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 age and country, be held a necessary element in the
school-course of every child, just as necessary as reading, writing, and
arithmetic; for it is after all the most necessary branch of that