In the presence of five thousand surgeons a great annual convention of the American College of Surgeons, held in the city of Chicago, was opened by its founder, Dr. Franklin H. Martin, with the significant question, "Gentlemen, how much is it worth to be well?" I don't know the answer, do you?
We might ask the young man of twenty, whose body is being literally eaten away in living death by the cruel killer cancer. His nights of pain are spent in sleepless tossings upon his bed. His days drag out wearily with not a ray of hope that his dreams of a life of happiness and accomplishment might ever be realized.
According to a recent statistical report of the American Cancer Society "more children from three to fifteen years of age die of cancer than from any other disease."
We might seek the answer to Dr. Martin's question from the young man of twenty-four who is panicky with a sense of pending dissoludon as he suffers the violent, gripping, viselike pains of a coronary attack. This often fatal malady, and new "captain of the men of death," is our greatest killer. Organic disease of the heart claims the lives of three hundred thousand Americans every twelve months. It is regrettable that the majority of its victims are in the most productive period of life. In fact, some of them are scarcely out of their teens.
Is this wanton waste of human life but a decree of fate? Has nature decreed that cancer "should strike one of four living Americans"? This is the frightening estimate of the American Cancer Society. Or has nature decreed that premature death from organic disease of the heart should become the nation's number one killer?
What Price Health?
Some years ago I had under my care in one of our sanitariums a man who was suffering intensely. He was the originator of a famous liniment, widely advertised for the relief of pain, but his liniment was quite ineffective for the relief of his own case. At the close of a hectic day he said to his nurse, "I will deed to you free of all encumbrance one of the best farms in the State of Massachusetts for one night's freedom from pain." How much is it worth to be well?
There was a young woman in Hollywood, California, Elaine St. Maur, "whose shapely hands were so much in demand by sculptors and artists that she had them insured for S150,000." How much are your hands worth? What would you take for your eyesight and become stone blind? What would you take for your hearing and become as deaf as the proverbial post? What would you take for a sound heart and suffer coronary attacks?—for normal lungs and develop tuberculosis or cancer? How much would you accept of earth's treasure in exchange for your health and spend your remaining days upon an invalid's bed, or in a wheel chair, enduring dreary, sleepless nights of tossing in pain and weariness? Whatever may be the price of good health, it is worth all it costs to be well, although to many it would seem the price is adjudged too high.
What price vigorous health, what price physical fitness and efficiency, what price freedom from pain, what price longevity? Are these priceless treasures bestowed by the whims or the caprice of the gods as some ancients believed, or by some chance dispensation of Providence? Is disease casual or is it causal? Is ill health but an accident? Does nature do her work at random by some game of chance, or in response to divinely ordered laws of physical peace written indelibly upon every organ and tissue of the body—upon the heart, upon the stomach, upon the liver, upon the lungs, upon the nerves and the brain?
Mental Derelicts
"Mental illness has become America's most shocking neglect. At the present rate," according to the Oklahoma Association for Mental Health, "one in every twelve children born this year will someday require mental treatment."
Mental derelicts are crowding our State institutions. Six hundred and fifty thousand of these intellectually dead or deranged occupy more than half of the total hospital beds in America. According to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company there are now more than 171,000 new admissions per year to our mental hospitals, and the annual cost to the taxpayer for their care is in excess of $1 billion, "not to mention the incalculable losses in man power." Forty per cent of the inmates of these hospitals are cases of dementia praecox—dementia of youth—that is, mentally deranged young people.
Is there no cause for this blot upon our vaunted intellectual progress and our boasted enlightenment and culture? The cause is not obscure. Too many youth of today, and not a few of their elders, live upon thrills, upon mental excitement. Life for them is one dizzy whirl, a screaming merry-go-round. The tempo of life has become enormously speeded up. Faster, faster is the demand, but nature cannot for long endure such strain; therefore they resort to stimulants to speed them up, and to narcotics to slow them down, to enable them to keep up this dizzy pace until enraged nature snaps with a nervous and mental breakdown. These props include everything from liquor, cigarettes, caffeine, happiness pills, and goofball barbiturates to marihuana and heroin.
Passing by the stronger nerve props of the dope addicts, lqt us take a look at the supposedly harmless and innocent drug, caffeine—the most widely used drug in America.
Caffeine, America's Most Widely Used Drug
The United States Government says there are seventy-one brands of cola drinks. These coffee cocktails contribute no small share to the breakdown of youth. With few exceptions, every bottle of these cola beverages is spiked with from two thirds to one grain of the powerful drug caffeine.
Is caffeine, the alkaloid of tea, coffee, and cola drinks, the innocent, harmless drug that many suppose it to be, so that even children may consume it copiously without deleterious effects? Drs. Fisk and Crawford, directors of the New York Life Extension Institute, write:
Yet such substances (as the acid extractives) must be regarded as much less harmful in their effects than so powerful a drug as caffeine which exercises a positive action on such important organs as the heart, brain and nervous system.—Periodic Health Examination, p. 278.
Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, one time chief of the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S. Government, said:
The most common drug in this country is caffeine. Your children, innocent of any knowledge of its deleterious effects, consume it freely. They do this to their great physical and mental detriment. . . . Caffeine is the essential alkaloid of coffee as thein is of tea, both are dangerous and detrimental drugs.
In his textbook of pharmacology (1952 ed., p. 879), Dr. William T. Salter, professor of pharmacology, Yale University School of Medicine, says:
The chief problem . . . is the possible chronic effect on the central nervous system . . . increased irritability, loss of sleep, palpitation of the heart, and even muscular tremors. Such effects are due to chronic mild intoxication with caffeine. . . . The nervous effects are due primarily to caffeine. Certain widely used soft drinks contain as much caffeine as ordinary coffee.
Caffeine Drug Addiction
Dr. W. A. Evans, who for a quarter of a century was health commissioner of Chicago, wrote:
Coffee is a drug. . . . From the standpoint of public hygiene the coffee question is worthwhile. It is much the most wide-spread form of drug addiction.
Dr. O. T. Osborne, former professor of therapeutics at Yale University, says:
There is no question but that the caffeine habit can be acquired. Whether as such (perhaps in the form of cola drink) or as a tea or coffee habit, cola beverage, tea and coffee fiends are of common occurrence. . .. The very fact that these beverages are such nerve stimulants should prohibit their use by children, by the same decision (a cola drink) should not be a beverage for a child. The tea and coffee, or other caffeine habits may be readily acquired by anyone and may do as much harm in some cases as alcohol and tobacco.
How strangely familiar these recent scientific medical statements sound when compared with that which was written ninety-three years ago by Ellen G. White.
Revealed Truth and Scientific Confirmation
In 1864, Mrs. White wrote, "Tea and coffee are stimulating. Their effects are similar to those of tobacco."—Counsels on Diet and Foods, p. 425.
The effect of tea and coffee, as heretofore shown, tends in the same direction as that of wine and cider, liquor and tobacco. . . . In some cases it is as difficult to break up the tea-and-coffee habit as it is for the inebriate to discontinue the use of liquor. —Christian Temperance, pp. 34, 35.
The use of tea and coffee is also injurious to the system. To a certain extent, tea produces intoxication. . . . Tea is poisonous to the system. Christians should let it alone. The influence of coffee is in a degree the same as tea, but the effect upon the system is still worse.—Testimonies, vol. 2, pp. 64, 65.
Revealed truth does not require scientific confirmation. It is no more the truth after science has belatedly demonstrated and confirmed it than it was prior to such confirmation.
As Dr. Paul D. White, heart consultant to President Eisenhower, said, "As to unequivocal proof, perhaps some of us shouldn't wait for scientific answers. We may be dead by the time the scientists' answers come along."
Now a final statement from the pen of Mrs. White.
Tea and coffee drinking is a sin, an injurious indulgence, which like other evils, injures the soul.—Counsels on Diet and Foods, p. 425.
Can any habit harm the body and not affect the mind and the soul? The Holy Bible says, "Eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness" (Isa. 55:2). "And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul" (Ps. 106:15). And again, "If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are" (1 Cor. 3:17).
First Rule for the Preservation of Health
The very first rule for the preservation of health and the "policy" that provides the very best life insurance is, keep all poisons out of your body. How is it so many fail to heed so rational a principle? It is sane, sensible, sound, and scientific!
Why should man poison his own blood stream? The blood is the life. Nothing should be taken in food, in drink, or in air, which can poison the crimson current of life. Is that really too big a price to pay for buoyant energy, joyous living, a clear brain, and a lengthened life span?
The average youth of our day could easily add one, two, or three decades to his span of years. But some gay thrill seeker asks: "What, you don't drink? You don't smoke? You don't chew? You don't dope? What do you do? Don't you have any enjoyment or pleasure in life? Can't you have any fun?" Oh, fascinating delusion, fantastic mirage! Is the cost too high?
Is there no fun except in fetters that bind you? Are there no pleasures except in poisons that enslave you? Is there no enjoyment or vivacity except in vices that destroy you? Is there any pleasure in the gripping pains of a coronary attack, or in the stabbing, lancinating pains of a "crisis" of locomotor ataxia? Is there any exhilaration in the frightening hallucinations of delirium tremens? Is there any real pleasure in poisons that befog inhibitions and the mind, that open to men the gates to Federal prisons, and that close and bar the pearly portals of Paradise? Is there any thrill in a leap to sucide?
Has not the devil in fact sold to the youth of today—and to many adults for that matter—a false bill of goods? The modern philosophy—let us eat, drink, smoke, play, and make life a grand carnival, a dizzy whirl of sensual pleasures and thrills—is not the path to happiness. It is not the highway to health. It cannot be the road to longevity. Instead it is a short cut to disappointment, to disillusionment, to defeat, and to early physical disaster. It is the most direct route to the cemetery.
Who gets the most fun, the most enjoyment out of life, the culprit or the Christian?
Only the Christian knows the true meaning of life and experiences the unalloyed pleasure, the true joys and thrills, of real living. He alone has "promise of the life that now is" and a blessed hope for the life that "is to come" (1 Tim. 4:8).
