The avoidable causes of disease, insanity, and deformity : a book for the people as well as the profession / by John Ellis.

  • Ellis, John, 1815-1896.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The avoidable causes of disease, insanity, and deformity : a book for the people as well as the profession / by John Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    stricken down by disease and cut off by a premature death; tell me, if the first men on earth, when God breathed into man the breath of life, and he became a living soul, were so created that necessarily nearly one-half of the children born into the world died before they were ten years old, as at present ? Enlightened reason rebels against such a conclusion, and sustains revelation when it teaches that man has fallen. That our race from a primi- tive state of innocence, peace and physical health, has degenera- ted until the darkness of night has shut out from man's spiritual perceptions, the bright rays of the Sun of Heaven; until selfish- ness, violence, vice, and sensualism have sapped even the physi- cal constitutions of the inhabitants of our earth. Evil is not undeveloped good, but the opposite of good, or a perversion of good; nor is falsehood undeveloped truth, but the opposite of truth. Nor are disease and suffering undeveloped health, and happiness; for they hold the same relation to health that evil and falsehood do to goodness and truth; and all progressive increase of disease and suffering, tends towards the destruction of the life of the natural body, in the same manner that an increase of evil and falsehood tends to destroy spiritual and heavenly life in man; for disease and suffering hold the same relation to evil and falsehood that effect does to cause. If man was free from sin he would understand more fully the physical laws by which he is surrounded; and what is even more essen- tial, he would be willing to live in accordance with them; for even the brute creation—the horse, the ox, and sheep, cull the life-giving grass from the same field where grows the poisonous plant, and even the young lamb will rarely touch the deadly laurel, except when driven to it to prevent starvation, when the green grass and other vegetation are covered with snow. The animals in the world, when unperverted by man, live in the order of their creation. But man, standing at the head of the animal kingdom, endowed with freedom, and reason to guide him, is found both physically and mentally, or spiritually per- verted, and he is constantly suffering, both physically and spirit- ually, from the consequences, or penalties which follow the viola- tion of natural and spiritual laws. This fact, of itself, should be