How to Live by Eugene Lyman Fisk (adult books to read txt) π
[Sidenote: Card-playing]
Card-playing and similar games afford wholesome mental recreation for some persons. However, they, too, are liable to be associated with late hours, and other disadvantages even when they do not degenerate into gambling. Card-playing, dancing, and many other popular forms of amusement often border on dissipation.
[Sidenote: Suicidal Amusement]
Amusements which weaken and degrade are not hygienic.
Read free book Β«How to Live by Eugene Lyman Fisk (adult books to read txt) πΒ» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Eugene Lyman Fisk
- Performer: -
Read book online Β«How to Live by Eugene Lyman Fisk (adult books to read txt) πΒ». Author - Eugene Lyman Fisk
Most of the rules of hygiene cost nothing to observe. But even when hygiene is costly at first, the cost is usually repaid in the end many times over. To ventilate a house in winter always costs a certain additional expenditure for coal, but it is better to pay the coal bill than the doctorβs bills. To sleep out-of-doors costs some extra blankets, bedding, clothing, and roll curtains, but these not only save the cost of heating an indoor sleeping-room, but save also the cost of ill-health. There is no better economy than to keep oneβs working-power. To lose it means to lose its earnings and to have, in addition, the heavy expenses of medical attendance, medicines, and nursing, and often to lose life itself with its potential earnings of every sort. In short, an unhygienic life, for the sake of economy, is βpenny-wise and pound-foolish.β
Many busy men object to hygiene because, they say, they have no time for it. They imagine that to devote an hour each day to exercise or relaxation is a waste of time and that they are really economizing their time by working that hour instead. We are here referring, not to those who can not control their working-time, but to those who deliberately choose to work when hygiene would require them to play. It is often those who fix their own working-hours, rather than those whose working-hours are fixed for them, who overwork the most. If these could know the suffering which sooner or later follows inevitably as the consequence of this mistaken policy, they would not pursue it for a single day. A slight loss of working-power comes immediately. A careful observer of mental workers found that an hour invested in exercise in the afternoon often pays for itself within a day, by rendering possible more rapid work. He also found an improvement in the quality of his work. The razor-edge of the mind needs daily honing through physical exercise. The same principle applies to all work. It is just as necessary to stop, at intervals, our physical and mental machinery for oiling and repairs, as to stop the machinery of a factory.
Another objection is that the practise of hygiene is βtoo much trouble.β It is undoubtedly true, that no one who has unhygienic habits can overcome them without a certain amount of βtrouble.β The people who get the best results are those who are never deterred by trouble so long as the trouble is worth while. For those who have not the necessary enthusiasm or self-control to break their unwholesome habits by sheer will power, the best advice is to so arrange their lives as to make the practise of hygiene inevitable. One physician in Chicago deliberately got rid of his automobile and other means of locomotion in order to force himself to walk to all his patients, and so secure enough physical exercise. Another man in New York City, with the same object in view, selected the location for his dwelling so that there was no rapid transportation available to take him to his office, making the walking back and forth a necessity from which he could not escape.
The only difficulty lies in overcoming the inertia of acquired habits. After one has changed his habits, it is just as easy to live rightly as to live wrongly. The rules of hygiene are not restrictive, but liberating. They may seem at first restrictive, for they prohibit many things which we have been in the habit of doing; but they are really liberating, for the things we were doing were unrealized restrictions on our own power to work, to be useful, or even to enjoy life. The βrulesβ of hygiene are thus simply the means of emancipating us from our real limitations. These so-called rules, when tried, will prove to be not artificial but natural, not difficult but easy, not complicated but simple. They are almost as simple as the direction to bathe in the river Jordan. It is, in fact, their very simplicity and availability to which is largely due their deplorable neglect and the failure to realize the wonderful benefits following their careful and continued observance.
Not only a healthy mental attitude toward life, but a healthy mental attitude toward oneβs own unhygienic habits is essential. It is a very common thing for a man to romance over his shortcomings, or his unhealthy physical conditions, to make humor of them to his friends. Very often the first step toward a better physical condition is a change in this mental attitude.
Section IVβThe Possibilities of HygieneCertain it is that more people would practise hygiene if they could be made to realize in some vivid way how much they needed it. Few persons, even when they read and accept the statistics on the subject, really have a picture of the imperative need of hygiene as an integral part of every human life. It is not brought home to them how widespread is illness, how numerous are preventable deaths, how many are the tendencies toward individual and racial deterioration.
The report of the Roosevelt Conservation Commission on National Vitality, indicates that annually there are in the United States over 600,000 deaths which might be prevented if existing knowledge of hygiene were properly applied; that at least half of the 3,000,000 and more sick-beds constantly kept filled in the United States are unnecessary; that the financial loss from earnings cut off by preventable disease and premature death amounts to over $1,500,000,000 annually; and that over 15 years are lost to the average life through the lack of application of knowledge which already exists but which simply has not yet been disseminated and applied.
The health examinations of the Life Extension Institute have revealed unsuspected ailments in persons who considered themselves well, and to an extent which has astonished even those who have long been familiar with these subjects. Among large groups of clerks and employes of banks and commercial houses in New York City with an average age of 27 and all supposedly picked men and women, only 1 per cent. were found free of impairment or of habits of living inviting impairment. Of those with important physical impairments, 89 per cent. were, prior to the examination, unaware of impairment; 16 per cent. of the total number examined were affected with organic heart trouble, 42 per cent. with arterial changes, ranging from slight thickening to advanced arteriosclerosis, 26 per cent. with high or low blood pressure, 40 per cent. had sugar, casts, or albumin in the urine, 24 per cent. had a combination of urinary and other serious impairment, 47 per cent. had decayed teeth or infected gums, 31 per cent. had faulty vision uncorrected.
Among industrial groups, not exposed to any special occupational hazard or poisoning, the figures were as follows: With an average age of 33, none were found to be free of impairment or habits of living inviting impairment. Of those with important physical impairments, 89 per cent. were, prior to the examination, unaware of impairment; 3 per cent. of the total number examined were affected with organic heart trouble; 53 per cent. with arterial changes, ranging from slight thickening to advanced arteriosclerosis; 23 per cent. with high or low blood pressure; 45 per cent. had sugar, albumin or casts in their urine; 26 per cent. had a combination of urinary and other serious impairment; 69 per cent. had decayed teeth or infected gums; 41 per cent. had faulty vision uncorrected.
There are few persons in America to-day who reach the age of forty sound and normal in every part of the body, especially if we include among abnormalities the minor ailments. The extent to which minor ills are prevalent among those who pass for βwellβ people is not generally appreciated. Once we penetrate beneath conventional acquaintance we almost invariably learn of some functional trouble, such as impairment of heart, circulation, liver, kidneys, stomach; or gallstones, constipation, diarrhea; or insomnia, neurasthenia, neuritis, neuralgia, sick-headache; or tonsillitis, bronchitis, hay fever, catarrh, grippe, colds, sore throat; or rupture, enlarged glands, skin eruptions; or rheumatism, lumbago, gout, obesity; or decayed teeth, baldness, deafness, eye ailments, spinal curvature, flat foot, lameness; or sundry other βtroubles.β
These ailments, though regarded as βminor,β should be recognized promptly and accepted as the signal that the person is moving in the wrong direction. There is no need for alarm provided this warning is heeded. Otherwise disaster is almost certain sooner or later to follow. The laws of physiology are just as inexorable as the laws of physics. There is no compromising with Nature. No man can disobey the laws of health to which he has been bred by Nature without paying for itβany more than a man can sign a check against his bank account without reducing the amount. He may not be immediately bankrupt, and until he exhausts his account he may not experience any inconvenience from his great extravagance, but Nature keeps her balances very accurately, and in the end all claims must be paid.
It is true, of course, that some persons have greater resistance than others. If we had a convenient barometer by which to measure daily the state of our vitality, we might register the effect of every unhygienic act. But it is so seldom that endurance is accurately measured that few people appreciate the enormous differences in people and the variations of the same person at different times. These differences and variations have a range of many hundred per cent. Some people can not walk upstairs or run across the street without being out of breath, while others will climb the Matterhorn without overstrain. The fact that certain people have lived to the century-mark in spite of unhygienic living is sometimes cited to prove that hygiene is ineffective. One might as well cite the fact that certain trees are not blown down in a gale or are not quickly destroyed by insect-pests to prove that gales have no tendency to blow down or insects to destroy trees.
The truth is that a person who has so much vitality as to lead him to defy the laws of health and to boast that he pays no price no matter how he lives, is likely to be the very man to exhaust his account of health
Comments (0)