Why, then--to come to practical suggestions--should there not be
opened in every great town in these realms a public school of
health? It might connect itself with--I hold that it should form
an integral part of--some existing educational institute. But it
should at least give practical lectures, for fees small enough to
put them within the reach of any respectable man or woman, however
poor, I cannot but hope that such schools of health, if opened in
the great manufacturing towns of England and Scotland, and,
indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast, would obtain pupils in
plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit by what they hear.
The people of these towns are, most of them, specially accustomed
by their own trades to the application of scientific laws. To
them, therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a
fresh set of facts, would have nothing strange in it. They have
already something of that inductive habit of mind which is the
groundwork of all rational understanding or action. They would
not turn the deaf and contemptuous ear with which the savage and
the superstitious receive the revelation of nature's mysteries.
Why should not, with so hopeful an audience, the experiment be
tried far and wide, of giving lectures on health, as supplementary
to those lectures on animal physiology which are, I am happy to
say, becoming more and more common? Why should not people be
taught--they are already being taught at Birmingham--something
about the tissues of the body, their structure and uses, the
circulation of the blood, respiration, chemical changes in the air
respired, amount breathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption,
secretion, structure of the nervous system--in fact, be taught
something of how their own bodies are made and how they work?
Teaching of this kind ought to, and will, in some more civilised