Personal hygiene and physical training for women

by Anna M. Galbraith

From the standpoint of health, the intense excitement attendant on playing for high stakes, the loss of sleep, the unnatural life, the loss of money that one can ill afford to lose, must eventually lead to a serious if not to a fatal breakdown.

It is not the natural and reasonable intellectual work that injures the brain, but the various emotions—ambition, anxiety, disappointment, the hopes and fears, the loves and hatreds of our lives—that wear out the nervous system and endanger the balance of the brain.

Powerful emotion is like concentration attended with dissociation, it occupies the mind to the exclusion of all else, even to the dictates of self-preservation and reason. The will is more or less suspended and held in abeyance during the emotional states.

The too great concentration of the attention on one’s business or occupation is a self-indulgence that often ignores the importance of the lighter side of life and the legitimate claims of family and friends.

Less ambition and more philosophy would greatly lessen the number of cases of nervous prostration and allied neuroses. All of one’s fortune is not staked on one throw of the dice; if the woman fails in one direction, there are other resources left.

Concentration of the mind on the physical suffering leads to the so-called habits in disease; there may have, in the first place, been a real physical cause. For example, in case of injury to a limb followed by severe pain in that member it has happened that after amputation of the limb the consciousness of pain persisted in the brain. In the functional neuroses, the first cause may have been a real physical one, but the individual becomes so self-centered, it is with difficulty that the mind can be withdrawn from the ego, and a cure can only be effected by supplanting the intense egotism by new interests.

Medical literature contains numerous observations of ailment caused by fright, and even of death itself so caused. It is not uncommon for medical students to contract the disease about which they are studying. In the old small-pox epidemics it was a very generally observed fact that those who feared contracting the disease were the most apt to get it. The reason is very easily explained—fear so suppressed the functional activities of circulation and nutrition, as to predispose the individual to take any disease to which she was exposed.

Autosuggestion is the predominant element in the concentration of the thought on one particular subject, and of the narrowing of the perspective to a single point of view.

Prolonged anxiety or grief will cause an emaciation, second only to that of tuberculosis itself, by the depression of the heart’s action and the circulation, the loss of appetite, the interference with nutrition, and the loss of sleep.

Worry is, as we have seen, in the first instance most frequently bred of exhaustion, but, if indulged in, it readily becomes a fixed habit, and the mind rapidly settles into a state of fixed gloom.