ence and in the second decade of the twentieth
century, when the deeper meanings of evolution are being revealed, and
the philosophy of Bergson is spoken about on the housetops, that he was
wrong? In these views may he not become the peer of Darwin?

At first blush it may seem to be a bad example of special pleading to
attempt to discover the reason for his opposition to vaccination in his
idealism. But it is not far from the truth. He believed in a Ministry of
Public Health, that doctors should be servants of the State, and that
they should be paid according as they kept people well and not ill.
Health is the natural condition of the human body when it is properly
sustained and used. And chemicals, even in sickness, are of less
importance than fresh air, light and proper food. He ridiculed, too, the
notion of unhealthy places. "It is like," he wrote to Mr. Birch, "the
old idea that every child must have measles, and the sooner the better."
To the same correspondent, who was contemplating going into virgin
forests and who expressed his fear of malaria, he replied: "There is no
special danger of malaria or other diseases in a dense forest region. I
am sure this is a delusion, and the dense virgin forests, even when
swampy, are, in a state of nature, perfectly healthy to live in. It is
man's tampering with them, and man's own bad habits of living, that
render them unhealthy. Having now gone over all Spruce's journals and
letters during his twelve years' life in and about the Amazonian
forests, I am sure this is so. And even where a place is said to be
notoriously 'malarious,' it is mostly due not to infection only but to
predisposition due to malnutrition or some bad mode of living. A person
living healthily may, for the most part, laugh at such terrors. Neither
I nor Spruce ever got fevers when we lived in the forests and were able
to get wholesome food." "Health," he said to the present writer, "is the
best resistant to disease, and not the artificial giving of a mild form
of a disease in order to render the body immune to it for a season.
Vaccination is not only condemned upon the statistics which are used to
uphold it, but it is a false principle--unscientific, and therefore
doomed to fail in the end." Besides which, he believed in mental
healing, and had recorded definite and certain benefit from spiritual
"healers." And he reminded himself that amongst doctors (witness the
blind opposition encountered by Lister's dis