The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1871-10-13

mere sttIlls w NC dt llrpb BlduCc ITO re-
lation between the rail.fall of season
and the number of marriages OF coun-
try; yet philosophers have distinctly
detected this relation, and accurately
determined il. In the same way that
mechanical rule which instructs us that
"what is gained in power is lost in
time,r can, without undue twisting be
made to interpret the relations of inten-
stiles in physiology and in ethics and in
aesthetics quite as well as in physics.
The dynamical formula has been merely
translated into the language of didacti-
cal ethics by Goethe when he so finely
expresses the limitations of human ge-
MUS and in law by saying Thought
expands, but lanes action animates,
but narrows.' What genius gains in
intensity it loses in breadth what is
gained in power is lost in time. And
the law will be found almost universal
in its application to all kinds and quail
ties Of forces. Take the case of the
peach-tree, for instance, which, by Sc
lection, and budding, and cultivation
has been made to yield large crops of a
delicious and noble, but only by the
sacrifice of its natural term of years, and
at the cost of its natural hardy health.
The wild, migrated tree IN Georgia and
Florida bears fruit during forty healthy
years, untroubled by the worm, uncon-
scious Of 1.-the yellows." The average
vitality of the highly productive cult
waited tree in Delaware and Maryland is
scarcely eight years. In the same
way and upon the same principle,
while the collective man has been
able largely to better his condition
and his health through the potent
instrumentalities Of wealth, culture,
and their correlative forces, the individ-
ual man has taken from his health and
shortened his life by thinning his skin
and laying bare his nerves to poignan-
cy of suffering never known in the
remoter ages. This is what is meant by
civilization weakening in proportion as
it retines. Our organizations, under the
dollhouse processes Of modern social
life, are grown more complex and diff
cult; our sensabilities are more acute;
our sympathies reach wider and deeper,
and our passions, endowed with more
tremendous force. are more destructive
and wasting. In consequence of all
this we are more liable to disease, and
less able to resist it; and besides this,
disease is constantly assuming new and
more complex and subtle forms, more
insidious in attack and more trouble
some to eradicate.
Medicine and the doctors have virtu-
ally no vocation here. If, in the olden
times, when men were naturally heal
thy, and mercifully unconscious Of the
acuteness of their nerves and the
fragilities and distemperments of their
organizations when they were ignorant
and credulous, and looked up to their
doctor.priests as the authentic ambassa-
doris Of a divine mission of healing; if
physic and physicians failed then, much
more must they fail now. If they could
not heal the body when man yielded
passively up to them all his mind as an
instrument with which TO work all the
tremendous effects of the imagination,
much less can they heal it now, when
man declines to send his fancy where
they project their wills, when he seri.
ously doubts and mistrusts them, and is
constantly disposed to weigh their
claims to power III the nicely adjusted
scales of intellectual Judgment. The
best the doctor can do, is to work upon
III dividual men provisional sort OF
patchwork, rs % dismantled ship rigs
jurymasts TO bear her to some near
port after a storm. And this sort of
patchwork is only too often like that of
which the candid Snetzler spoke, when
once a rural vestry called him into
consult with them about repairing the
organ in their parish church. "Shen-
tlemens," said the honest old organ
builder, taking pinch of snuff after he
had duly inspected the dilapidated
-Shentlemens, das organ is
wort one hoondert pound. You schpends
init me one hoondert pound more III
dem repairsh. Vel den, das organ will
be wort shoost fifty pound! - This is
upon the rather too liberal assumption
that the machine can be repaired at ALL
In other cases, and numerous ones.
When the artist goes about
To redress her dame, no doubt
Ottentimes he snuts ii out"
Fortunately for society, however, doc
tors do not enjoy any great immunity
from the spirit of the age, and even
their profession, interested as il is in
the contrary proposition,
cannot refuse to suspect occasionally
that. as rule, mankind " mgrd0escu
none the better for physic.
The medical atmosphere of to-day is
indeed strangely rife with mysterious
and numerous specula.
ton agents unknown ethereal inhuen-
cess, > " changes in the type of diseases"
and other roundabout ways of entering
the plea OF ignorance. There is much
more talk nowadays than ever before of
the expediency of flying physic and de-
pending upon the us medicatrir naturG-
that unknown force whose coordinate
functions are immeasurable in numbers,
and whose relations are not TO ne COM
pared with those of my other Of the
powers that regulate humanity. Our
doctors, indeed, still venture to cope
with the diseases of individuals, but
they show a praiseworthy timidity in 80
doing, and tacitly confess to us, by &C.
tons which speak louder than words,
that they have abandoned all claims to
possessing a peculiar faculty for even
patching a broken, unsettled, and un.
nerved generation.
Yet, adverse as al the circumstances
NAV seem the boon of good health