Learning to Live In advocating (in his presidential address to
the British Medical Association) the establishment of health hostels where men and women would learn in effect how to order their physical lives, Lord Dawson of Penn opened up a highly interesting line not merely of thought but of practical activity. Life is a very haphazard business with most of us. We eat what we are given to eat, with little thought of whether it is the best thing, or even a good thing, for us. We take too little physical exercise, or occasionally too much. We worry about trivial ailments or ignore plain warnings of graver trouble. Lord Dawson's idea, it would seem, is that the average man and woman would be all the better for a week or a fortnight in an institution that is essentially not a hospital, where no encouragement would be given to hypochondriacs, but whose inmates would be given periodical overhaul and advised not merely on the ordinary rules of health, but on any special regime their personal physique and state of health might call for. Probably half the illnesses men suffer from could have been prevented if they had taken themselves in hand in time, and the prophylactic value of Lord Dawson's " health hostels " is not open to doubt.
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