Personal hygiene and physical training for womenGalbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Science
Personal hygiene and physical training for women
Galbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Physical education and training; Women -- Health and hygiene
The physiologic, as well as the moral necessity, has always been
conceded for every man to have a life-work—a vocation; a work for
which he should be fitted, and for which he was capable, sufficiently
congenial not to sink into mere drudgery, and which would, at the
same time, afford ample financial compensation to be remunerative and
a stimulus to his power of endurance.
Important, from a physiologic point of view, as a vocation is for
men, it is equally or even more important for women. It is highly
probable that the unstable nervous system of women and their
emotional extravagance and dissipations, whether of frivolity,
wickedness, or grief, is largely due to lack of mental discipline and
muscular development. It is a psychologic proposition that any woman
who has a toothache suffers less if she keeps busy, and any one will
testify that she suffers much less from the intense heat of summer if
she is busily employed.
One of the great objects of a definite and fixed occupation is
to turn the thoughts out from the ego. Work of some kind is
indispensable to the health and happiness of every one, since it
necessitates an objective instead of a subjective attitude of mind.
Experience teaches that the brain, like the muscles, is subject
to training; occasional excessive efforts, with long intervals of
repose, are rather injurious, while a many-sided activity, constantly
repeated, interrupted by sufficient shorter rests and supported by
sufficient nutrition, is strengthening. A healthy training of the
brain should be as many sided as possible.
Symmetric development and training of every function of the brain
is as essential for mental efficiency and sanity as the development
of all the muscles of the body is for bodily vigor, and a one-sided
training of the mental powers is as certain to produce eccentricities
of habits of thought and actions as those occupations which call into
play only the action of certain groups of muscles is to cause bodily
deformities. Anything which will prove injurious to the delicate
nerve substance must be avoided, as laziness, idleness, and, worst of
all, any form of narcotics.
Many-sided life work, consistently carried through, not only
strengthens the brain, but also its continued power of adaptation,
and one’s whole life is a continuous struggle for adaptation. The
more the brain works, the more capable it is of receiving new
impressions and elaborating old ones, and it retains its elasticity
longer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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