How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern ScienceFisher, Irving
Science
How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science
Fisher, Irving
Hygiene
Another objection is that the practise of hygiene is "too much trouble."
It is undoubtedly true, that no one who has unhygienic habits can
overcome them without a certain amount of "trouble." The people who get
the best results are those who are never deterred by trouble so long as
the trouble is worth while. For those who have not the necessary
enthusiasm or self-control to break their unwholesome habits by sheer
will power, the best advice is to so arrange their lives as to make the
practise of hygiene inevitable. One physician in Chicago deliberately
got rid of his automobile and other means of locomotion in order to
force himself to walk to all his patients, and so secure enough physical
exercise. Another man in New York City, with the same object in view,
selected the location for his dwelling so that there was no rapid
transportation available to take him to his office, making the walking
back and forth a necessity from which he could not escape.
[Sidenote: Simplicity of Hygienic Living]
The only difficulty lies in overcoming the inertia of acquired habits.
After one has changed his habits, it is just as easy to live rightly as
to live wrongly. The rules of hygiene are not restrictive, but
liberating. They may seem at first restrictive, for they prohibit many
things which we have been in the habit of doing; but they are really
liberating, for the things we were doing were unrealized restrictions on
our own power to work, to be useful, or even to enjoy life. The "rules"
of hygiene are thus simply the means of emancipating us from our real
limitations. These so-called rules, when tried, will prove to be not
artificial but natural, not difficult but easy, not complicated but
simple. They are almost as simple as the direction to bathe in the river
Jordan. It is, in fact, their very simplicity and availability to which
is largely due their deplorable neglect and the failure to realize the
wonderful benefits following their careful and continued observance.
[Sidenote: The Evil of Romancing]
Not only a healthy mental attitude toward life, but a healthy mental
attitude toward one's own unhygienic habits is essential. It is a very
common thing for a man to romance over his shortcomings, or his
unhealthy physical conditions, to make humor of them to his friends.
Very often the first step toward a better physical condition is a change
in this mental attitude.
Section IV--The Possibilities of Hygiene
[Sidenote: The Preventability of Disease and Death]
Certain it is that more people would practise hygiene if they could be
made to realize in some vivid way how much they needed it. Few persons,
even when they read and accept the statistics on the subject, really
have a picture of the imperative need of hygiene as an integral part of
every human life. It is not brought home to them how widespread is
illness, how numerous are preventable deaths, how many are the
tendencies toward individual and racial deterioration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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