A CONSUMPTIVE POSITION.
If you lie crooked in bed, do it on the side. “To bend up double, man never was made,” says the song. Do not bolster up the head so as to get a square look at your toes, or, being in a feather bed, till you resemble a letter C. Rather use but one light curled-hair pillow. It is cool and healthy. Avoid feather beds and pillows.
“Didn’t your ‘grandma sleep during nearly a hundred years’ on a feather bed?” My quizzer has returned, peeped over my shoulder, and asked this question. Now see me quench him at a swoop.
“Yes, she did; and I think it probable that if she had not she would have been living now. My grandmother’s good habits, free use of muscle, sunshine, and air, more than offset the use of mince pies, and the evil of sleeping on a feather bed in winter.”
I sleep on a hair mattress and pillow the year round. They are the best.
Catarrh and Cold Feet.—How to cure both.
Catarrh is peculiarly a Yankee disease. Now, how does a Yankee differ in his habits from the rest of the world’s people?
Let me tell you wherein he differs. The “five minutes for refreshments” is an illustration. He hurries, he rushes, he’s a talker; and having hurried unnecessarily, and got himself all in a perspiration, he stops to talk with a friend on the street, in a current of air, possibly in a puddle of water, the consequence of which is checked perspiration, a cold, the catarrh. If the circulation to the skin is checked, that excretory organ ceases to throw off the waste and worn-out matter of the system, and the work is thrown upon the mucous membrane, which if failing to perform the unnatural office, the patient goes into a decline. Set this down as reason No. 1 for the catarrh being peculiarly a “Yankee disease.”
Chronic catarrh necessarily must be connected with a bad circulation of the blood, a want of action in the skin, and usually with cold feet. I must take time to explain these causes of a disease which usually leads to the more fatal one—consumption. Now we have cold feet and loss of action in the skin. Result, catarrh, terminating fatal in consumption.