Health-Giving Habits

All the great peace scouts who have succeeded in exploring or hunting expeditions in wild countries have only been able to get on by knowing how to keep themselves and others healthy. They had to, because diseases, accidents, and wounds might be suffered by them or their men, and they couldn't find doctors in the jungles to cure them. A Scout who does not know something about taking care of himself would never get on at all; he might just as well stay at home for all the good he will be.

Therefore practise keeping healthy yourself, and then you will be able to show others how to keep themselves healthy too. In this way you can do many good turns.

Also, if you know how to look after yourself you need never have to take medicines. The great English poet, Dryden, in his poem, Cymon and Iphigenia, wrote that it was better to trust to fresh air and exercise than to pay doctors' bills to keep yourself healthy:

• "Better to hunt in fields for health unbought
• Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught:
• The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;
• God never made his work for man to mend."

Author

Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell (Chief Scout, London, UK)

Date of Creation

1908

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