Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

Undoubtedly after a generation or two in the use of our wonderful mechanical and electrical aids for easier living, we shall all be brought to the same method of grading our habits. Those who have not the mental vision to see this necessity will cease to enjoy the world’s improvements. They will all become victims of their own stupidity or foolishness.

Not only does all this danger in dulling our brain-tools apply to the engineer, electrician, airman, auto driver and the hundreds of other active callings, but it applies also to the writer, painter, musician.

In these latter professions the danger is to the individual, but the result is the same—ruin in the end. The writer loses his force, his biting words; the painter shows a lack of his former color-tone, the musician finds that his latest work is severely criticised.

All these conditions may occur and yet the creator of brain output still remain an average man, not noticeably dissipated. In fact, he may live a strictly moral life, yet show in his prime a deterioration which neither he nor his friends can explain.

This fact brings us to the point of explaining the little and big factors which produce these causes of failure.

It is some little break in the connection between brain-cells that brings about the inability to think and act without effort. When a task is difficult to perform that is usually accomplished without difficulty, you may know that there is a temporary interruption somewhere in the tiny fibers and cells of the brain. Something has disturbed their normal action. It is either fatigue poison, the poisons from overfeeding or underfeeding, effects of alcohol, tobacco, or the foul air you have taken into your system. Look into the matter and see what is the cause. It is the state brought about by some of these poisons which is at the bottom of all these lapses of full control of self and powers. The most frequent cause for this condition is due to two factors—external surroundings and mental absorption of injurious suggestions and sights.

The external surroundings are most frequently those of which the individual is not fully cognizant. That is, they are constantly at work doing their little injury day by day until they have finally made an impression upon the activity of the brain—dulled its keenness.

First of all these is the breathing of unfresh air. Not the noticeably bad air found in tenements, many shops and factories, but the air into which are thrown the emanations of thousands of all kinds and conditions of human bodies. No matter how well ventilated, theoretically, a big department store may be, the air one breathes in it is certain to contain poisons from well and diseased bodies. In most department and other large stores much attention is paid to ventilation, the best possible methods are used. But these stores cannot regulate the personal hygiene of those thousands who enter.

The man who is in the habit of daily and nightly taking into his system nothing but fresh air cannot remain a half hour amid the surroundings of a crowded store without having a headache and a general feeling of sluggishness. Always having his brain free of poisonous substances, he rapidly becomes affected with the smallest amount. Living amid such atmospheric surroundings keeps the man and woman from doing their best. It is the same with the thousands of men who work in shops among hundreds of their kind; with the traveler who has to sleep in our microbe canisters, the sleeping cars; the theaters where continuous performances go on, and worse than all the commuter who twice a day takes in the poisons swarming in the smoking cars.

It is not necessary for me to enumerate all these unhealthful conditions we have to face every day of our lives. They are here and many of them cannot be changed as long as man and woman herd like sheep, one after the other, to the cities. Of course it would be an ideal state if before entering these large department stores, factories, etc., every man, woman and child was compelled to strip and have a hot bath and vigorous rub down. And this idea is not such an impossible one as you might at first think. These very same conditions existed in Rome. There every man and woman took a hot bath before and after being in a crowd, whether it was shopping, in the Forum, or the amphitheater. There were baths for the poor, for the children and nurses, for the laborer as well as those magnificent ones for the rich and noble. But you see they were all Romans. I don’t think we should have much success in getting ALL of our citizens to bathe. In the hospitals, we doctors sometimes have to use a hose to get any effect upon a certain class of patients. I have seen thousands of men and women who wanted the doctor to give them “something to make them feel well” when plenty of soap and water was all they needed. And they were not the poor, the tramps and outcast, by any means.