A great surgeon stood before his class to perform a certain operation
which the elaborate mechanism and minute knowledge of modern science
had only recently made possible. With strong and gentle hand he did
his work successfully so far as his part of the terrible business went;
and then he turned to his pupils and said, "Two years ago a safe and
simple operation might have cured this disease. Six years ago a wise
way of life might have prevented it. We have done our best as the case
now stands, but Nature will have her word to say. She does not always
consent to the repeal of her capital sentences." Next day the patient
died.

Apart from accidents, we hold our life largely at will. What business
have seventy-five thousand physicians in the United States? It is our
own fault that even one-tenth of them get a respectable living. What a
commentary upon our modern American civilization that three hundred and
fifty thousand people in this country die annually from absolutely
preventable diseases! Seneca said, "The gods have given us a long
life, but we have made it short." Few people know enough to become
old. It is a rare thing for a person to die of old age. Only three or
four out of a hundred die of anything like old age. But Nature
evidently intended, by the wonderful mechanism of the human body, that
we should live well up to a century.

Thomas Parr, of England, lived to the age of one hundred and fifty-two
years. He was married when he was a hundred and twenty, and did not
leave off work until he was a hundred and thirty. The great Dr. Harvey
examined Parr's body, but found no cause of death except a change of
living. Henry Jenkins, of Yorkshire, England, lived to be a hundred
and sixty-nine, and would probably have lived longer had not the king
brought him to London, where luxuries hastened his death. The court
records of England show that he was a witness in a trial a hundred and
forty years before his death. He swam across a rapid river when he was
a hundred.

There is nothing we are more ignorant of than the physiology and
chemistry of the human body. Not one person in a thousand can
correctly locate important internal organs or describe their use in the
animal economy.

What an insult to the Creator who fashioned them so wonderfully and
fearfully in His own image, that the graduates from our high schools
and even universities, and young women who "finish their education,"
become profici