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XVI. OF THE PHYSICAL JOURNAL OR ACCOUNT.

THE journal opened for the physical department will embrace all that concerns health; the means of preserving it, if good; of strengthening and improving it, if weak; and of recruiting and re-establishing it, if injured and impaired. It will form in time a valuable body of practical information, and may be intituled: Physical Report; Health and Diseases.

The science of the preservation of health, to which our continental neighbours have given the name of hygiene, seems to embrace three principal conditions, or qualities, concurring in its particular object: cleanliness, sobriety, and temperance. Cleanliness extends to whatever is used by man, to every thing about him, to his person, to his apparel, to his habitation, to all that he

to be wished that history, which ought to furnish a grand experimental and moral course of the study of the human heart, were written by men susceptible of feeling strongly themselves, and capable of powerfully affecting the feelings of others. Historians would then transfuse into the souls of their readers the sensations and impressions which were produced by the events, and which would be renewed in future generations by the living pictures of those events delineated with truth and energy, and presented in all their freshness to the eyes of posterity.

touches, to the very air that he breathes.*Sobriety attends to the choice and quality of the food most favourable to health, and the proportions in which it ought to be used. Lastly, temperance, which comprises continence, and which is one of the connecting links between the physical and moral man, consists in repressing envy, lust, and the malignant passions, which sour the temper, disturb the intellectual and moral func

*We learn from the narrative of Cook's voyages that this celebrated navigator, who owed part of his renown to his extraordinary skill in the art of guiding, governing, and preserving men, found means, by the establishment of judicious and severe regulations, to introduce an admirable degree of cleanliness among his crews, and with it almost all the other virtues. Cleanliness alone, converted into a habit and a want, produced among those rough seamen sobriety and temperance, and from these flowed almost all the other good moral habits. Order, docility, discipline, silence, harmony, and friendship, prevailed among them, conjointly with health of body, and the eontent of mind which results from all these things. Hence Cook lost but a very small number of his companions in his long and dangerous voyages.

Persons who have contracted a habit of extreme cleanliness hold in abhorrence drunkenness, gluttony, and all the brutal passions, the excesses of which at once disgust the senses and degrade man in the eye of reason. A constant attention to personal cleanliness causes us to feel a higher respect for ourselves, and induces a desire to keep our souls pure and well-regulated, like our bodies.

tions, and by a necessary consequence derange the regular order of the physical functions also. In the physical journal will be entered, as they occur, the principal observations that may result from the constant study of, and thorough acquaintance with, our constitution. We shall easily ascertain by experience, and by close attention to ourselves, what things agree or disagree with us. We shall collect many facts worthy of notice respecting the differences of constitution observed in others; also concerning the variations of climate, gradual and successive, or sudden and irregular, in the different seasons, in different countries, in different days of the year, nay sometimes in different parts of the same day; and concerning the manner in which they seem to affect the physical constitution. We shall note down, on critical and important occasions, the good or ill effects of different bodily exercises, practised in moderation or to excess; of different kinds of food; of sleep more or less prolonged; of forced vigils; of extreme application of the mind; of excessive heat; of wet weather, hot and cold; and the different influences of variations of diet on the temper and character. Lastly, the relations between the physical state and the moral state, between the physical state and the intellectual

state, and between these three states, considered either separately or collectively, and in their mutual action and re-action, will furnish occasion for many particular observations, that will prove useful and instructive in practice. The art of preserving health is one of the grand means of economising time and life.

By pursuing the method here pointed out, a person will soon qualify himself to be his own physician,* and will be able to chuse with perfect confidence the diet, regimen, and exercises best adapted to his constitution. He will at least have it in his power to furnish a physician, in case of need, with positive information, which may materially tend to guide his judgment in regard to the mode of treatment proper to be pursued.+

* According to Suetonius, the Emperor Tiberius frequently observed, that he could not conceive how it happened that a man of thirty should not be capable of being his own physician.

+ If each individual of the reflecting and observing class of mankind were to keep an account of the state and variations of his health at certain periods, and to collect his remarks on the causes to which the alterations of his physical constitution, and the derangement or the re-establishment of his functions, are attributable, such particular histories of the human body, considered in numerous individuals, would furnish physiology and medicine with useful materials. I presuppose that these histo

He will collect other analogous observations, relative to methods easily practicable, and to the remedies usually employed in the most common disorders. He will practise this precept given, if I recollect rightly, by Boerhaave,—to keep the head cool, the feet warm, and the body open.* He will be capable not only of managing himself, but also of giving occasionally advice serviceable to others. The knowledge thus acquired, according to circumstances, either in conversation with well-informed persons, or in the examination of the different facts witnessed by himself, will afford the twofold advantage of preserving him from empirics who make so many dupes and victims, and of enabling him to perform acts of beneficence. "Every man," says Hippocrates," should strive to acquire at least a slight tincture of medicine, which is the art that most nearly concerns

ries should be drawn up with care and fidelity; that is to say, composed of real and circumstantial facts, accurately observed, well authenticated, selected with discernment, and calculated to lead to evident consequences, and to luminous and instructive results.

* Old Parr, who attained the age of one hundred and fiftytwo years, is said to have followed and inculcated these rules for the preservation of health :---" Keep your feet warm by exercise, your head cool through temperance; never eat till you are hungry, nor drink but when nature requires it."

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