1.H 01. What is Health
What is Health?
Let me tell you that when I speak of health I do not mean merely not being sick. I divide people into, first, the sick folk; secondly, the not-sick folk; thirdly, the almost-healthy folk; and fourthly and they are the elect the folk that are healthy. What I mean by "health" is such a feeling or tone in every part of a man’s body or system that he has the natural language of health. What is the natural language of health? Look at four-months-old puppies, and see. Look at kittens, and see. Look at children, from the time they are three or four or five years old. Look at young men, when they are at school and at the academy. They cannot eat enough, nor holloa enough, nor run enough, nor wrestle enough. They are just full. It is buoyancy. It is the insatiable desire of play and of exertion. The nature of the human constitution, in a state of health, is to be a creative instrument or agent; and the necessity in a man to be creating outside of himself is one of the noblest tokens of health. When one has been kept at work and under the yoke, he has played off his surplus energy in the various channels of his business activities. We do not expect a man to bound and caper about, for the simple reason that he has other legitimate channels to work off his steam in. But let him get a vacation, He goes to the White Mountains. He has three or four days of uncaring rest and nights of long sleep, and then lie awakes to the stimulus of the mountains. "Well," he says, " I feel like a boy again;" which is only another way of saying, " I feel my health." His system is not perverted. He is rested in all his parts, and that vast amount of energy and vitality which he generates, hut which in the city was worked off in professional labours and social relations, is now being collected again the measure of the instrument is filled, and it pours over. A man in health is a fountain, and he Hows over at the eye, at the lip, and all the time, by every species of action and demonstration.
I have often seen what are called over-shot wheels, where they have a very small and weak stream.
They get a wheel of large diameter, and the buckets are made in a peculiar form, sloping from the mouth up. Then comes a little trickling stream which pours down into the big buckets its slow accumulation of water-weight, and it begins to turn the wheel very moderately and gradually, and so it goes. That is about the condition in which average men are working, with just enough power to turn an over shot wheel. But if you have a great, full, strong stream, the mere impact of which on the wheel is enough to turn it, then the wheel is made under shot, and the water comes dashing against the breast and bottom of it, and around it goes promptly and rapidly. The miller says, " What do I care? I have got the whole stream. There is no use in economizing my water; I will let it now/ and the water runs all the time. There are very few men that can afford to run on an under-shot wheel. Al most all men are economists of their resources, because they have not this real high health.