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
We remember another instance; this time of a consumptive; a man who
was so far gone that all the physicians gave up his case as hopeless.
To all intents and purposes he was already a dead man, when there came
to him the light of a new hope. He had spent a great deal of money
in taking various “treatments” for tuberculosis, without deriving
permanent benefit, and then had come to believe utterly that in only
one way was there hope for the consumptive, namely, by living entirely
in the open air. When seemingly at his last gasp he arrived at a branch
of the Battle Creek Sanitarium at Boulder Creek, Colorado. In certain
photographs of this establishment you may see on a bare hillside that
stands back of the building, a narrow foot-path. This path has many
turnings and windings in its lower course, but towards the top of the
hill it aspires upward in a straight line. That trail was made by the
consumptive who had determined that he would live, crawling on his
hands and knees up the side of the hill. He positively refused to go
under a roof for any consideration whatsoever. His meals were brought
to him where he lay on the road side. At first he was so weak that
he could only go a few feet in the course of a day, and had to drag
himself along in a wavering line. But he began to improve—he went on
improving—until, finally, along the track on which he had crawled he
was running at top speed.
And a little while ago this man was one of the athletes who took part
in Professor Irving Fisher’s endurance competition between flesh-eating
athletes and vegetarians; and he proved to be best of them all! He
doubled the best record made by any Yale man in the deep-knee bending
contest. The most enduring Yale man was able to make the deep-knee
bend—which is a very severe test of physical endurance—twelve hundred
times. The consumptive who had cured himself went twenty-four hundred
times. He thinks nothing of a ten or fifteen mile ran before breakfast
in the morning.
It is important to apply these truths to the question of nutrition. It
is positively harmful to eat food when one is gloomy or low spirited or
worried or angry.
You may object to this that you cannot at will make an optimist of
yourself at meal times, and turn on a flow of good humor as you draw
water from a tap. But you can at least refrain from eating, and if you
do you will discover that the real hunger which is bound to develop is
a very strong emotion. It will drive away any ordinary attack of the
blues very quickly; and will call up pleasant anticipations of the joy
of food to assist the digestive processes.
IX
THE CASE AS TO MEAT
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