Education and self-improvement, founded on physiology and phrenology, or, what constitutes good heads and bodies, and how to make them good, by enlarging deficiencies and diminishing excesses / by O. S. Fowler.

  • Fowler, O. S. (Orson Squire), 1809-1887.
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Education and self-improvement, founded on physiology and phrenology, or, what constitutes good heads and bodies, and how to make them good, by enlarging deficiencies and diminishing excesses / by O. S. Fowler. 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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    us with the sight of pain which cannot be relieved ? Or Com- bativeness, to quarrel, or engage in street brawls, or cause neighborhood animosities and bickerings? Or Destructive- ness, to devastate whole countries with war, and blood, and every conceivable form of human suffering ?—to make the loving wife a lonely widow ; and the happy child a helpless orphan ; and to end the lives of millions by a death the most painful and horrible ! Or appetite, to gormandize, and offer up all that is virtuous and happy in our nature at the shrine of loathsome drunkenness ? Or Approbativeness, to pinch the feet of the suffering Chinese, or distort the waist and has- ten the death of the simple American, or deform the head of the savage Indian ? Or Self-Esteem, to wade through seas of blood to thrones of despotism, and rule with a tyrant's rod? Or Veneration, to produce all the abominations of paganism, together with all the bigotry of Christendom ? Or Construct- iveness, (with Causality) to invent and execute instruments of death, or the agonizing rack ? Or Acquisitiveness, to cheat, and rob,and with Destructiveness, to murder? Or Causality, to plot mischief and work destruction? Or Parental love, to be lacerated with anguish inexpressible by the death of a lovely child, or of a whole group of beautiful and happy sons and daughters ? Or Adhesiveness, to mourn the loss of near and dear friends, by death or treachery ? Or Connubial love, to weep distracted and inconsolable over the grave of a lovely wife, or a fond husband ; and that, perhaps, after every child has been buried, every means of support extorted, every earthly pleasure blasted, and loathsome, painful disease prey- ing on their inmost vitals, and opening the dark, yawning grave at their feet ? No ! Never ! The poles are not opposite to each other more than these results are the antipodes of their legitimate functions—their only constitutional product! Nor is there a single organ or contrivance of the body, nor faculty of the mind, nor arrangement of our nature, the natural, ap- propriate action of which causes pain, or produces any thing but happiness. To suppose otherwise, would be a libel on the God of Heaven—a reflection on both His power and His goodness; as well as in open hostility to fact. Whence, then, this wide-spread misery ? Did Eve's eating