Personal hygiene and physical training for women

by Anna M. Galbraith

The Hygiene of Work.—Since the motor centers are located in the brain, it is natural to expect that all definitely directed movements will directly affect the brain and the mental development, and so it is. Du Bois Réymond says that it is easy to demonstrate that such bodily exercises as gymnastics, fencing, swimming, riding, dancing, and skating are much more exercises of the central nervous system, of the brain, and spinal cord than of the muscles.

It is further urged that healthful energy of will is impossible without strong muscles, which are its organs, and that endurance, self-control, and great achievement all depend on muscle habits.

The philosophy of work consists in its necessity. The brain-cell in health cannot cease to be active, except to a partial extent during sleep. There must be some output of mind from the mind cell and of motor stimulus from the motor cell. The proper selection of work for that particular brain to do, and the physiologic regulations of the work done, is the basis of the hygiene of work. For health, for happiness, and for efficiency, right work rightly done is the most important matter in any man’s or any woman’s life.

The physiologic, as well as the moral necessity, has always been conceded for every man to have a life-work—a vocation; a work for which he should be fitted, and for which he was capable, sufficiently congenial not to sink into mere drudgery, and which would, at the same time, afford ample financial compensation to be remunerative and a stimulus to his power of endurance.

Important, from a physiologic point of view, as a vocation is for men, it is equally or even more important for women. It is highly probable that the unstable nervous system of women and their emotional extravagance and dissipations, whether of frivolity, wickedness, or grief, is largely due to lack of mental discipline and muscular development. It is a psychologic proposition that any woman who has a toothache suffers less if she keeps busy, and any one will testify that she suffers much less from the intense heat of summer if she is busily employed.

One of the great objects of a definite and fixed occupation is to turn the thoughts out from the ego. Work of some kind is indispensable to the health and happiness of every one, since it necessitates an objective instead of a subjective attitude of mind.

Experience teaches that the brain, like the muscles, is subject to training; occasional excessive efforts, with long intervals of repose, are rather injurious, while a many-sided activity, constantly repeated, interrupted by sufficient shorter rests and supported by sufficient nutrition, is strengthening. A healthy training of the brain should be as many sided as possible.

Symmetric development and training of every function of the brain is as essential for mental efficiency and sanity as the development of all the muscles of the body is for bodily vigor, and a one-sided training of the mental powers is as certain to produce eccentricities of habits of thought and actions as those occupations which call into play only the action of certain groups of muscles is to cause bodily deformities. Anything which will prove injurious to the delicate nerve substance must be avoided, as laziness, idleness, and, worst of all, any form of narcotics.

Many-sided life work, consistently carried through, not only strengthens the brain, but also its continued power of adaptation, and one’s whole life is a continuous struggle for adaptation. The more the brain works, the more capable it is of receiving new impressions and elaborating old ones, and it retains its elasticity longer.

Hurry generally implies lack of system in carrying out the routine of work, or the undertaking of more work than the individual can accomplish without injury to herself. Few things can more certainly muddle the brain and produce a sense of physical exhaustion than a sense of hurry. Without the sense of this insane driver with a lash in his hands standing over one, she can work more rapidly, with complete self-possession, and do more accurate and better work. The peculiar sense of being hurried has a direct benumbing physical effect, that can often be felt in the brain as distinctly confusing.