Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New HygieneSinclair, Upton
Science
Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene
Sinclair, Upton
Hygiene
He himself thinks that there is nothing very remarkable in all this. He
attributes it to his abstention from meat, from tea and coffee, alcohol
and tobacco. He never eats more than one “hearty” meal a day; his
second meal, when he takes one, consisting of a little fruit. His sole
regret is that during the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life
he ate meat. He believes that any child, if it begin right, can, when
it grows up, do all that he is doing.
“I was,” he said to a friend, “a puny, undersized, ailing child; born
when my father was more than fifty. It was the accepted opinion that I
would not live to be a man which I fully believed. I had an appetite
for knowledge and resolved that since I was to die early I must study
and work very hard in order to accomplish a little something before I
died. So I would study until one to three o’clock in the morning; then
rise at six. From the age of ten I have fully supported myself. All
this deliberate stealing of time from sleep resulted in a permanent
stunting of my growth. And as I went on in life, I kept up the same
habits of night work. And yet, I have only once been troubled by an
illness; which came upon me a few years ago as a result of overwork.
But which I got rid of; and now I am in better bodily condition than I
was twenty-five years ago. But I was not handicapped by a great number
of things that are bars to other workers, over which they stumble.
I have slept when I could in the open air; I have drawn from air,
water, light, heat, and proper exercise, the benefits that inhere
in them; and I have nourished my body on wholesome foods. I mention
these points with insistence—these points that seem so freakish to
many people—simply because to me they are fundamental points in the
physiologic, or natural, way of healing and of living.”
Dr. Kellogg publishes a big magazine of large circulation named _Good
Health_; and in this he teaches that health is not a mere negation of
ailments—a state of being free from rheumatism, or consumption, or
biliousness, or any other of the “thousand natural shocks that flesh
is heir to”—but that it is being wholesome, happy, sane, complete,
a unit—a man or woman eating, drinking, sleeping, working, playing,
functioning in all parts as naturally, as inevitably, as easily and as
unconsciously, as a flower grows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account