Street organ

“ The “quiet street” which I selected for its retirement, is infested with organ-grinders, who reap a daily harvest among the infantile population for which quiet streets are remarkable. My landlady—worthy Mrs. Squall—has six little Squallets, who delight in hand-organs, and who interrupt my musical waking-dreams of the twilight hour, every day, with appeals for sixpence to give “the new organ-grinder, with his sweet little monkey.” ”

“ This organ was not a portable one like English street organs, but a more imposing instrument, as we learn from other documents giving a detailed account of the moneys paid to Maistre Jehan for conveying the organs from Bruges to Brussels. ”

“ We hope to see the city once again crowded with traffic as thick as that on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, and the uncanny silence of our present-day streets banished by the cheerful turmoil of automobiles and taxis. And above all we hope to see the air-raid shelters gone, and the hundreds of crippled men in hospital blue no longer visible in our streets, and the long lines of motor ambulances, which assemble every evening outside the stations to meet the hospital trains, swept away forever. ”

“ When this is the case with a sickly, feeble, aged body, the mouth, the throat, in speaking, and the stomach in receiving food; the nostrils, and the eyes, which are called doors, these are all affected and must weaken as nature ceaseth to perform its original offices. Thus these doors are shut in the street when the Grinding is low. The Streets are the several passages of the body, which the matter of nourishment passeth through, and are the roads and highways to and from the places where the Grinding is performed. ”

“ In this Church, unlike most others, the western gallery is obtained by a recess over the vestibule, and is principally occupied by a splendid organ by Nicholls, comprising the great organ, choir organ, and swell organ, containing thirty-three stops and 1876 pipes. The organ is considered one of the finest and most powerful in London. ”

“ Now, there is only one district in New York City where a man is bound to receive scars and wounds and indentations of that sort—and that is along the sidewalks of Twenty-third Street and a portion of Sixth Avenue south of there. ”

“ The corridor on each side is a framework of walls of glazed brick, arched over head, and divided into six segments. In each segment is a separate, light, elegant removable ward, constructed of glass and iron, twelve feet high, fourteen feet long, and ten feet wide. The cubic capacity of each ward is 1,680 feet. Every patient who is ill enough to require constant attendance has one of these wards entirely to himself, so that the injurious influences on the sick, which are created by mixing up, in one large room, the living and the dying ”

“ The Scotchwoman has made several attempts to accommodate "young men lodgers," but they have ended in shrill rows.
There is no house without children in this street, and the number of them grows ever and ever greater. Nine-tenths of the doctor's visits are on this account alone, and his appearances are the chief matter of such conversation as the women make across the fences. One after another the little strangers come, to live through lives as flat and colorless as the day's life in this street. Existence dawns, and the doctor-watchman's door knock resounds along the row of rectangular holes. ”

“ If the vaso-motor centre of the brain is only influenced when the ganglia at the base are called into activity, and if their activity coincides with emotion, and not with thought, whose organ is much more remote, in the cerebral hemispheres, it should follow that emotion, and not thought, should most easily influence the vaso-motor centre, and be followed by peculiar modifications of the ganglionic system and of the circulation. ”

“ From a hundred foul lanes and alleys have debouched, on to the spick-and-span-new promenade, unheard-of human horrors. Gibbering forms of men and women in filthy rags, with fiery heads of shock hair, the roots beginning an inch from the eyebrows, with the eyes themselves bleared and gummy, with gashes filled with yellow fangs for teeth, with rough holes punched in the nasal cartilage for nostrils, with sprawling hands and splay feet, tessellated with dirt—awful deformities, with horrifying malformations of the limbs and running sores ostentatiously displayed ”

“ Into each great bundle of nerves, as it leaves the axis of the body along with an artery, there enters a branch of the sympathetic nerve; which branch, accompanying the artery throughout its ramifications, has the function of regulating its diameter and otherwise controlling the flow of blood through it according to the local requirements. Analogously, in the group of telegraph-wires running alongside each railway, there is one for the purpose of regulating the traffic—for retarding or expediting the flow of passengers and commodities, as the local conditions demand. ”

“ The quiet night routine went on about him; the strong, pervasive odor of antiseptics; the padded tap of the nurses' rubber soles as they went softly on their rounds; the occasional click of a glass and a spoon somewhere; the piteous wail of a suffering child in a distant ward; the sharp whir of an electric bell; the homely thud of the elevator on its errands up and down; even the controlled yet ready spring to service of all concerned when the ambulance rolled up and a man on a stretcher, with a ghastly cut in his head and face, was brought in ”

“ The last census shows us that the street cars in the city of New York have more ways of producing nervous prostration and palpitation of the brain to the square inch than the combined population of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Tinkersdam and Gotterdammerung.
To get in some of the street cars about six o'clock is a problem, and to get out again is an assassination. ”

“ In this same infirmary there was one surgical ward—for in a listless mood I went over it—where the patients had died, not of the poison, nor of suffocation, but of hunger: for the doctors, or someone, had made the long room air-tight, double-boarding the windows, felting the doors, and then locking them outside; they themselves may have perished before their precautions for the imprisoned patients were complete: for I found a heap of maimed shapes, mere skeletons, crowded round the door within. ”

“ The first essential in hospital construction is abundance of air and light. The evils of overcrowded wards are well recognised in surgical practice, but although less obvious in medical cases, they are not less real. And this is true, not only of fever wards, but of general medical wards; overcrowding, or the presence of some peculiarly unhealthy case, lowering the vitality, and otherwise exerting an injurious influence upon the patients. In our new wards, air and light are abundant. ”

“ By this exercise the appetite and perspiration are promoted; the body is kept in proper temperament; the mind is enlivened; the motion of the lungs is facilitated; and the rigidity of the legs arising from too much sitting, is relieved. The most obstinate diseases, and the most troublesome hysteric and hypochondriacal complaints, have been frequently cured by perseverance in walking.”
Pedestrian feats, even when carried to excess, are seldom attended by any pernicious effects. The exhaustion occasioned by severe [42] exercise is only temporary ”

“ Often at night I would try with one lost hand to grope for the other. As, however, I had no pain in the right arm, the sense of the existence of that limb gradually disappeared, as did that of my legs also.
Everything was done for my neuralgia which the doctors could think of; and at length, at my suggestion, I was removed, as I have said, from the Stump Hospital to the United States Army Hospital for Injuries and Diseases of the Nervous System. It was a pleasant, suburban, old-fashioned country-seat, its gardens surrounded by a circle of wooden, one-story wards, shaded by fine trees. ”

“ It will repay us a minute of time to look at one of these model hospitals. One is the fac simile of the other, and is devoted to the service of every five thousand of the population. Like every building in the place, it is erected on a subway. There is a wide central entrance, to which there is no ascent, and into which a carriage, cab, or ambulance can drive direct. ”

“ Scientists say that the human system has two nerve-centres—one in the brain, to which and from which are telegraphed all movements depending upon the will, and another in the small of the back, the centre of the involuntary operations of respiration, digestion, and so on. It may be fanciful to suppose that in the national system Washington is the one nervous centre and New York the other. ”

“ On one side of the Hospital stretched away the Broad Highway more pleasing at this point of the route than at many others, and far away it seemed to lead into pleasant woodland realms.
On the other side of the building passed the King’s Highway, which, at this point, was exceedingly rough and uninviting to the view.
Thus I saw how the shrewdness of Hell was exercised in locating hospitals at such places.
“Ignorance is the mother of all that folly,” said Mr. World with a feeling of self-satisfaction, “I see a long line of separate buildings just below us—there along the King’s Highway. ”

“ We orderlies meet each convoy at the front door of the hospital. The walking-cases are the first to arrive—men who are either not ill enough, or not badly enough wounded, to need to be put on stretchers in ambulances. They come from the station in motor-cars supplied by that indefatigable body, the London Ambulance Column. The walking-case alights from his car, is conducted into the receiving hall, and ten minutes later is in the bathroom. ”

“ The ribs which form the framework of the chest not being properly sustained by the muscles attached to them, gradually fall inward, thus flattening the chest, and compressing the lungs. There is a very close connection between gracefulness of carriage and sound bodily health.
The person who lounges, or slouches, be it ever so picturesquely, does so at the expense of the body. Proper exercise will prevent these physical defects, and will remedy them in most persons who have not yet attained middle age. ”

“ If I were stretched out on a table in the operating room of a New York hospital, the surgeons busy with their scalpels, there would be no horrified faces, I can assure you. There is nothing about my body or brain that is in the least beastlike. ”

“ If the patient is in an exceptionally suffering condition he is not placed on the receiving-hall bed; instead—the Medical Officer having given his permission—his stretcher is put on a wheeled trolley and he is taken straight away to his ward, so that he will only undergo one shift of position between the ambulance and his destination. ”

“ WHAT a strange company they are, these old patients who crowd into the surgeon’s memory after a lifetime of busy practice! There they stand, a confused, impersonal assembly, so illusive and indistinct as to be little more than shadows. Behind them is a dim background of the past—a long building with many windows that I recognize as my old hospital, a consulting room with familiar furniture, an operating theatre, certain indefinite sick-rooms as well as a ward in which are marshalled a double row of beds with blue and white coverlets. ”

“ The bowed back, the droop of the shoulders, the hanging jaw, and the shuffling gait, tell the story of chronic, wasting disease more graphically than words. We have a ludicrously inverted idea of cause and effect in our minds about "a good carriage." We imagine that a ramrod-like stiffening of the backbone, with the head erect, shoulders thrown back and chest protruded, is a cause of health, instead of simply being an effect, or one of the incidental symptoms thereof. ”

“ When one walks long and hard, the blood-vessels are distended and the feet increase appreciably in size. More than that, in the act of walking, the forward part of the foot is constantly changing in shape: the toes alternately spread and contract, bend and straighten. The whole supple member is full of muscular activity.
The pedestrian accordingly will not advisedly clothe his feet in cotton stockings and close-fitting shoes, however well made. The consequences of so doing would be rubbing and blisters, impaired circulation and lameness. ”

“ We have in our bodies a system of canals called arteries and veins, having their head at the heart, which is the main pump that keeps the blood in motion. The arterial circulation consists of those channels which convey the blood—supposed pure blood—away from the heart to the different parts of the body, loaded with the life-giving principle of sustenance, invigoration and heat, while the veins or venous circulation conveys to the heart and lungs the impure blood, loaded many times with disease-breeding germs. ”

“ The cubical stone blocks are displaced under the prodigious traffic, the corners and edges are worn away, the surface gets to be irregular, the joints are widened. The filth of the streets gathers in ruts and joints, is recruited constantly by new accessions of urine, horse-dung, and silt, and, diluted by the rain, it ferments, and forms a putrescent organic mire, becoming in course of time a source of noxious miasmas. ”

“ It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? ”