Thoughts on health and some of its conditions / [James Hinton].

  • Hinton, James, 1822-1875
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thoughts on health and some of its conditions / [James Hinton]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    creature drew its breath—that life must depend on death, and growth spring from decay. Disease, decay—we think of them as enemies, but they are in truth our earliest nurses. They cherished our infant life, therefore they come to gather our last breath. Our last breath, do we call it ? Is it not our first true breathing rather ? The heralds of life throng around the death-bed, and the same hands that nur- tured our earliest days minister to our last. It is even so : so it should be, and must. Death and decay, heralds of life they were—and are ; where the new life dawns and the trembling spirit thrills on the brink of a new world, there the appointed forerunners and ministers of life must be. Without death we could not enter upon life ; without processes which are essentially those we know as processes of disease, we never could have drawn our vital breath ; it is by loss we gain, by failure we succeed. Dying is a birth we witness from the outer side ; we see but the departing, not the coming life : even as in this life, so called, it is but the one side we see, and that—is it not the wrong ? Is it not in the failing heart, the sinking pulse, the strife abandoned, that life is revealed ?—a life of higher energies, and wider sphere, of which the yielded breath and fading- strength of man may well give promise.