NATURAL LIVING
Sleep, the saint that evil thoughts and aims
Takest away, and into souls dost creep,
Like to a breeze from heaven.
WORDSWORTH.
He who would get the benefit of sleep must look after health.
Health, after all, is merely that condition where all parts of the
human organism work together without friction. We think of health as
something that is bestowed upon us from without; something over which
we have no control and almost no influence. Perhaps this queer idea is
partly responsible for the general lack of health to-day.
It seems incredible that it is necessary that human beings endowed with
tremendous capacity for enjoyment, with everything at hand to enjoy,
should be hindered by a mere lack of that harmony that we call health
from fully enjoying life. It seems only reasonable that there must be
some explanation of lack of health and some way of escape from it.
It is now generally admitted that most of the diseases to which man
thinks himself heir are due to improper, unnatural living. It could
safely be added that the remainder of our ill-health and distress comes
in large part from improper, unnatural thinking.
The common man may laugh at the idea that we make our own ill-health;
if you were not more intelligent than the common man, you would not
read this book, so that you will probably see at once that your own
experience has taught you the truth of it. You will discover that you
have learned for yourself, albeit for the most part unconsciously, that
what a man thinks about, that he becomes. So it would seem that the
natural and proper thing to do, if we find ourselves suffering from
sleeplessness and ill-health, is to look after our way of living and
thinking.
Medical science was once the attempt to cure disease; as Dr. Woods
Hutchinson says, it is now coming to be the science of preventing
disease, and everything that tends to that end is properly a part of
the science of medicine, though it have no connection with the myriad
drugs of the pharmacopœia.
Until we compare conditions to-day with those of even fifty years
ago, we can form no idea of our rapid strides toward natural living.
If we walk the streets of the city or the roads of suburban towns and
villages very early in the morning, at any season of the year, we
shall find the vast majority of the houses with open windows. It is
true that the opening may not always be very wide, but they are open.
Fifty years ago all would have been closed.
Within the recollection of those whose memories go back a quarter of
a century, we were taught that night air was dangerous to breathe and
was to be completely shut out from our houses. Now we know that the
organism needs fresh air by night as well as by day, and that the most
dangerous thing about night air is the lack of it.
We now treat the most dreaded diseases, pneumonia and tuberculosis,
almost wholly by fresh air and nourishing food, administering drugs
only to check the symptoms until the system gets into condition to
throw them off. More than that, we know now that consumption, at least,
is not a mysterious dispensation of Providence visited upon certain
people without regard to individual responsibility. Rather it is always
the result of improper living or thinking, or both, and, when it is
the scourge of a district, as in thickly settled city slums, it is the
direct result of monopoly and oppression that deny the common interests
of all mankind.
In 1865 Dr. W. W. Hall of New York published his book, “Sleep,” in
the preface of which he said: “It is the end and aim of this book to
show that as a means of high health, good blood, and a strong mind to
old and young, sick or well, each one should have a single bed in
a large, clean, light room, so as to pass all the hours of sleep in
a pure, fresh air, and that those who fail in this, will in the end
fail in health and strength of limb and brain, and will die while yet
their days are not all told.” That this physician with a large practice
should find it necessary to write a book to set forth the necessity
of fresh air during sleeping-hours, goes to show how little the mass
of our people knew even fifty years ago. We hear so much about fresh
air in these days that we forget that the preceding generation was in
deadly terror of it.
All things point to a marked advance during the past decades, in the
understanding of conditions necessary for health, but, after all, we
have come but a very little way along the road we must travel to get
the most out of life.
We owe a good deal of our advance in this direction to physicians and
others who have broken loose from traditions and have not feared to
put their ideas and discoveries to the test. Nature has provided all
things for “the healing of the nations,” if we but trust her. As Dr.
Shattuck, a famous Boston surgeon, used to say in making his rounds in
the Massachusetts General Hospital, “There is one inestimable gift
God has given to man—an abundance of fresh air.” It was his method of
announcing that he did not think the ventilation of room or ward was
sufficient, and the nurses understood that, and immediately admitted
more air into the room.
In the wards of that great institution were dozens of persons who had
never before heard of the value of fresh air: being compelled by evil
social conditions to live in districts where sunshine and air were
rarities, they had never heard of any relation between health and fresh
air. They frequently learned that lesson there.
A little device which we call “the Perfect Gift of Sleep” is a great
help in excluding the light without excluding the air, and especially
valuable in that most delightful change, sleeping out of doors. A bag
is made of dark green or blue or black silk or satin, about four inches
wide and eight inches long, and very loosely filled with sweet pine
needles. It is laid lightly over the eyes.
This may seem too trivial to bother about, but the increased comfort
and the better quality of sleep which it brings is astonishing.