J. F. Campbell Collection > Address to the middle classes upon the subject of gymnastic exercises

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But where sloth and gluttony are rife, physicians
will abound. Their art is indispensable, in a state
of society, where men live in the daily violation of
all the fundamental laws and common principles of
nature. It is the triumph of the art of healing,
that, in an age when men eat as much in a day as
they ought in a week, and only walk in a week as
much as they ought in a day, its resources should
have extended human longevity beyond the limits it
had reached in less civilized ages. But though
human life is prolonged, its enjoyment is diminished,
for the follies and vices of man have aggravated
and multiplied his maladies.
Every age and clime has its peculiar and fashion-
able distempers, which, superseding others, estahlish
their own vicious predominance. These have their
origin far less in the climate, than in the diet and
habits of that society in which they prevail. Every
stage of society, from barbarism to civilisation, has
its specific complaints, and a very slight acquaint-
ance with medicine or medical history will enable
the student to predicate, from the social condition of
a nation, the diseases that torment it. In fact, all
these successive stages are marked by characteristic
disorders. In an uncivilised age the inflammatory,
in a civilised, the nervous predominate. Our an-
cestors suffered from a class of ailments now com-
paratively rare, such as plethora and fevers, ailments
produced by redundance of blood, or by violent ex-
cesses in gluttony and wine. In these days prevail
complaints of the heart, complaints of the brain.