ILLNESS PREVENTABLE.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 June 1923, Page 7

ILLNESS PREVENTABLE.

A SPECIALIST’S VIEWS. By Telegraph.—Press Asan.—Copyright. London, June 13. Dr. Leonard Williams, a Harley Street specialist, made some refreshingly original comments upon illness when addressing the Aldwych Club on physiological efficiency. He said that if we get an Illness we should not be pitied as victims, but condemned as fools. A “martyr to rheumatism” was just as fantastic a phrase as a “martyr to delirium 1 tremens” would be. We must learn to divest ourselves of the idea that there is something Heaven-sent and inevitable about illness. In a greater or less degree, chiefly greater, all disease was preventable. If one estimated the average life of the lower animals in relation to the time taken to reach maturity, the normal life span of man ought to -be 120 to 140 years. When man attained maturity it was his duty to maintain that physical state as long as possible; instead he generally set about to impair it as fast as possible. When he had thus urgently summoned every Imaginable microbe to reside within him he sought our sympathy.