The illusion that perfect health and happiness

Life is an adventure in a world where nothing is static; where unpredictable and ill-understood events constitute dangers that must be overcome, often blindly and at great cost; where man himself, like the sorcerer's apprentice, has set in motion forces that are potentially destructive and may someday escape his control. Every manifestation of existence is a response to stimuli and challenges, each of which constitutes a threat if not adequately dealt with. The very process of living is a continual interplay between the individual and his environment, often taking the form of a struggle resulting in injury or disease. The more creative the individual the less he can hope to avoid danger, for the stuff of creation is made up of responses to the forces that impinge on his body and soul. Complete and lasting freedom from disease is but a dream remembered from imaginings of a Garden of Eden designed for the welfare of man.

The illusion that perfect health and happiness are within man's possibilities has flourished in many different forms throughout history. Primitive religions and folklores are Wont to place in the remote past this idyllic state of paradise on earth; most ancient peoples have in their legends stories of happier times, when men enjoyed long lives during which they remained strong and healthy. In the Old Testament the Patriarchs are said to have lived hundreds of years, while their descendants can hardly aspire to more than threescore and ten. The ancient Greeks believed in the existence of happy races, vigorous and virtuous, in inaccessible parts of the earth. According to their legends, the Hyperboreans and the Scythians in the north, the Ethiopians in the south, lived exempt from toil and warfare, from disease and old age, in everlasting bliss like the dwellers in the Isles of the Blest at the edge of the Western Sea. In Works and Days Hesiod wrote of the golden age when men "feasted gaily, undarkened by sufferings" and "died as if falling asleep." The oldest known medical treatise written in the Chinese language also refers to the health of the happy past. "In Ancient times," states the Yellow Emperor in his Classic of Internal Medicine published in the fourth century B.C., "people lived to a hundred years, and yet remained active and did not become decrepit in their activities. . . . But eventually the tranquil era came to an end, and as men turned more violent they became more vulnerable to noxious influences."

While the events that brought to an end the legendary era of health and happiness were placed in distant countries by the Greeks and in the remote past by the Chinese, the violent changes responsible for increase in emotional and physiological misery are not always vague beliefs arising from the mists of time. For a few peoples, indeed, they are the precise and well-documented memories of recent disasters.

It was as recently as 1864, for example, that the Navajo Indian were overrun by Kit Carson in Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. The destruction of their gardens and peach trees in the innermost holy land of the tribe broke their spirit and terminated their resistance. Twenty-five thousand of "The People" made the long walk to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico, where they were held in captivity until 1868. That year some ten thousand of the survivors were allowed to return and settled in the desertic territory which now constitutes the Navajo reservation. There the tribe succeeded in adapting itself to a peaceful pastoral way of life based on the exploitation of sheep and goats. Living on a diet high in meat products, supplemented with Indian corn, wild berries, fruits and nuts, the Navajos rapidly increased in numbers despite great physical hardships and high infant mortality.