LITTLE THINGS BY Charles Robert Morrison

Patients themselves make it necessary for the physician to look solemn,
shake his head, compound some bitter but harmless medication, in
order that nature may have a chance to help the frightened, grown-up
child of a imagined ailment.
That is supposed to be the most desirable state of bliss, where one is as
ignorant of the existence of vital organs and their functions, as it is
possible to be. The more one knows, of the little learning sort, the more
certain he is that he has received a death-dealing blow when a slight
pain strikes him in the region of the heart or the lungs, or a little lower
down. Some people cannot regale themselves with the freshness and
wisdom of the annual almanac, issued by some proprietary medical
company, but are sure to feel a sympathetic anxiety, somewhere in their
bodily make-up, calling for that very remedy, which has effected such
marvelous cures in the case of others.
The facts are, the better informed concerning this body of ours and the
things that help or injure it--the better off we are. The introduction of
the study of physiology and hygiene in our public schools, within the
lifetime of those now teaching, and the later requirement of scientific
study of the effects of stimulants and narcotics upon the human
system, has had, and will continue to have, a beneficial influence upon
public health. All laws looking to the abatement of nuisances, plaguespots;
all quarantine regulations; all addresses at institutes, and
lectures devoted to the principles of health, help to prolong life and
make it worth living. We need physicians; we need instruction; we need
rules, regulations, requirements for the public health. But with all these
guides and guards, this body will, in spite of care and patching and
tinkering--die; and out from the material will pass that which animated
it, which gave it personality and power, into another and spiritual body,
eternal in the heavens. It is for the soul within, that the house without,
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