Companion book of complete membership in the Ralston Health Club : in seventeen departments ; being a complete study of the natural causes and the natural cures of disease, without medicines or apparatus of any kind / by Edmund Shaftesbury [pseud. of Webster Edgerly].

  • Ralston Health Club
Date:
[1895], [©1895]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Companion book of complete membership in the Ralston Health Club : in seventeen departments ; being a complete study of the natural causes and the natural cures of disease, without medicines or apparatus of any kind / by Edmund Shaftesbury [pseud. of Webster Edgerly]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    The world is emerging from its long period of conflict. If you will watch the life of any plant, the aggression of weeds will be seen to cast a doubt over its prospect of thriving; and an unceasing assault of one-kind of foe or another will follow it, until it is over- come. 80 all things come, and so they go. Your body must sooner or later be destroyed by some kind of life. This is the conflict of disease and death. But in other ways and in a larger sense, the human being is in conflict, both as an individual and in aggregate life. What nation ever came into existence, except through con- flict? And what ever maintained its national life against foreign foes or internal dissension, without unremitting efforts? Yet of the thousands of governments that have appeared on the earth, but few remain today, and they are all passing through the era of conflict. The race ofwhich you are an individual has always existed in the throes of conflict. There is no page of secular or sacred writings that does not tell this story over and over again. Be our origin what it may, the race secured its foothold on the globe only through the severest conflicts against wind and weather and all the elments, against disease and war and famine, against passion and intrigue, against accident and design; and we have but to lift the curtain of a century back to see the seething masses of humanity writhing in the throes of almost universal hatred. A generation or two ago life, in most parts of the world, was generally unsafe. Individual existence is one prolonged conflict. Your infancy and youth were passed in safety, but at what peril only those can tell who guarded you by night and day. There are physical foes within and physical foes without; and against these we would ]3rotect you now and always, and we hope your life may be pro- longed through many blessed summers yet to come. But disease preys upon weakened vitality, and mind and heart rule matter. It is this phrase of your life that we wish most earnestly to impress upon you at this meeting. The vitality of life is ruled by the mind's occupation. In epidemics it is seen how easily fear reduces the vitality and gives the body a prey to disease. Instances have been cited time out of mind showing the fatal results of fear and imagination. On the other hand peace and quietude have inspired the longest lives and the nearest approach to perfect health. An English statistician proved by figures that could not be disputed that sovereigns cared