A Handbook of Health by Woods Hutchinson (readnow TXT) π
CHAPTER II
WHY WE HAVE A STOMACH
WHAT KEEPS US ALIVE
The Energy in Food and Fuel. The first question that arises in our mind on looking at an engine or machine of any sort is, What makes it go? If we can succeed in getting an answer to the question, What makes the human automobile go? we shall have the key to half its secrets at once. It is fuel, of course; but what kind of fuel? How does the body take it in, how does it burn it, and how does it use the energy or power stored up in it to run the body-engine?
Man is a bread-and-butter-motor. The fuel of the automobile is gasoline, and the fuel of the man-motor we call food. The two kinds of fuel do not taste or smell much alike; but they are alike in that they both have what we call energy, or power, stored up
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Some of the most important part of your training and fitting for life is given by plays and games. Not only do they put you in better condition to study and enjoy your work in school, but they also teach you many valuable lessons as well. Our favorite national game, base-ball, for instance, not only develops the muscles of your arms and shoulders in throwing the ball and in striking and catching it, and your lungs and heart in rushing to catch a fly or in running the bases, but also develops quickness of sight and hearing,βrequires, as we say, "a good eye" for distance,βmakes you learn to calculate something of the speed at which a ball is coming toward you or flying up into the air, requires you to judge correctly how far it is to the next base and how few seconds it will take to get there and whether you or the baseman can get there first.
More important yet, like all team games, it teaches you to work with others, to obey orders promptly, to give up your own way and do, not what you like best, but what will help the team most; to keep your temper, to bend every energy to win, but to play fair. It also teaches you that you must begin at the beginning, take the lowest place, and gradually work yourself up; and that only by hard work and patience and determination can you make yourself worth anything to the team, to say nothing of becoming a "star" player.
If you will just go at your studies the way you do at base-ball, you will make a success of them. Make up your mind to gain a little at a time, to learn something new every day, and you will be astonished how your knowledge will mount up at the end of the year. When you first start in a new study, it looks, as you say, "like Greek" to you. You feel quite sure that you never will be able to understand those hard words or solve those problems "clear over in the back of the book." But remember how you started in on the diamond as a "green player," with fumbling fingers that missed half the balls thrown to you, with soft hands that stung every time you tried to stop a "hot" ball; how you ducked and flinched when a fast ball came at you, and how you fumbled half your flies and, even when you fielded them, were likely to send them in six feet over the baseman's head. But by quietly sticking to itβwatching how the good players did it, and playing an hour or two every day during the seasonβyou gradually grew into the game, until, almost without knowing how it happened, you had trained your muscles, your nerve cells, and your brain and found yourself a good batsman and a sure catcher.
Good for muscle and will.
So it will be in your school work. Just stick quietly to it, taking your work a lesson at a time; give yourself plenty of sleep and plenty of fresh air, and eat plenty of good food three times a day, and your mind will grow in strength and skill as gradually, as naturally, and as happily as your body does.
Every season of the year has its special games suited to the weather and the condition of the ground. If you take pride in playing all of them in their turn, hard and thoroughly, and making as good a record in them as you can, you will find that it will not only keep you healthy and make you grow, but will help you in your school work as well, by keeping your wits bright and your head clear. There is a fine group of running games, for instance, such as Prisoner's Base, or Dare Base, Hide-and-Seek, or I Spy, and the different kinds of tag,βFox-and-Geese, Duck-on-Rock,βwhich are not only capital exercise for leg muscles, lungs, and heart, but fine training in quickness of sight, quickness and accuracy of judgment, and quickness of ear in catching the slightest rustle on either side, or behind you, so that you can rush back to the base, or "home," first.
Then with the winter comes skating, with hockey and Prisoner's Base on the ice, and coasting and sledding and snow-balling, to say nothing of forts and snowmen. You should try to be out of doors as many hours a day in the winter-time as in the summer, so far as possible. If you play and romp hard, you will find that you don't mind the cold at all, and that, instead of taking more colds and chills, you will have fewer of these than you had when you cooped yourself up indoors beside the warm stove.
A good exercise for all the muscles.
It is just as important for girls to play all these games as it is for boys; and girls enjoy them just as much and can play them almost, if not quite, as well, if they are only allowed to begin when they are small and do just as they please. There is no reason whatever why a girl should not be just as quick of eye and ear, and as fast on the run, and as well able to throw or catch or bat a ball, as a boy. Up to fifteen years of age boys and girls alike ought to be dressed in clothes that will allow them to play easily and vigorously at any good game that happens to be in season. Girls like base-ball as well as boys do, if they are only shown how to play it.
In summer, of course, the whole wide world outdoors turns into one great playground; and it is largely because we turn out into this playground that we have so much less sickness, and so many fewer cases of the serious diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia, and rheumatism in summer than in winter.
Boys and girls ought to know how to swim and how to handle a boat before they are twelve years old; for these are not only excellent forms of exercise and most healthful and enjoyable amusements in themselves, but they may be the means of saving livesβone's own life or the lives of others.
As a form of exercise and education combined, nothing is better than walks in the country or, where this is impossible, in parks and public gardens. An acquaintance with trees, flowers, plants, birds, and wild animals, is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment and good health that any one can have all his life through.
Last, but not by any means least, comes that delightful combination of work and play known as gardening, and the lighter forms of farming. Every child naturally delights in having a little patch of ground of his own in which he can dig and rake and weed and plant seeds and watch the plants grow. In our large cities, where most of the houses have not sufficient space about them to allow children to have gardens of their own at home, land is being bought near school-houses and laid out as school gardens, and the work done in them is counted as part of the school work. Indeed, so important is this work considered as a part of school education, that some large cities are actually building their schools out in the open country, so that they can have plenty of space for playgrounds and gardens and shops, and carrying the children from the central parts of the city out to them by trolley or train in the morning and back at night.
Wherever you happen to live, you should engage in healthy happy, vigorous play in the open air at least two to four hours a day all the year round. If you live in a town, while it will not be quite so easy to reach the woods and the fields and the swimming holes and the skating ponds, yet you will have a large number of playmates of your own age, and have good opportunity to play the games calling for half a dozen or more players; and there will be plenty of vacant lots and open spaces, or little-traveled streets, in which to play base-ball and foot-ball and Prisoner's Base and tag. And although you may not be within reach of the best zoological garden ever made,βa barnyard,βyet you can make occasional trips to the city "Zoo," or the botanical gardens, or to parks.
Healthful Methods of Study. In the growth and training of the highest, most valuable, and most wonderful part of the bodyβthe brainβthe same methods followed in our outdoor games will give the best results. We do not create intelligence by study, nor manufacture a brain for ourselves, in school. We simply develop and strengthen and improve the brains and the mental power that we were born with.
A large area in the residence section of a city, now used as a dump, from which dust and disease can spread. It could easily be cleared and used for children's gardens, or a playground or athletic field.
Our minds grow as our bodies do, by healthful exerciseβlittle at a time, with plenty of rest and change of occupation between the periods of work. That is why our school studies are arranged as they are: instead of one subject being studied all the morning, or all day, four or five subjects are studied for twenty or thirty minutes each, and a change is made to another before our minds become over-tired and begin poisoning themselves with fatigue toxins. A subject that is rather hard for us is followed by one that is easier; and the hardest subjects in the course are usually taken up early in the morning session, or after recess, or early in the afternoon, when we are well-rested and feeling fresh and ready for work.
We should try to keep our bodies and our brains and our sight and hearing in the very best possible condition for our work, so as to come up to each task that we have to master keen and fresh and clear-headed, rather than to take pride in spending so many hours a day studying in a half-tired, half-hearted, listless kind of way. You will find that you will be able to master a lesson and see through a problem in half the time if you get plenty of sleep in a room with the windows open, play a great deal out-of-doors, and do not hurry through your meals for either school or play.
Study just as you play ball when you are trying to make a place on the team. Bend every energy that you have to that one thing, and forget everything else, until you have finished it. You can do more work in fifteen minutes in this way than you can in forty minutes of sitting and looking out of the window and wondering how much longer the study period is to last, and what the next chapter is about in the story that you are reading at home, or what you are going to wear to the party next week.
Like the obstacle race, the high jump cultivates determination as well as muscle.
Keep yourself in good condition, and then buckle down to your
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