Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of DiseaseWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Science
Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Mental healing
Night Work.--In a large city there are many workmen who are on night
duty. They will be disturbed in many ways in health, unless they make
special arrangements to live under conditions that enable them to have
full eight hours of sleep every day and, above all, to have their
meals regularly. When they come home in the morning they usually have
a rather hearty meal. Most of them can sleep very well with this, but
very few of them sleep the full eight hours, and all need this amount.
Usually they have another full meal about five in the evening. Very
often it will be found that the third meal of the day consists of a
sandwich, with a glass of milk or a glass of beer, and some cake or
some crackers and cheese, or the inevitable pie. Every workman should
have three full meals, and a man who is suffering from almost any
symptoms will be improved at once if the third good meal is insisted
upon. At one time I had occasion to see a number of men whose work
began not later than seven in the evening and did not finish until six
or seven in the morning. They were sufferers from all sorts of
complaints. Most of them were under weight. Not a few were
constipated. Some were suffering from severe headaches that came
rather frequently, and a few from a headache that was severe but came
only every two or four weeks. These patients alternated night and day
work, and it was the week after they had been on day work, and first
went on to night work, that they suffered from headache.
In every one of these cases instructions with regard to eating and
sleeping proved to be the best remedy. Nearly all of them were not
eating enough, and were skimping the third meal. Three of them were
taking only between four and five hours of sleep. They stayed up after
breakfast to read the paper, went to bed about nine and got up about
two o'clock. Just as soon as two or three hours was added to their
sleep, they began to feel better, and various symptoms, digestive,
rheumatic and nervous, of which they complained, began to disappear.
Nearly always night workers are more prone than the ordinary run of
workmen to some indulgence in spirituous liquors. Cold and shivery on
the way home from work in the early morning, they take a nip of
whiskey to brace them up. Alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver is a little
more common among sea captains, policemen, printers and night workmen
on the railroads than among the average of the population. The reason
for it seems to be that undilute whiskey is thrown into the
circulation by being taken into the stomach at a time when that viscus
is empty and all the cells are craving food and drink. It is carried
directly to the liver, and there either produces or predisposes to the
bad effects upon liver cells which we know as cirrhosis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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