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Seções: Índice Geral Seção Atual: Índice Obra: Índice Anterior: 15. Sobre o “Bebê” Seguinte: 17. Sobre a Cultura da Beleza, Graça e Saúde na Juventude – II
(p. 121)16. SOBRE A CULTURA DA BELEZA,GRAÇA E SAÚDE NA JUVENTUDE – I
MY DEAR SIBYL, – You are wise to turn your attention to the care and culture of beauty in your children, and I will gladly do what I can to be useful to you in your laudable design. It is far easier to lend a helping hand to Nature in the development of good looks during childhood and youth than to correct her mistakes in adult age. For the body as well as the mind is most susceptible of impression and training in early years, and, if one may so speak, the habit of beauty is easier to acquire then than in any subsequent period of life. Mothers ought, therefore, if they wish their sons and daughters to grow up fair, straight, and well-formed, to superintend their physical education with a care as great as that bestowed on their intellectual culture, never allowing the interests of the former to be sacrificed to those of the latter, as is now too often the case in these days of relentless cramming and perpetual examinations. It is a priceless good for a boy to be handsome, for a girl to be beautiful, and for both to be healthy, graceful, and strong of limb; but these blessings are not altogether fairy gifts, – they can, in most cases, be made or marred at will, and the power of withholding or conferring them is chiefly vested in the hands of the mother. Under the head of “beauty” I include, of course, health and good (p. 122)sense, for no boy or girl can be really beautiful who is either sickly or foolish. A weakly body, a pallid skin – pace Mr. Burne Jones – or a vacant expression of face cannot but be considered inimical to physical charms.
Every mother should, if possible, nurse her own baby, supposing, of course, that she is healthy and able to undertake the duty in question with comfort and success. When weaned, the milk of cows, goats, or asses should for a full year form the staple alimentation of the child, with a small allowance of some light farinaceous food, such as that I recommended in my letter to Mrs. Cameron. As, in that letter, I gave many minute directions for the preparation of baby-foods and the management of infants, and as you can easily turn to it for details, I will not now dwell on the subject of nursery cookery and hygiene with regard to the first period of existence, but will devote myself to the consideration of the diet and manner of life to which children should be accustomed from the age of two years and upwards.
And this is the place to say a few words on the question of heredity. We are all of us branches of a tree, part and parcel of the stock from which we spring. One of the commonest errors of unthinking or uninformed people is to speak and write on the subject of physical education as though every child were an independent and isolated product of Nature, capable of being developed to a condition of perfection exactly proportionate to the method and amount of training which he or she personally receives. This is very far indeed from being the case. Environment, of course, may do much in the way of modification, but it can only modify the material on which it operates, and this material is vastly different in different individuals. We are not ourselves only; we are the representatives or deputy selves of our parents, (p. 123)grandparents, and collateral relatives. To use a suggestive metaphor, it may be said that children are but newly-issued editions of old compositions, re-bound and corrected, with fresh introductions, modern print and headpieces, but the text is that of former editions handed down from generation to generation. If the parents on either side, their progenitors, or even remoter ancestors, have been gluttonous, intemperate or otherwise vicious physically or mentally, the children of such a line will bear about in their bodies and intellects the fruits and results of these defects. Drunken habits in the father may show themselves as epilepsy in the son; luxuriousness in the father may produce gout or liver disease in the son; and other sins will visit themselves on the offspring of the sinner in many terrible and even loathsome forms of malady.
Consumption, insanity, rheumatism, asthma, heart complaint, cancer, Blight’s disease, hysteria, deafness, blindness, imbecility, and many other more or less painful and mortal disorders, are hereditary penalties imposed by a vicarious law upon the sons and daughters of those who have lived amiss, whether ignorantly or wilfully. For Nature does not stop to ask whether infringement of her mandates is deliberate Of unwitting; her law is inflexible; she knows neither caprice nor forgiveness. “Punishment,” says Hegel, “is not something arbitrary, it is the other half of crime.” Or, again, in more definite terms, we are told in the Pali Dhammapada that “evil deeds, like newly-drawn milk, do not all at once turn sour,” but the sourness is nevertheless inevitable, sooner or later; “pain follows trespass as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.” And if we turn to the Hebrew prophet we read: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the (p. 124)teeth of the children are set on edge,” – a figure which admirably pourtrays the law of heredity, inasmuch as the real offender against Nature frequently escapes almost wholly the reckoning which his child has to defray by lifelong suffering. Thus it is often said, “Robinson drank two or three bottles of port every night of his life, and died in a green old age without a symptom of gout.” Investigation would probably show that “Robinson” had healthy and temperate parents, the benefit of whose virtue he enjoyed in his own person. But the son of “Robinson” has a poor chance. He will get the gout that his father has earned, or, may be, something worse. Heredity is, then, a factor in our lives which may be either for good or for evil. In scientific parlance it may be either physiological or pathological. Physiological heredity, or transmitted health, is, however, more uncertain and limited in its character than pathological heredity, or transmitted disease. It is seldom that the effects of right living hold their own against the mistakes of posterity throughout six generations. Yet this is undoubtedly the case with the effects of evil living against attempts to counteract them. Sometimes, in cases where the lives of the immediate parents of some afflicted child have been irreproachable from the physiological point of view, inquiry elicits the fact that the habits of a grandparent, or even of some remoter relative, were irregular.
Insanity, idiotcy, epilepsy, and gout may be mentioned as diseases especially liable to develop in alternate generations. Sometimes even two or more generations may be missed, and reversion may occur in a third or fourth remove. Nevertheless, Nature always tends, in the long run, to eliminate diseased conditions; the physiological state is the regular and normal state; the pathologica, is the abnormal and accidental. Every generation, therefore, (p. 125)of an infected stock exhausts a portion of the poison, and so attenuates it that at length it becomes wholly purged away. The seventh generation is, by most medical authorities, regarded as that which establishes the boundary line of the hereditary transmission of any special malady.
Three principal features, as a rule, distinguish hereditary complaints: the marked severity of their symptoms, – often wholly disproportionate to the accidental cause by which their manifestation is provoked: their tendency to relapse easily, and to assume a periodical or habitual type; and their custom of appearing for the first time in a new subject at the same epoch of life and in the same organs as in the previous generation. Some hereditary diseases of the more virulent kind, such as scrofula, tubercle, epilepsy, and skin disorders appear in early infancy, and render necessary the most stringent and incessant vigilance from the hour of birth. Others, such as rheumatism, asthma, hysteria, and heart disease, appear later, or await some provocative cause to manifest themselves for the first time; others again, as cancer, gout, kidney and arterial disease, develop in middle age, or even towards the close of life. Consanguineous marriages in families affected with any special taint have a most disastrous influence on the offspring, which thus inherit, as it were, a double portion of morbific virus, and are apt to manifest the malady common to both parents in a violent and speedily fatal form.
I cannot quit this interesting and important subject of inherited health and disease, without reminding you of the effect which a wet nurse may have upon the physical and even mental constitution of the child she rears. A nurse of scrofulous, cancerous, or rheumatic tendency, for instance, may infect a nurseling in no way related to (p. 126)her; and diseases too horrible to name may be conveyed by her milk. I know a remarkable case, in which the whole mental type of an individual appears to have been modified by that of the foster-mother; the child in question, now grown to manhood, exactly resembling in disposition and idiosyncrasy the woman who nursed him, not the mother who bore him, nor, so far as can be ascertained, any of his proper relatives. Such facts show how highly important it is for those mothers who are forced to confide the nourishment of their infants to strangers, to make a judicious and careful choice, assisted by professional guidance, and by a knowledge not only of the person, but of the antecedents of the substitute selected.
Seções: Índice Geral Seção Atual: Índice Obra: Índice Anterior: 15. Sobre o “Bebê” Seguinte: 17. Sobre a Cultura da Beleza, Graça e Saúde na Juventude – II
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