Insanity: Its Causes and PreventionStearns, Henry Putnam
Science
Insanity: Its Causes and Prevention
Stearns, Henry Putnam
Psychiatry -- Early works to 1900
3. A larger importance will be given, in methods of education at home, to
inculcating and enforcing obedience to laws and regulations. This is
essential, not only to the interests of society, but especially to those
of the individual in his relations to the laws of health. Man is endowed
not only with intellect, but with a will in the direction and use of it,
and it becomes his duty and essential to his interests to find out those
courses of conduct which will lead to health. In a considerable degree he
is capable of regulating his conduct so as to be in harmony with such
regulations. If, however, he is not taught the necessity of obedience
while young, and how to obey easily, the lesson becomes one very difficult
to learn in later life, and he is in great danger of never learning it.
4. A larger degree of importance will be given to education in relation to
physiology and heredity, especially so far as they relate to the
institution of the family. As the well-being of both society and the
individual depends so largely on that of the family, a knowledge of the
laws of heredity will be considered as essential to all persons who enter
into the relation of marriage, so that tendencies toward diseases may be,
at least in some measure, avoided.
II.--_In Reference to Certain Habits and Customs of Living._
1. One of the most important of these will relate to the use of alcohol,
in its various forms, as a beverage. Its stimulating and deteriorating
influence upon the brain will be more fully understood and avoided,
thereby removing one of the largest factors in the causation of insanity.
One of the astonishing facts which confronts the student of sociology, is
the unaccountable indifference, which has existed hitherto in society to
the vast evils of intemperance. When, however, the young become more
generally educated in reference to the physiological effects of alcohol,
and more fully appreciate the fact that they do not cease with those
primarily concerned, but pass over from the individual to his family and
to society; that the amount of disease and suffering to both, from this
evil, are so much greater than from any other--nay, I had almost written
from all others together,--extending in the family to the third and fourth
generations frequently in the forms of insanity and idiocy, and in society
to ignorance, poverty, crime, and a larger expenditure of charity than for
all other forms of evil,--why, it seems certain I shall be justified in my
prophecy, that the day cannot be far distant when society will proscribe
and limit the ravages of this enemy of human society.
2. The second refers to the excessive use of tobacco, especially by the
young, before the system attains to the maturity of its growth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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