Questions. 1. How do we know that tobacco is a poison? 2. How does tobacco make extra work for the body? 3. What effect does tobacco have on the nose and throat? 4. What is the effect of tobacco on the blood? 5. On the nervous system? 6. On the heart? 7. Mention some of the false ideas about the effect of alcohol. 8. How does alcohol affect the stomach? 9. The liver? 10. In what ways does alcohol reduce the resisting powers of the body? 11. How does alcohol affect the nervous system? 12. How does it influence mental work? 13. What do business men think of drinkers? 14. What influence has alcohol on the next generation?
Remember. 1. Tobacco is a poison that has a very bad effect on the nervous system, the blood, the heart, the stomach, the nose, and the throat. 2. Alcohol is a poison and not a food. 3. Alcohol injures the stomach, the liver, and the nervous system. 4. Alcohol reduces the power to do accurate mental work. 5. Alcohol numbs the sense of right and wrong, and encourages crime.
PART II
THE ENEMIES OF HEALTH
[CHAPTER XVI]
DISEASE GERMS
We have learned that the body is made up of cells, and that each cell is alive. The cells in our bodies cannot live separately. There are, however, certain animals and plants that are each made up of a single cell. These animals and plants are called germs, and some of them cause disease.
Different germs cause different diseases
These germs are so exceedingly small that we can see them only with the aid of a microscope. They differ in appearance one from another, as a pine tree differs from an ash, or an American child from a Chinese child. When you plant your garden, you put sweet peas in one place and asters in another, and you know that you will have sweet peas growing where you planted the pea seeds, and asters growing where the aster seeds were put. So it is with these little germs; you will no more get tuberculosis from typhoid fever germs than you would get asters from pea seeds.
Now, while there are many, many kinds of germs in the world, there are only certain ones that cause certain diseases, and we have learned where these germs like to live and how to kill them. We also know that they come only from some person or animal sick with the particular disease which they cause. Typhoid fever germs are not given off by a person suffering with tuberculosis, nor are diphtheria germs given off by a typhoid fever patient, but the germ of each disease is given off by some person or animal suffering from that particular disease.