Preventable Diseases

Synopsis

Preventable Diseases is a guide book on hygiene and health written by Woods Hutchinson, an English American physician and health writer who promoted the consumption of red meat and strongly opposed to the ideas of vegetarianism. He has written many books including "Studies in Human and Comparative Pathology," and  "Instinct and Health".

Excerpts from Chapters:

The human body as a mechanism is far from perfect. It can be beaten or surpassed at almost every point by some product of the machine-shop or some animal. It does almost nothing perfectly or with absolute precision. As Huxley most unexpectedly remarked a score of years ago, "If a manufacturer of optical instruments were to hand us for laboratory use an instrument so full of defects and imperfections as the human eye, we should promptly decline to accept it and return it to him. But," as he went on to say, "while the eye is inaccurate as a microscope, imperfect as a telescope, crude as a photographic camera, it is all of these in one." In other words, like the body, while it does nothing accurately and perfectly, it does a dozen different things well enough for practical purposes. It has the crowning merit, which overbalances all these minor defects, of being able to adapt itself to almost every conceivable change of circumstances.

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