A man, therefore, (so they say) should carry his
profession or trade into prison with him if possible; if not, he must
earn his living by the nearest thing to it that he can; but if he be a
gentleman born and bred to no profession, he must pick oakum, or write
art criticisms for a newspaper.
These people say further, that the greater part of the illness which
exists in their country is brought about by the insane manner in which it
is treated.
They believe that illness is in many cases just as curable as the moral
diseases which they see daily cured around them, but that a great reform
is impossible till men learn to take a juster view of what physical
obliquity proceeds from. Men will hide their illnesses as long as they
are scouted on its becoming known that they are ill; it is the scouting,
not the physic, which produces the concealment; and if a man felt that
the news of his being in ill-health would be received by his neighbours
as a deplorable fact, but one as much the result of necessary antecedent
causes as though he had broken into a jeweller's shop and stolen a
valuable diamond necklace--as a fact which might just as easily have
happened to themselves, only that they had the luck to be better born or
reared; and if they also felt that they would not be made more
uncomfortable in the prison than the protection of society against
infection and the proper treatment of their own disease actually
demanded, men would give themselves up to the police as readily on
perceiving that they had taken small-pox, as they go now to the
straightener when they feel that they are on the point of forging a will,
or running away with somebody else's wife.
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