Overflowing health produces good humour, and we all know how important that is to matrimonial felicity. I once knew an old lady who used to say that it was a duty to sometimes take medicine for the sake of one's friends. She was thinking of the effect of dyspepsia, congested liver, and other forms of ill-health upon our tempers. The chief misery of dyspepsia is that it is not merely pain, but pain which affects the intellect and feelings alike; in Carlyle's vivid words: "Every window of your feeling, even of your intellect, as it were, begrimed and mud-bespattered, so that no pure ray can enter; a whole drug-shop in your inwards; the foredone soul drowning slowly in the quagmires of disgust."
Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks of a man in the clothing business with an impressible temperament who let a customer "slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment. 'Ah!' said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, 'if it hadn't been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left the store.' A passing throb only; but it deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human being, x, into a given piece of broadcloth, a."
How many more happy days would a husband and wife spend together were it not for confounded headaches which cause foolish, bitter words to be spoken. If a man cannot do business when the nice mechanism of his body is deranged, neither can he be gentle and kind in the family circle. This is what Dr. Johnson meant when he said that a man is a villain when sick.
"Smelfungus," says Sterne, "had been the grand tour, and had seen nothing to admire; all was barren from Dan to Beersheba; and when I met him he fell foul of the Venus de Medici; and abused her ladyship like a common fish-fag. 'I will tell it,' cried he, 'I will tell it to the world!' 'You had better,' said Sterne, 'tell it to your physician.'" So too when a man falls foul of his wife, and abuses her ladyship like a common fish-fag because his liver is out of order, he had better go to a physician and take every means of clearing his clouded temper.
How much a husband can do by sympathy and kindness for a sick wife! Mrs. Carlyle used to say, "The very least attention from Carlyle just glorifies me. When I have one of my headaches, and the sensation of red-hot knitting-needles darting into my brain, Carlyle's way of expressing sympathy is to rest a heavy hand on the top of my head, and keep it there in perfect silence for several seconds, so that although I could scream with nervous agony, I sit like a martyr, smiling with joy at such a proof of profound pity from him." The truth is that happiness is the most powerful of tonics. By accelerating the circulation of the blood, it facilitates the performance of every function; and so tends alike to increase health when it exists, and to restore it when it has been lost.
If acts of kindness from a husband are necessary in all cases, they are especially so in cases of his wife's illness, from whatever cause arising, and most of all when there is a prospect of her becoming a mother. This is the time for him to show care, watchful tenderness, attention to all her wishes, and anxious efforts to quiet her fears. Any agitation or fatigue at such times may cause the remaining years of her life to be years of pain and weakness. If he value happiness in married life and would escape bitter self-reproach, the husband will be very careful of his wife when in this condition. And it is the duty of the young wife, on her part, to take care of her own health, because of the manner in which hers will affect the health of her expected child. And as the moral and mental nature of the child is scarcely less dependent on her than the physical, she should cherish only such mental frames and dispositions as she would like to see reproduced in her child. How much her husband can help or hinder her in doing so! Then when the child is born she ought if possible to give it the food which nature provides and which is its birthright. No other is so congenial, and the consequences of unnatural methods of feeding are sometimes most injurious to the bodies and minds of children.
In these hard times of great competition in every kind of business, it is a sad fact that many men have to overwork themselves, or at least fancy they have, in order to get a living for their families. But there are others who kill themselves by overwork and over-anxiety, for what? To amass more money than they can well spend, or to catch the soap-bubble called fame—
"And all to leave what with his tact he won,
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son."
Alas! that such men never think of His considerate words to His disciples who was the great Physician of the body as well as of the soul—"Come ye apart, and rest awhile." If they did they would be able to show to their friends at home what the Lord had done for them. Rest to their overstrung nerves would make them less peevish, discontented, and generally disagreeable.
More open-air amusements, and more indoor gaiety, would save a great many failing brains and enfeebled hearts.