INVALIDS CONDEMNED AS FOOLS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2594, 16 June 1923, Page 3

INVALIDS CONDEMNED AS FOOLS.

SPECIALIST’S ORIGINAL IDEAS. London, 13th June. Dr. Leonard Williams, a Harley Street, specialist, has some refreshingly original comments upon illness. Addressing the Aldwych Club on physiological efficiency, he said, “If we get an illness we should not be pitied as victims, but condemned as fools. The martyr to rheumatism is just as fantastic a phrase as a “martyr to delirium 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, chieby greater, all disease is preventable, if one estimated it on the average life of the lower animals and relation to the time taken to reach maturity, the normal life-span of man ought to be from 120 to 140 years. When man attained maturity, it w'as his duty to maintain that physical state as long as possible, lusead of that he generally sets out to impair it as fast as possible. “When he has thus urgently summoned every imaginable microbe to reside within him, he seeks our sympathy,” declared Dr. Williams.