Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and HappinessBeecher, Catharine Esther
General
Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and Happiness
Beecher, Catharine Esther
Cooking; Home economics
Any such attention to religion as prevents the performance of daily
duties and needful relaxation is dangerous, and tends to produce such a
state of the brain as makes it impossible to feel or judge correctly.
And when any morbid and unreasonable pertinacity appears, much exercise
and engagement in other interesting pursuits should be urged, as the
only mode of securing the religious benefits aimed at. And whenever
any mind is oppressed with care, anxiety, or sorrow, the amount of
active exercise in the fresh air should be greatly increased, that the
action of the muscles may withdraw the blood which, in such seasons, is
constantly tending too much to the brain. At the same time, innocent
and healthful amusement should be urged as a duty.
There has been a most appalling amount of suffering, derangement,
disease, and death, occasioned by a want of attention to this subject,
in teachers and parents. Uncommon precocity in children is usually the
result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and in such cases medical
men would now direct that the wonderful child should be deprived of
all books and study, and turned to play out in the fresh air. Instead
of this, parents frequently add fuel to the fever of the brain, by
supplying constant mental stimulus, until the victim finds refuge in
idiocy or an early grave. Where such fatal results do not occur, the
brain in many cases is so weakened that the prodigy of infancy sinks
below the medium of intellectual powers in after-life.
In our colleges, too, many of the most promising minds sink to an early
grave, or drag out a miserable existence, from this same cause. And it
is an evil as yet little alleviated by the increase of physiological
knowledge. Every college and professional school, and every seminary
for young ladies, needs a medical man or woman, not only to lecture
on physiology and the laws of health, but empowered by official
capacity to investigate the case of every pupil, and, by authority, to
enforce such a course of study, exercise, and repose as the physical
system requires. The writer has found by experience that in a large
institution there is one class of pupils who need to be restrained by
penalties from late hours and excessive study, as much as another class
need stimulus to industry.
Under the head of excessive mental action must be placed the indulgence
of the imagination in novel-reading and “castle-building.” This kind of
stimulus, unless counter-balanced by physical exercise, not only wastes
time and energies, but undermines the vigor of the nervous system. The
imagination was designed by our wise Creator as a charm and stimulus to
animate to benevolent activity, and its perverted exercise seldom fails
to bring a penalty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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