Thomas de Quincey - "The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2"

Johann Wolfgang Goethe - "Die Mitschuldigen"

Agnes H. Morton - "Etiquette"

Lewis Falley Allen - "Rural Architecture"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

A Handbook of Health

W >> Woods Hutchinson >> A Handbook of Health




The Spinal Cord. Running downward from the base of the brain, like the
stalk of a flower, is a great bundle of nerve-fibres, the central cable
of our body telephone system, the spinal cord. This, you will remember,
runs through a bony tube formed by the arches of the successive
vertebrae; and as it runs down the body, like every other cable it gives
off and receives branches connecting it with the different parts of the
body through which it passes. These branches are given off in pairs, and
run out through openings between the little sections of bone, or
vertebrae, of which the spinal column is made up. They are called the
_spinal nerves_, and each pair supplies the part of the body which lies
near the place where it comes out of the cord.

The spinal nerves contain nerve wires of two sorts--the inward, or
_sensory_, and the outward, or _motor_, nerves. The sensory, or ingoing,
nerves come from the muscles and the skin and bring messages of heat and
cold, of touch and pressure, of pain and comfort, to the spinal cord
and brain. The outward, or motor, nerves running in the same bundle go
to the muscles and end in curious little plates on the surface of the
tiny muscle fibres, and carry messages from the spinal cord and brain,
telling the muscles when and how to contract.

As the spinal cord runs down the body, it becomes gradually smaller, as
more and more branches are given off, until finally, just below the
small of the back and opposite the hip bones, it breaks up by dividing
into a number of large branches which go to supply the hips and lower
limbs.

While most of the spinal cord is made up of bundles of white fibres,
carrying messages from the body to the brain, its central portion, or
core, is made of gray matter. The reason for this is that many of the
simpler messages from the surface of the body and the movements that
they require are attended to by this gray matter, or ganglia, of the
spinal cord without troubling the brain at all.

For instance, if you were sound asleep, and somebody were to tickle the
sole of your bare foot very gently, the nerves of the skin would carry
the message to the gray matter of the spinal cord, and it would promptly
order the muscles of the leg to contract, and your foot would be drawn
away from the tickling finger, without your brain taking any part in the
matter, though, if you had been awake, you would of course have known
what was going on.

This sort of reply to a stimulus, or "stirring up," without our knowing
anything about it, is known as a _reflex_ movement. Not only are many of
these reflexes carried out without any help from the will, or brain, but
they are so prompt and powerful that the brain, or will, can hardly stop
them if it tries, as, for instance, in the case of tickling the feet.
You can, if you make up your mind to it, prevent yourself from either
wriggling, pulling your foot away, or giggling, when the sole of your
foot is tickled; but if you happen to be at all "ticklish," it will take
all the determination you have to do it, and some children are utterly
unable to resist this impulse to squirm when tickled.

This extraordinary power of your reflexes has developed because only the
promptest possible response, by jerking your hand away or jumping, will
be quick enough to save your life in some accidents or emergencies, when
it would take entirely too long to telephone up to the brain and get its
decision before jumping. When you are badly frightened, you often jump
first and discover that you are frightened afterwards; and this jump,
under certain circumstances, may save your life. On the other hand, like
all instinctive or impulsive movements, it may get you into more trouble
than if you had kept still.

As you will see by the picture, the spinal nerves, which are given off
from the cord in the lower part of the neck and between the shoulder
blades, are gathered together into a great loose bundle to form the long
nerve-wires needed to supply the shoulders and arms. Those given off
from the small of the back just above the hips also run together to
form, first a network and then a big single nerve-cord, called the
_sciatic_ nerve, which many of you have probably heard of from the
frightfully painful disease due to an inflammation of it, called
_sciatica_. It is the largest nerve-cord in the body, running down the
middle of the back of the thigh to supply the muscles of two-thirds of
the leg.[26]

The substance of both the spinal cord and the brain is made up of
millions of delicate, tiny cells, called _neurons_, most of which, with
very long branches, are arranged in chains for carrying messages,
forming the white matter; while the others lie in groups, or ganglia,
for sorting and deciding upon messages, forming the gray matter.

Just at the top of the spinal cord, where it passes into the skull and
joins with the brain, it swells out into a sort of knob, about the size
of a queen olive or the head of a gold-headed cane, which is known as
the _medulla_, or "pith." This is the most vital single part of the
entire brain and nervous system; and the smallest direct injury to it
will produce instant death, partly because all the messages which pass
between the brain and the body have to go through it, and partly because
in it are situated the centres which control breathing and the beat of
the heart, and another quite important but less vital centre,--that for
swallowing.

How Messages are Received and Sent. Now to learn how smoothly and
beautifully this nerve telephone system of ours works, and how simple it
really is, although it has such a large number of lines and so many
telephones on each line, and such a large central exchange, let us see
how it deals with a message from the outside world. Suppose you are
running barefoot and step on a thorn. Instantly the tiny nerve bulbs in
the skin of the sole of your foot are stimulated, or set in vibration,
and they send these vibrations up the sciatic nerve, into and up the
whole length of the spinal cord, through the medulla, which switches
them over to the other side of the brain up through the _brain stalk_,
and out to the part of the surface (cortex) of the brain which controls
the movements of the foot. All this takes only a fraction of a second,
but it is not until the message reaches the brain-surface that you feel
pain. If you were to cut the sciatic nerve, or even tie a string tightly
around it, you could prick or burn the sole of your foot as much as you
pleased, and you would not feel any pain at all.

As soon as the surface of the brain has recognized the pain and where it
comes from, it promptly sends a return message back down the same cable,
though by different nerve-wires, to the muscles of the foot and leg,
saying, "Jerk that foot away!" As a matter of fact, this message will
arrive too late, for the centres in the spinal cord will already have
attended to this part of the matter, often almost before you know that
you are hurt.

However, there is plenty of other work for the brain to do; and its next
step, quicker than you can think, is to wake up a dozen muscles all over
the body with the order, "Sit down!" And you promptly sit down. At the
same time, the brain "central" has ordered the muscles of your arms and
hands to reach down and pick up the foot, partly to protect it from any
further scratch, and partly to pull the thorn out of it. Next it rushes
a hurry call to the muscles controlling your lungs and throat, and says,
"Howl!" and you howl accordingly. Another jab at the switchboard, and
the eyes are called up and ordered to weep, while at the same time the
muscles of the trunk of your body are set in rhythmic movement by
another message, and you rock yourself backward and forward.

This weeping and rocking yourself backward and forward and nursing your
foot seem rather foolish,--indeed you have perhaps often been told that
they are both foolish and babyish,--but, as you say, you "can't help
it," and there is a good reason for it. The howl is a call for help; and
if the hurt were due to the bite of a wolf or a bear, or the cut had
gone deep enough to open an artery, this dreadfully unmusical noise
might be the means of saving your life; while the rocking backward and
forward and jerking yourself about would also send a message that you
needed help, supposing you were so badly hurt that you couldn't call
out, to anyone who happened to be within sight of you. So that it isn't
entirely babyish and foolish to howl and squirm about when you are
hurt--though it is manly to keep both within reasonable limits.

If the message about the thorn had been brought by your eyes,--in other
words, if you had seen it before you stepped on it,--then a similar but
much simpler and less painful reflex would have been carried out. The
image of the thorn would fall on the _retina_ of the eye and through its
_optic nerve_ the message would be flashed to the brain: "There is
something slim and sharp in the path,--looks like a thorn." When this
message reached the brain, and not till then, would you see the thorn,
just as in the case of the pain message from the foot. Then the brain
would take charge of the situation just as before, flashing a hasty
message to the muscles of the legs, saying, "Jump!" while its message to
the throat and lungs, instead of "Yell," would be merely, "Say,
'Goodness!' or 'Whew!'" and you would say it and run on.

If the thing in the grass, instead of a thorn, happened to be a snake,
and you heard it rustle, then the warning message would come through
your ears to the brain, and you would jump just the same; though, as it
is not so easy to tell by a hearing message exactly where the sound is
coming from, you might possibly jump in the wrong direction and land on
top of the danger.

This is the way in which you see, hear, and form ideas of things. Your
eye telegraphs to the brain the colors; your ear, the sounds; and your
nose, the smells of the particular object; and then your brain puts
these all together and compares them with its records of things that it
has seen before, which looked, or sounded, or smelt like that, and
decides what it is; and you say you _see_ an apple, or you _hear_ a
rooster crow, or you _smell_ pies baking. Remember that, strange as it
may seem, you don't see an orange, for instance, but only a circular
patch of yellowness, which, when you had seen it before, and felt of it
with your hand, you found to be associated with a feeling of roundness
and solidness; and when you lifted it toward your nose, with the
well-known smell of orange-peel; so you called it an orange. If the
yellow patch were hard, instead of elastic, to the touch, and didn't
have any aromatic smell when you brought it up to your nose, you would
probably say it was a gourd, or an apple, or perhaps a yellow croquet
ball. This is the way in which, we say, our senses may "deceive" us, and
is one of the reasons why three different people who have seen something
happen will often differ so much in their accounts of it.

It is not so much that our senses deceive us, but that we draw the wrong
conclusions from the sights, sounds, and smells that they report to our
brains, usually from being in too great a hurry and not looking
carefully enough, or not waiting to check up what we _see_ by touching,
hearing, or tasting the thing that we look at.

This message-and-answer system runs all through our body. For instance,
if we run fast, then the muscle cells in our legs burn up a good deal of
sugar-fuel, and throw the waste gas, or smoke, into the blood. This is
pumped by the heart all over the body, in a few seconds. When this
carbon dioxid reaches the breathing centre in the medulla, it stirs it
up to send promptly a message to the lungs to breathe faster and deeper,
while, at the same time, it calls upon the circulation centre close to
it, to stir up the heart and make it beat harder and faster, so as to
give the muscles more blood to work with. If some poisonous or very
irritating food is swallowed, as soon as it begins to hurt the cells
lining the stomach, these promptly telegraph to the vomiting centre in
the brain, we begin to feel "sick at the stomach," the brain sends the
necessary directions to the great muscles of the abdomen and the
diaphragm, they squeeze down upon the stomach, and its contents are
promptly pumped back up the gullet and out through the mouth, thus
throwing up the poisons.

And so on all over the body--every tiniest region or organ in the body,
every square inch of the skin, has its special wire connecting it with
the great telephone exchange, enabling it to report danger, and to call
for help or assistance the moment it needs it.


FOOTNOTES:

[26] To give you an idea of what real things nerve-trunks are, this
sciatic nerve is as large as a small clothes-line, or, more accurately,
as a carpenter's lead pencil, and so strong that when the surgeon cuts
down upon it and stretches it to cure a very bad case of sciatica, he
can lift the lower half of the body clear of the table by it. This
strength, of course, is not due to the nerve-fibres and cells themselves
but to the tough, fibrous sheath, or covering, with which all the nerves
that run outside of the brain and spinal cord are covered and coated.
The spinal cord, though it is between one-half and three-fourths of an
inch across, or about the size of an ordinary blackboard pointer, has
little or none of this fibrous tissue in it, and is very soft and
delicate, easily torn when its bony case is broken; hence its old name,
the _spinal marrow_, from its apparent resemblance to the marrow, or
soft fat, in the hollow of a bone.




CHAPTER XXI

THE HYGIENE OF BONES, NERVES, AND MUSCLES


HOW TO GET AND KEEP A GOOD FIGURE

Erect Position is the Result of Vigorous Health. Naturally and
properly, an erect, graceful figure and a good carriage have always been
keenly desired; and much attention has been paid to the best means of
acquiring them; as we say, we try to "get the habit" of carrying
ourselves straight and well. But it must be remembered that an erect
figure and a good carriage are the results of health and vigor, rather
than the cause of them.

Stooping, round shoulders, sitting "all hunched up," or a shuffling
gait, are owing partly to bad habits, or "slouchiness," but chiefly to
weak muscles and a badly-fed nervous system, often due to a poor
digestion and a weak circulation. If a child is not healthy and
vigorous, then no amount of drilling or reminders to "sit straight" and
"stand erect" will make him do so.

It is of great importance that the child should take an erect and
correct position for reading and writing, and while sitting at his desk;
and that the desk and the seat should fit him. But it is more important
that he should not sit at his desk in a stuffy room long enough to be
harmed by a cramped position.

There are few children who will "hump over" at their desks, if the
muscles of their backs and necks are strong and vigorous, and their
brains well ventilated. Nor will many of them bore their noses into
their books, or sprawl all over their copy books when they write, unless
the light is poor, or they have some defect of the eyes which has not
been corrected by proper glasses. A bad position or a bad carriage in a
child is a sign of ill health, and should be treated by the removal of
its cause.

Curvatures--Their Cause and Cure. There are various forms of
curvatures, or bendings, of the spine which are supposed to be owing to
faulty positions of sitting or of carrying the body. There is wide
difference of opinions as to their cause; but this all are agreed on,
that they practically never occur in sturdy, well-grown, active
children; and the way that they are now corrected is by careful systems
of balancing, muscular exercise, open-air life, and abundant feeding,
instead of using steel braces, or jackets, or schoolroom drills.

[Illustration: THE POSITION OF THE BODY IS AN INDEX TO ITS HEALTH

Note the pupil in the second row who evidently needs eye glasses.]

Much the same is true of other deformities and defects of the body, as,
for instance, round shoulders, or "flat-foot," or even such serious ones
as "club-foot" and "bow-legs." Nearly all these are caused by the
weakness or wrong action of some muscle, or groups of muscles. If this
be long continued or neglected, the bones--which, you will remember,
were made by the muscles in the first place--will be warped out of
shape. When this has occurred, it is often necessary to bring back the
limb, or foot, into a nearly straight position by mechanical or surgical
means; but we now largely depend upon muscular exercises combined with
rubbing and massage with the hand, and on building up the general vigor
of the entire body, so that the muscles will pull the limb or the
backbone back into proper position. Take care of the muscles, and the
bones will take care of themselves! Make the body strong, vigorous, and
happy, and it will "hold" and "carry" itself.


OUR FEET

The Living Arches of the Foot. One of the most important things to
look after, if we wish to have an erect carriage and a swift, graceful
gait, is the shape and vigor of the feet. Each foot consists of two
springy, living arches of bone and sinew, which are also used as levers,
one running lengthwise from the heel to the ball of the toes, and the
other crosswise at the instep. These arches are built largely of bones,
but are given that springy, elastic curve on which their health and
comfort depend, and are kept in proper shape and position, solely by the
action of muscles--those of the lower part of the leg and calf.

[Illustration: IMPRINT OF (1) ARCHED FOOT AND (2) FLAT FOOT

The absence of impression on the inner border of the normal footprint at
_A_ is due to the elevation of the foot by the longitudinal arch. The
other arch lies across the foot in front of this.--After Schmidt.]

The purpose of these arches is to "give," or spring, like carriage
springs, and thus break the shock of each step and cause the body to
"ride" easily and comfortably. In order that a spring may "give," it
must expand, or spread. Far the commonest and most serious cause of a
poor, easily tired gait and a bad carriage is tight shoes, which, by
being too short, or too narrow, or both, prevent the arches of the foot
from "giving" and expanding. Not only does this produce corns, bunions,
and lame feet, but it makes both standing and walking painful and
feeble, and destroys the balance of the entire body, causing the back to
ache, the shoulders to droop forward, and the neck muscles to tire
themselves out trying to pull the head back so as to keep the face and
eyes erect. Thus one soon tires, and never really enjoys walking. If
this disturbance of balance is increased by high heels, thrust forward
under the middle of the foot, the result is very bad.

[Illustration: THE RESULT OF WEARING A FASHIONABLE SHOE

(1) A foot that has never worn a shoe (from a photograph); (2) A foot so
cramped and bent as to prevent firmness of step and gait.]

Our Shoes, an Important Factor in Health. Few more ingenious
instruments of crippling and torture have ever been invented than
fashionable tight shoes with high heels.

Kipling never said a shrewder or truer thing than when he made Mulvaney,
the old Irish drill-sergeant, tell the new recruit, "Remimber, me son, a
soljer on the marrch is no betther than his feet!" and this applies
largely to the march of life as well.

Every shoe should be at least three-quarters of an inch longer, and from
half to three-quarters of an inch wider, than the foot at rest, to allow
proper expansion of these great "carriage-spring" arches. If children
run free in the open air, either barefoot, or with light, loose,
well-ventilated shoes, or sandals, they will have little trouble, not
only with bunions, corns, "flat-foot," or lameness, but also with their
backs, their gait, and their carriage. Easily half of our backaches, and
inability to walk far or run fast in later life, to say nothing of
over-fatness and dyspepsia, are caused by tight shoes.


SLEEP AND REST

Why We Need Rest. A most important element in a life of healthful
exercise, study, and play is rest. Even when we are hard at work, we
need frequent breathing spells and changes of occupation and amusement
to keep one part of our muscles, or our brains, from poisoning itself.
But after a time, in even the strongest and toughest of us, there comes
a period when no change of occupation, no mere sitting still, will rest
us; we begin to feel drowsy and want to go to sleep. This means partly
that the fatigue poisons, in spite of fresh air and change, have piled
up faster than we can burn them, so that we need sleep to restore the
body.

All day long we are making more carbon dioxid than the oxygen we breathe
in can take care of; while we sleep, the situation is reversed--the
oxygen is gaining on the carbon dioxid. This is why the air in our
bedrooms ought to be kept especially pure and fresh.

But the need goes deeper than this: sleeping and waking are simply parts
of the great rhythm in which all life beats--a period of work followed
by a period of rest. Continuous, never-ceasing activity for any living
thing quickly means death. While externally the body appears to be at
rest, the processes of growth and upbuilding probably go on more rapidly
when we are asleep than when we are awake. The benefits of exercise are
made permanent and built into the body during the sleep that follows it.
The more rapidly young animals are growing, the more hours out of the
twenty-four they spend in sleep. When you sleep, you are not stopping
all the useful activities of your body and mind, you are simply giving
some of the most useful and most important of them a chance to work. The
only likeness between sleep and death is that in both the body is quiet
and the eyes are closed. Really we are never more alive and growing than
when asleep.

It is of the utmost importance that young children especially have all
the sleep they need, and that is precisely all that they can be induced
to take. The best rule for you, then, to follow, is to go to bed when
you feel sleepy, and to get up when you wake rested. Every child under
twelve should have at least ten hours of sleep, and every grown person
eight, or better still, nine hours. Time spent in sound, refreshing
sleep, is time well spent. If you cannot sleep well, it is a signal that
something is wrong with your health, or your habits--a danger signal of
great importance, which should be attended to at once. The best and only
safe sleep-producer is exercise in the open air.


DISORDERS OF MUSCLES AND BONES

The Muscles and Bones Have Few Diseases. Considering how complex it
is, and the never-ceasing strain upon it, this moving apparatus of ours,
the nerve-bone-muscle-machine, is surprisingly free from disease. The
muscles, though they form nearly half our bulk, have scarcely a single
disease peculiar to them, or chiefly beginning in them, unless fatigue
and its consequences might be so regarded. They may become weakened and
wasted by either lack or excess of exercise, by under-feeding, or by
loss of sleep; but most of their disturbances are due to poisons which
have got into the blood pumped through them, or to paralysis or other
injuries to the nerves that supply them.

The muscles of an arm, for instance, which has been lashed to a splint,
or shut tightly in a cast for a long time, waste away and shrink until
the arm becomes, as we say, "just skin and bone"; and the same thing
will happen if the nerve supplying a muscle, or a limb, is cut or
paralyzed.

The bones have more diseases than the muscles, but really comparatively
few, considering their great number and size, and the constant strain to
which they are subjected in supporting the body, and driving it forward
and doing its work under the handling and leverage of the muscles. Most
of their diseases are, like those of the muscles, the after-effects of
general diseases, particularly the infections and fevers, which begin
elsewhere in the body; and the best treatment of such bone diseases is
the cure and removal of the disease that caused them.

[Illustration: CALLUS FORMED AROUND A FRACTURE

An aluminum splint holds the parts of the bone together.]

Repair of Broken Bones. If bones are broken by a fall, or blow, they
display a remarkable power of repair. The "skin" covering them
(periosteum) pours out a quantity of living lime-cement, or
animal-mortar, around the two broken ends, which solders them together,
much as a plumber will make a joint between the ends of two pipes. This
repair substance is called _callus_. The most remarkable thing about the
process is that, when it has held the two broken ends together long
enough for them to "knit" firmly--that is, to connect their blood
vessels and marrow cavities properly--this handful of lime-cement, which
has piled up around the break, gradually melts away and disappears; so
that, if the ends of the bone have been brought accurately together, you
can hardly tell where the break was, except by a slight ridge or
thickening.

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