality and speciality of character which characterize diseases, and therefore would prop- erly rank amongst them. ]^o name seems as yet to have been applied to this malady, and no one apparently more expressive at present suggests, than Malo inferno, which (though perhaps not exactly Classic) I would denominate it, and define it to be strictly a human disease, confined chiefly to the Civilized Races of Man, an unnatu- ral and pitiable disfigurement of the human face divine, unlmown to the Brutes, and unallowed by the Savage Races, caused by the careless per- mission of a habit contracted in infancy or child- hood, and submitted to, humbly, through life, under the mistaken belief that it is by an unfor- tunate order of l^ature—its Remedy (in neglect of the specifics to be proposed in the following](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21045495_0062.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
