Woods Hutchinson

“ Even while you sleep, your heart keeps beating, and you don’t stop breathing, of course. But your muscles are quiet, and your food tube rests. Your brain rests, too,—better in sleep than at any other time,—so that when morning comes you are as “lively as a cricket” and quite ready for the new day.
Yet even in sleep your brain does not stop working entirely, but goes on receiving messages from the stomach and the skin and the memory, and mixing them up together in the strangest fashion, so that you dream, as you say. You ought not to dream very much if you are perfectly well ”

“ It is good to think that every one of us, even such little fellows as Claude, can help to keep the city beautiful. But it is not simply to make things look nice that we have so many cans—cans for ashes, cans for papers, cans for food scraps. No indeed, it is to keep the city clean and make it fit for people to live in; for if dirty papers and scraps were left to blow about the streets, they would fill the air with germs and filth.
Any dust that blows about the streets is likely to be carrying disease germs with it. ”

“ What is the use, say some, of putting ideas about disease into children’s heads and making them fussy about their health and anxious before their time?
Precisely because ideas about disease are far less hurtful than disease itself, and because the period for richest returns from sensible living is childhood—and the earlier the better.
It is abundantly worth while to teach a child how to protect his health and build up his strength; too many of us only begin to take thought of our health when it is too late to do us much good. Almost everything is possible in childhood. ”

“ So, you see, the Board of Health is one of the very best friends that you have, trying to keep your food pure and good, the water that you drink clean and wholesome, and the milk sweet and free from dirt or disease germs. You ought to help these officers and their inspectors in every way that you can. I know that it is sometimes troublesome to obey all their rules; and perhaps when you don’t know what the dangers are which they are trying to guard you against, it seems to you that they are too particular about a great many things. ”

“ The only place where air is absolutely sure to be fresh is out of doors. There, as we have seen, the sun and the winds keep it so all the time. But, unluckily, we cannot spend all our time outdoors, either when we are little or after we have grown up. So we must try in every way that we can to bring the outdoors indoors—to get plenty of fresh air and light into the houses that we live in, especially the bedrooms we sleep in and the schoolrooms we study in when we are children, and the offices or shops we work in when we are grown up. ”

“ When you are washed, it doesn’t take you long to dress; and before you have finished brushing your hair, you begin to feel as if you were ready for breakfast. You know just where the feeling is—an empty sensation near the pit of your stomach, and you don’t have to look at the clock to know that it is breakfast time. ”

“ So we should take care that the air around us is fresh air.
Unless the air were kept in motion by the heat of the sun, causing breezes and winds, it would become stale and wouldn’t do at all for our lung-bellows to use. The air we breathe must be kept moving and fresh if it is to make us feel bright and strong and happy. Mother Nature has given us miles upon miles and oceans upon oceans of this clear, fresh air to breathe—“all outdoors,” in fact, as far as we can see around us and for miles above our heads. She sends the winds to move the air about and blow away the dust and dirt ”

“ After you have your lungs and your blood well filled with air, either by walking briskly to school or by chasing one another about the school playground, you will suddenly hear the bell ring, and you march indoors and sit down at your desks. Here, of course, the air cannot blow about freely from every direction, because the walls and doors and windows are shutting you in on every side. ”

“ In one sense, in fact, though this may be a little harder for you to understand, you are sunlight yourselves; for the power in your muscles and nerves that makes you able to jump and dance and sing and laugh and breathe is the sunlight which you have eaten in bread and apples and potatoes, and which the plants had drunk in through their leaves in the long, sunny days of spring and summer. ”

“ You have often seen little drops of water on your skin, when you were very hot. This sweat, or perspiration, as we call it, cools the body by making the skin moist. You know how cold it makes you to be wrapped in a wet sheet. Well, the skin cools you in just the same way, when it becomes wet with sweat. The sweat comes from the blood under the skin; so that, as we saw before, by letting this moisture pass through, the skin acts as a sieve to let out the waste from the blood. ”

“ But, of course, you know that air is not good to eat. It has no strength in it, as food has; it isn’t even a liquid like milk or coffee or tea. It is so thin and light that we call it a gas. Indeed, I suppose it is pretty hard for you to believe that air is a real thing at all. But all outdoors is full of the gas called air, and everything that seems to be empty, like a room or an empty box, is full of it.
You cannot even smell it, as you can that other gas which comes through pipes into our houses and burns at the gas jets ”

“ When one part works well, it helps all the rest; when one squad of tiny cells in the muscles or liver or heart is doing its duty, like the little ants, it helps all the other cell-workers in the body to keep healthy.
If you eat proper food, you help not only your stomach but your liver, too; for it has not so many poisons to get rid of. While you are helping your stomach and your liver, you are helping your heart and your brain, and so on. So what you do to help one helps all.
There are, however, some poisons that the liver cannot get rid of; but these the skin or the kidneys carry away. ”

“ Mother Nature has given each of you two very delicate little receivers to catch the sound waves and carry them to your brain. You know what they are—you can name them. But how are these wonderful little machines made? ”

“ How nice it would be for you to be able to prepare breakfast for them. I know a family where the youngest boy often rises early and gets breakfast for five. He can fry the bacon and boil the eggs and make the coffee and mush and biscuit just as nicely as his mother can; and he takes pride in it and enjoys it.
Cooking is what we call an art. Everyone, of course, can learn to do it; but some people can do it much better than others, just as some boys and girls can draw better than others. ”

“ Of course, sometimes, when you are not well, you have to be absent; it is best that you should be. But it is better still to know how to keep well, so you won’t have to be absent, and won’t have to miss any good times in work or play all your life.
You remember that all the parts of your body are fed and ventilated by the blood, which is pumped to them from the heart. So long as this blood is pure and has plenty of oxygen in it, it does good to every part of the body to which it comes. ”

“ But how did your eyes get the message to your brain, and how did your brain tell your legs to stop walking? We must have in our bodies a kind of telephone system. And that is, in fact, just what we have. Our brain is our “central office”; and our nerves are the wires, running from all parts of our body to the brain, carrying messages back and forth. ”

“ When you have had some good games of play after school, and have finished whatever errands you may have to run, or have done the chores about the barn or the garden or the house, you will begin to feel as if there were something missing somewhere. ”

“ In the days when your grandfather was a little boy, every man thought that ale and wine and whiskey were good foods for him when he was well; and good medicine when he was sick. He believed that they gave him an appetite, and increased his strength. But now we have found, by carefully studying the effects of alcohol, in laboratories and in hospitals, that these beliefs were almost entirely mistaken. We know that all that wine, beer, and whiskey do is to make people feel better for a little while, without making them actually stronger or better in any way. ”

“ Sugar is really a very good food if you do not eat too much at once, and so pure candy is good for you if you do not eat too much. The very best time to eat it is at the end of a meal. If you learn to make it at school or at home, you can always have some to eat after your luncheon without having to buy it. If you do buy candy, don’t get the bright colored kind; it looks pretty, but it may hurt you. And be sure to see that it has been kept under a cover, where the dust and flies could not get at it. ”

“ You know how careful we are all trying to be not to let consumption spread. By insisting that all houses shall be built so as to give plenty of light and fresh air to everyone; and by forbidding spitting upon the streets; and by insisting that food to be sold, especially milk, shall be clean,—by preventing the spread of the disease in every way, our Boards of Health have cut down the number of deaths from this disease nearly one half ”

“ When you are running and breathing hard, and even when you are sitting still and breathing quietly, air is going into your lungs and then coming out, going in and coming out, many times every minute. How does the air get in and out of the lungs? It will not run in of itself; for it is light and floats about, you know. Here, again, Mother Nature has planned it all out. She has made us an air bellows, or air pump, to suck it into the lungs. ”

“ If you try to work or play hard right after a hearty meal, you will be drawing away to your brain or to your muscles, the blood that the stomach is trying to get for the digesting and melting of your food. I suppose that you have all found this out for yourselves; for, if you run and play too hard right after dinner, you are very soon out of breath, and if you keep up the exercise, you are quite likely to have an attack of indigestion or stomach ache. ”

“ The school doctor is not thinking only about what seems to be a cold, although, as you know, it is very important that anyone with a cold should take good care of himself and should not let others catch it from him. The doctor sends the child home because this is just the way in which several other infectious diseases may begin—measles, scarlet fever, chicken pox, whooping cough, and diphtheria. For most infectious diseases, as you will remember, are caught from germs floating in the air and breathed into the nose and throat. ”

“ Your mother and your father and your teacher will help you to choose, and you will soon find that what they call “good literature” is good stories, and about the right sort of men and women and boys and girls—the kind that you would like to know, and that you would want to be like. Once try it, and you find that you like that kind of reading better than you do the cheap, slangy, trashy stuff, just as you like, and never get tired of, good bread and butter and roast beef and apples and milk and cream and pudding and pie. ”

“ As soon as you have finished breakfast, and brushed your teeth and gone to the toilet, you are ready to run out of doors to play, if you have plenty of time, or, if not, to start for school.
Doesn’t it seem a nuisance, in winter time, to have to put on a coat and overshoes and a cap or a hood, and sometimes leggings and mittens, too? But your mothers know what is best for you; and when you are young and growing fast, you have so much more surface in proportion to your weight than when you are grown up, that you lose heat from the blood in your skin very fast ”

“ But you children who have good eyes that can see, do you really see things when you look at them? You can train your eyes just as you can train your ears. You can teach them to read quickly down a page, and to find things in pictures, and, better still, to see things out of doors, in the garden and the woods and on the seashore. We hear a great deal about “sharp eyes,” but most of us see very little of all we might see. Our eyes are on the lookout, too, to protect us from dangers that may come; with our skin and nose and ears, they are constantly on the watch ”

“ You see, when you run, you are working your muscles and heart-pump very hard; and if you kept running all the time, you would burn up so much food in the muscles that the heart couldn’t pump blood fast enough to wash away all the waste, and would just chug-chug-chug till it tired itself out. When you are tired, it is time to stop and rest; for being tired means that the poisons are not being carried away from the muscles fast enough, and that your heart is working too hard. ”

“ When your head aches, Nature is telling you that you have been over-straining your eyes, or breathing foul air, or eating some food that does not agree with you, or forgetting to go to the toilet regularly, or not getting sleep enough. The sensible thing to do is not to swallow some medicine to deaden your nerves to the pain, but to find out what you have been doing that is unhealthful for you, and then stop it. ”

“ Some of the germs of these “catching” diseases, like the germs of typhoid fever, of which we have spoken in connection with our drinking water, are carried in the water or milk that we drink, or upon the food that we eat; and one of the worst carriers of germs is the ordinary household fly.
Not so very many years ago, people did not know that dirt makes people sick. You see, they did not know anything about the disease seeds (germs) that grow so fast in dirt. They did not like to have flies about, because flies look so dirty and bite people and crawl over things and spot them. ”

“ Hide-and-seek is a good game, because, when you are caught, you can stand still a few minutes and rest. When you are hiding, you can take a good breath for the home-run you have to make. Most games, in fact, are planned like this—a run and a rest, and then another run. While you rest, some one else is taking his turn at the bat, or at being “It,” or whatever is the hardest part of the work. This is one reason why games are so good for you to play. ”