A Handbook of Health

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TROUBLES OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

The Nervous System is not easily Damaged. The nervous system is
subject to a good many more diseases than are either the muscles or the
bones; but, considering how complex it is, it is not nearly so easily
damaged or thrown out of balance as we usually imagine, and has
astonishing powers of repair. Instead of being one of the first parts of
the body to be attacked by a disease, such as an infection or a fever,
it is one of the very last to feel the effects of disease, except in the
sense that it often gives early that invaluable danger signal, pain.

Headache. Next after fatigue the most valuable danger signal given us
by our nerves is that commonest of all pains, _headache_. Indeed, it is
not too much to say that headache is the most useful pain in the world.
It has little to do with the condition of the brain, but occurs in the
head chiefly because the nerves of the head and face are the most
sensitive of all those in the body, and the first ones, therefore, to
"cry out" when hurt.

Headache has been described as the cry of a poisoned or starved or
over-worked nerve, and is simply nature's signal that something is going
wrong. Toxins, or poisons, formed anywhere in the body, from any cause,
get into the blood, are carried to the sensitive nerves of the head and
face, and irritate them so that they ache. It is foolish to try to do
anything to the head itself for the relief of headache, although cold
cloths, or a hot-water bottle, may be soothing in mild cases. The thing
to do is to clear the poison out of the blood, and the only way is to
find what has caused it.

Nearly all the things that cause headache do so by poisoning the blood.
A very common cause of headache, for instance, is getting over-tired,
especially if at the same time you do not get enough sleep; and, as you
already know, tiredness, or fatigue, is a form of self-poisoning.
Another very common cause of headache is bad air--sitting or sleeping in
hot, stuffy rooms with the windows shut tight. If you do this, not only
are you not getting oxygen enough into your blood to burn up the waste
poisons that your own cells are making all the time, but also you are
breathing in the waste poisons from other people's lungs, and the germs
that are always in bad air.

Another very common cause of headache is _eye-strain_. Whenever you find
that, when you try to read, the letters begin to dance before your eyes,
and your head soon begins to ache, it is a sign that you need to have
your eyes examined and perhaps a pair of glasses fitted to enable you to
see properly.

Constipation and disturbances of digestion also very often cause
headache by poisoning the blood; and, as you know, the first sign of a
bad cold, or the beginning of a fever, or other illness, will often be a
bad headache.

In short, a headache always means that something is going wrong; and the
thing to do is to set to work at once to see if you can find out what
has caused it, and then to remove the cause. If you cannot find out the
cause, then go to a doctor and ask him to tell you what it is, and what
to do to get rid of it.

Above all things, don't swallow a dose of some kind of headache
medicine, and go on with your work, or your bad habits of eating, or
using your eyes; because, even though it may relieve the pain, it
doesn't do anything whatever to remove the cause and leaves you just as
badly off as you were before you took it. Besides, most of these
headache medicines, which for a time will relieve the pain of a
headache, are narcotics, or pain-deadeners; and in more than very
moderate doses they are poisons, and often dangerous ones. Those in
commonest use, known as the "coal tar" remedies, because the chemists
make them out of coal tar,[27] are likely to have a weakening effect
upon the heart; and, while not very dangerous in small doses, they are
very bad things to get into the habit of using.

The Exaggerated Claims of Patent Medicines. The same thing must be
said of the habit of dosing yourself every time you feel a pain or an
ache, with some sort of medicine, whether obtained at some previous time
from a doctor, or bought at a drug store. A large majority of the
medicines that are most widely advertised to cure all sorts of pains and
aches contain some form of narcotic--most commonly either alcohol or
opium. The reason for this is that no one medicine can possibly be a
cure for all sorts of diseases; and the only kind of medicine that will
make almost every one who takes it feel a little bit better for the time
being is a narcotic, because it has the power of deadening the nerves to
pain or discomfort.

Careful analyses by boards of health and government chemists of a great
number of advertised medicines have shown that three-fourths of the
so-called tonics and "bitters" and "bracers" of all sorts contain
alcohol--some of them in such large amounts as to be stronger and more
intoxicating than whiskey. The same investigations have found that a
large majority of the "colic cures," "pain relievers," nearly all the
"soothing syrups" and "teething syrups," and most of the cough mixtures,
cough cures, and consumption cures contain opium, often in quite
dangerous amounts. The widely-advertised medicines and remedies
guaranteed to cure all sorts of diseases in a very short time are almost
certain to be one of two things: either out-and-out frauds, costing
about four cents a bottle and selling for fifty cents or a dollar, or
else dangerous poisons. All patent pain relievers are safe things to let
entirely alone.

Another risk in taking medicines wholesale, especially those that are
known as patent medicines, is that you never can be quite sure what you
are taking, as their composition is usually kept a strict secret. It may
happen to be something very good for your disease, it may be entirely
useless, and it may be something very harmful. There is no one drug, or
medicine, known to the medical profession, that will cure more than one
or two diseases, or relieve more than four or five disturbed and
uncomfortable conditions. As you not only do not know what you are
taking, but are not always quite sure what is the matter with you, the
chances of your getting the right remedy for your disease are not much
more than one in a hundred. If it isn't the right thing, you are
certainly wasting your money, and may be doing yourself a serious
injury.

We should not pour drugs of which we know little into a body of which we
know less. Doctors give scarcely a fourth as much medicine now as they
did fifty years ago. The best cures are food, exercise, sleep, and fresh
air.

The Effects of Disease. In the case of nearly all infectious diseases,
the effects on the nervous system are among the last to appear, and may
not occur until weeks, months, or even years after the main fever or
attack of sickness. This is one of the reasons why, when they do occur,
they are often hard to cure; the whole system has become saturated with
the poisons before they reach the nerves at all. So it happens that the
idea has grown up that nervous diseases are very hard to cure. When,
however, we know that two-thirds of them are a late result of some of
the preventable infectious diseases and fevers, we can realize that it
is perfectly possible to prevent them, and that prevention is the best
cure.

The poisons that attack the brain and nervous system may be formed in
the body by disease germs or brought in from without, as are alcohol,
tobacco, lead, or arsenic. Even such mild infections as measles, scarlet
fever, and influenza may poison certain nerves supplying the muscles of
an arm or a leg, causing temporary paralysis, or even permanent laming;
or they may attack the nerve of sight or of hearing and produce
blindness or deafness.

A great many of the cases of paralysis and insanity are caused by
alcohol. Alcohol in excess may attack the nerves supplying the arms and
legs, producing severe pain and partial paralysis. It may also, after
long-continued use, affect the cells of the brain itself, producing the
horrible condition known as delirium tremens--a form of acute insanity
with distressing delusions, in which the patient imagines that he sees
rats, snakes, and other reptiles and vermin crawling over him, or in his
room. Even in those who never use it to such excess as this, or indeed
in those who may never become intoxicated, the long-continued use of
alcohol may produce a slow poisoning and general breaking-down of the
whole nervous system, causing in time the hand to tremble, the eye to
become bleared and dim, the gait weak and unsteady, the memory
uncertain, and the judgment poor.

Are Nervous Diseases Increasing? The direct use of the brain and
nervous system has much less to do with the production of its diseases
or even its serious disturbances than is usually believed. Most of
these, as we have seen, are due either to the poisons of disease or
alcohol, or to the fatigue-poisons, or other poisons, produced in the
stomach, the liver, the muscles, or other parts of the body. The worst
results of brain-work are due to the extent to which it deprives us of
proper exercise and fresh air. Good, vigorous mental activity,--hard
brain work, in fact,--when you are in good condition, is, if not
overdone, as healthful and almost as invigorating as physical exercise
or hearty play. We often hear it said that the rush and hurry of our
modern strenuous life is increasing the number of mental diseases and
nervous breakdowns. But there is no evidence that the strain of
civilization upon our brains and nervous systems is damaging them, or
that either nervous diseases or insanity are more frequent now than they
used to be one hundred or five hundred years ago. In fact, all the
evidence that we have points in exactly the opposite direction; for, as
we have seen, most of these brain and nerve diseases are due to
infectious diseases, bad food, and bad living conditions generally, all
of which the progress of modern civilization is rapidly lessening and
preventing.

We are collecting our insane in modern hospitals and comfortable homes,
instead of letting them wander in rags about the country, and this makes
them live longer and seem more numerous. But the poorest and least
highly civilized classes and races have much more insanity among them
than those who live under more favorable conditions.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Some of these coal-tar remedies are _Acetanilid_, and _Antipyrin_,
and _Phenacetin_.

CHAPTER XXII

EXERCISE AND GROWTH

Fatigue as a Danger Signal. The chief use of exercise in childhood,
whether of body or mind, is to make us grow; but it can do this only by
being kept within limits. Within these limits it will increase the vigor
of the heart, expand the lungs, clear the brain, deepen sleep, and
improve the appetite. Beyond these limits it stunts the body, dulls the
brain, overstrains the heart, and spoils the appetite. How are we going
to tell when these limits are being reached? Nature has provided a
danger signal--fatigue, or "tiredness."

Fatigue is due, not to complete exhaustion, but to poisoning of the
muscle, or nerve, by its own waste substances. If the fatigue is
general, or "all over," it is from these waste substances piling up in
the blood faster than the lungs, skin, and kidneys can get rid of them.
In other words, fatigue is a form of self-poisoning.

We can see how it is that exercise, which, up to the point of fatigue,
is both healthful and improving, when carried on after we are tired,
becomes just the opposite. Fatigue is nature's signal, "Enough for this
time!" That is why all methods of training for building up strength and
skill, both of mind and muscle, forbid exercising beyond well-marked
fatigue. If you yourself stop at this point in exercising, you will
find, the next time you try that particular exercise, that you can go a
little further before fatigue is felt; the third time, a little further
yet; and so, by degrees, you can build up both your body and brain to
the fullest development of which they are capable.

In muscular training, a series of light, quick movements, none of which
are fatiguing, repeated fifteen, twenty, or a hundred times, will do
much more to build up muscle and increase strength, than three or four
violent, heaving strains that tax all your strength. Real athletes and
skilled trainers, for instance, use half-or three-quarter-pound
dumb-bells and one-or two-pound Indian clubs, instead of the five-pound
dumb-bells and ten-pound clubs with which would-be athletes delight to
decorate their rooms. A thoroughbred race-horse is trained on the same
principle: he is never allowed to gallop until tired, or to put out his
full speed before he is well grown. In fact, the best methods of all
forms of exercising and training always stop just short of fatigue.
Education and study ought to be planned on the same principle. Exercise
of either our muscles or our minds after they have begun to poison
themselves through fatigue never does them any good, even if it does not
do them serious harm; and, where the exercise is for the sake of
building us up and developing our powers, it is best to stop for a
little while, or change the task, as soon as we begin to feel distinctly
tired, and then to try it again when we are rested.

[Illustration: A TRAINED BODY

Ellery H. Clark, All-around Athletic Champion of America, 1897, 1903.]

This is one of the secrets of the healthfulness and value of play and
games for children, and for older persons as well. When you get tired,
you can stop and rest; and then start in again when you feel
rested--that is to say, when your heart has washed the poisons out of
your muscles and nerves. In fact, if you will notice, you will find
that nearly all play and games are arranged on this plan--a period of
activity followed by a period of rest. Some games have regular
"innings," with alternate activity and rest for the players; or each
player takes his turn at doing the hard work; or the players are
constantly changing from one thing to another--for instance, throwing or
striking the ball one minute; running to first base the next; and
standing on base the next. Every muscle, every sense, every part of you
is exercised at once, or in rapid succession, and no part has time to
become seriously fatigued; so that you can play hard all the afternoon
and never once be uncomfortably tired, though your muscles have done a
tremendous lot of work, measured in foot-pounds or "boy-power," in that
time.

The good school imitates nature in this respect. The recitation periods
are short, and recesses frequent; a heavy subject is followed by a
lighter one; songs, drawing, calisthenics, and marching are mixed in
with the lessons, so as to give every part of the mind and body plenty
to do, and yet not over-tire any part.

All-Round Training from Work and Play. Every game that is worth
playing, every kind of work that accomplishes anything worth while,
trains and develops not merely the muscles and the heart, but the sight,
hearing, touch, and sense of balance, and the powers of judgment,
memory, and reason, as well.

If you are healthy, you know that you don't need to be told to play, or
even how, or what, to play; for you would rather play than eat. You have
as strong and natural an appetite for play as you have for food when you
are hungry, or for water when you are thirsty, or for sleep when you are
tired. It is just as right to follow the one instinct as the others,
though any one may be carried to extremes.

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,--requires, as we say, "a
good eye" for distance,--makes 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
it--watching how the good players did it, and playing an hour or two
every day during the season--you 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.

[Illustration: TUG OF WAR

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,--Fox-and-Geese,
Duck-on-Rock,--which 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.

[Illustration: THE GIANT STRIDE

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 lives--one'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.

[Illustration: SCHOOL GARDENING]

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,--a barnyard,--yet 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 body--the brain--the 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.

[Illustration: A WASTED CHANCE FOR PUBLIC HEALTH

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 exercise--little 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.

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