Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/23

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forming a legitimate and worthy department of medicine. "Cosmetics," it should be called, if one can rid that word of its current baser meaning as applied to the meretricious arts of the toilette.

If one reflects how much mental suffering even slight deformities give, and how often the loss of beauty is the forerunner of the loss of health, it will not seem idle or unworthy of the highest medical skill to take cognizance of such trifles. Indeed, each generation witnesses more and more attention paid to

"Reparer des années les irreparable outrages,"

as the gallant and oft-quoted line of Racine phrases it.

This department of "cosmetics," "chirurgica cosmetica," as the old surgeons styled it, of which we speak, is a border-land between science and idealism, between the physician and the artist, and must hence-*forward take its position as an important field of professional industry.

It is, we say, a border-land between the physician and the artist. It is wholly within the province of neither. Health is the source of beauty, but the stream does not stay forever by its fountain. All the precepts, all the hints, which the diligent study of the healing art gives, all the suggestions proffered by hygiene and physiology, we shall attentively consider and apply. But is this all? By no means. Then come those aids to beauty provided by chemistry and pharmacy, those