The children's health

Front matter

THE CHILDREN'S HEALT

FLORENCE HULL WINTERBURN

Class

Preface

There are now in existence so many excellent treatises upon health and hygiene that I have had great difficulty in persuading myself to add another to the number. But during my studies along the line of mental development, I have realized the need of some volume dealing with the general principles of health, rather than with disease and its treatment.

So far as I know, no one has yet endeavored to supply the need of mothers for a simple little manual containing the laws of health as based upon evolution, and giving broad outlines instead of pet theories of the authors.

Urged to this task by my unresting solicitude for childhood, I have brought my best energies to bear upon a task which is not the least important of the volumes belonging to The Parents' Library. It is far from being the complete and satisfactory 5

PREFACE

treatise I should have liked to make it. But at least the suggestions here offered are truths sustained by science and countenanced by philosophy. I have tried to make a book which should, in a way, stand as a medium and interpreter between child nature and the great mother Nature whose laws we are so inclined to neglect. And I trust that it may be helpful to inexperienced parents and welcome to all those who appreciate any effort, however small, that is made for the children's sake.

F. H. W.

New York, Sept. i, 1901. 6

Chapter I The Health Demanded By Modern Life

"Times modify forms. The world of thought moves fast; what is good for one time may ill suit another. The culture of past ages is stealing into our present thought, deepening and widening it." — Bronston Alcott.

Between the new-born infant whose cry may be a protest against the life forced upon him, and the world about to close around him, stand the guardians of his cradle, ready, like court chamberlains, to introduce the stranger and coach him for his part. It were well if these authorities were thoroughly imbued with a sense of their responsible position, and performed their duties with some intelligence, instead of mechanically and awkwardly, as they must unless they not only know what to do, but realize why it is done. 9

That frail young life of which they now take charge has been gradually gathering in the strange seclusion of the mother nurture, strength enough to essay the next step onward toward individual existence. It begins to breathe the outer air. But what a harsh contrast the atmosphere of our earth offers to the shelter nature formerly afforded it! The tenderest zephyr of June is icy, and from the shock the little being encounters in its introduction to our world proceeds the first sensation experienced, and what is called the temperaturesense takes the place of honor in the little human brain.

There is no doubt that this tiny entity, always hitherto warm, suffers appreciably from the change to cool air. But the change is only one of the many that are inevitably awaiting. What can we do? " Life is full of suffering, and the baby must become accustomed to endure." Our ready philosophy fills up the chinks left by the adult habit of almost brutal indifference to discomforts forgotten and overlived.

Nothing is more difficult than entire sympathy with suffering similar to our own, except sympathy with what we have not personally experienced. To feel for others is a sentiment that is comparatively modern and is not yet largely developed even in the most gentle souls. And if it requires an effort to comprehend what is passing in the lives of people who are our equals and peers, and who are capable of fluent explanation, what heroic self-forgetfulness and powerful imagination must inspire one bent upon investigating the drama of that inner life hidden under the puerile, uninviting exterior of a wrinkled baby face.

We have adopted a phrase to express our indifference of the child-soul, and to justify our lack of care for its early development. We call babies, nay, even young children of six and ten, " little animals." It is an assumption betraying frightful egotism upon our part, and out of this disposition to treat children from the physical standpoint, and to build up the structure of their intellectual and moral education on a brute basis, some curious consequences arise. Many inconsistencies between the ordinary practices of society and the high ideal of its professed religion may be explained by retracing, step by step, the life and training of some of its adult members. The blight, the disease of the most enlightened communities is — indifference of heart: profound, radical lack of feeling which makes a temporary wave of sentiment, aroused by some magnetic, enthusiastic outii burst of eloquence, quickly subside into apathy and mortification over our want of stoicism.

The ideal we bow to is human benevolence toward our fellows, but the ideal we hug in our bosoms and obey is hardness, wary aloofness from what may exact deprivation. Rising from its knees, and swarming from the oppressive atmosphere of worship to the congenial breeze of worldliness that meets it at the door, the congregation of the church emerges, discussing the fine sermon and a cautious barter of civilities with an eligible acquaintance in the same breath. In moments of self-examination we incline to wonder at ourselves, and ask why it is that we are incapable of the true love for our fellow creatures which we candidly acknowledge is the core and kernel of Christian virtue.

Then, does it never occur to us that the reason for the hard heart of the adult may lie in the ossification of the heart of infancy? From the day of its birth we train our child in the endurance of cruelty; and then ask why, when he is grown, he should contemplate with perfect equanimity all the numerous acts of cruelty enacting in the world, and pursue his selfish interests with cool disregard of the wishes and needs of others. But we ought not to ask. We ought to know that the child who has been considered a " little animal," and reared as an animal, will be an animal, in human form, when he reaches maturity. Sudden transformations in character do not occur. If we wish to bring forth the result of the perfect flower of fine civilization in our child, we must begin, when he makes his appearance on our earth, to treat him as a tender blossom, and not as a tough weed. If we aim to secure for him the gift of perfect health, of that harmonious poise between mind and body which will make living a joy, we must not treat his body as a thing to be developed by itself for a period, as if mind was something which could jump into its frame when we choose to call for it, but recognize the claim of his whole personality, seeing, through the veil of that apparently stupid and insensate outer self, the delicate buds of sensation and emotion, alive and quivering so long — often so very long — before we find proper to regard him as a human being.

Accrediting him, then, with at least the germs of sensations, and a potentiality of suffering, let us not make our welcome of the new-born infant rough. Let us receive him tenderly, and hasten to give him the nearest likeness to the atmosphere he craves, which it is in our power to furnish.

I think the care of young infants is a matter that receives more attention from the medical profession now than ever before. And the sisterhood of trained nurses— that blessing of modern lifesmoothes many a briar from the baby's path. But few, even among tender mothers, have brought to bear upon it that broad consideration of the entire subject which sweeps all details under the reign of a general law and recognizes beyond the immediate needs of the moment the great end in view. The object of all the care and attention we must bestow on our helpless little one is not that he may merely be fed when he hungers and put to sleep when he is weary. These are the details, the trifles that should be carefully considered as we consider the stitches in a beautiful piece of embroidery, the pattern of which we view with pleasure from time to time as we work, thinking how fair the result will be when we have done. But the motive that impels our regard to the details is to secure the permanent, the entire welfare of the child. We wish him to grow strong and beautiful; to become serene, cheerful and happy. Back of the care with which we secure for him pure air, proper food, a clean skin, sufficient sleep, is the aim of developing a completely good physique, and, incidentally, that good disposition which shall make the best of life and turn it to a useful purpose.

Now, let us bring out from its obscure lurking place in our minds this after-consideration. It is not a thing to be simply glanced at in a casual way. It is the thing of chief importance; the All of education and of life.

Health is accord between all the forces and potentialities of our nature. It is harmony between the separate factors constituting our entire self, and between ourself and our outer surroundings. That person is well who fits perfectly into the circumstances of his life, and performs with enjoyment all his appointed functions. We still — even in this progressive, scientific period — speak of disease as if it was wholly an affair of the body. But the body and the mind are inseparable, and the nomenclature of the one may always be translated into that of the other if we have the honesty and accuracy to make our statements coincide with facts. Happiness and health are as completely interchangeable terms as skies and heavens. The one is the outward symbol of the inward feeling. If a man is ill when he has a fever, so also is he ill when he is discontented and uneasy. The emotional woman, living in the smiles of her favorites, and shrinking under their frowns, is ill; i5 even to the same degree as her sister, who is perishing of asthma. She is fighting ineffectually for elements not contained in her moral atmosphere, just as the other invalid fights for oxygen. The little one writhing on the floor of his luxurious nursery in a rage incomprehensible to his indulgent parents, is ill, with a systemic derangement that in his more unstable constitution may soon show itself as a physical malady. But the true malady is a wound to the mind, a blow upon his feelings, some frightful disappointment in the nature of the persons or the objects that make his world. He is not more seriously indisposed when he has a fit of indigestion, or the measles. But while in the latter case we know what is the matter and apply remedies, in the former we minimize the trouble and seldom deal with it intelligently.

We are half-cured of a sickness when we know what caused it; for then our mind is cleared of the delusion which made us bring it upon ourselves. There are thousands of causes for human disorders too subtle to be recognized by the thoughtless, too far-reaching to be seized by the bigot. The person under the influence of a " fad " sees his single idea everywhere, and can see nothing else. Fixed ideas are a form of madness which we see most frequently in those whose hobby is 16 health. But if we would understand what health really is, and how to achieve it, we must away with " fads," with delusions and hobbies, with all one-sided views and inspired theories; we must be sane, and, in the breadth of view given to the sane, look at the subject in all its human, its world-wide, its universal relations.

Why can we not bear constantly in mind that we are not separated, single individuals, but beings linked with all the material and immaterial forces of existence; with the physical forces of electricity, heat, cold, gravity, in even such small manifestations as the rumble of the machinery which smites our ears as we walk along the street. The power back of that noise is our brother; one that is able to penetrate into the deep consciousness of our being and stir in us the feelings of pleasure or pain. And not less are we linked with all the social processes of civilization; with the factors of trade, the march of war, the tides of science and the arts. All of them vibrate in our hearts and start flowing in our veins the currents of dislike and despair, or of approval and content; in other words, of disease or of health. The past has power over us, for tendrils stretch back from the present hour into the depths of memory, and may cause an aching, like a tooth's 17 nerve. The present enslaves us, but some potentiality of the future, speaking to us through our imagination, beckons us onward toward freedom, and a nobler life.

Our total environment, then, is but another self; unknown, but felt. And true health is harmony between all this universal self and the small personality that stands in our shoes and looks back at us from our mirror. What short-sighted folly to think that, by keeping what we know as our own body in pretty good order, we keep well. A single shock from one of the great relative forces outside knocks us prostrate, and under the grip of some ailment we slowly fight our way, in seclusion and in that determined ignoring of our environment which we term " rest," back to the status from which we have stumbled. To be thrown again — how soon?

To be well, what must we do? Either harmonize with our environment or compel our environment, the whole of it — our world and all the worlds that are part even of our dreams — to harmonize with us. Alexander and Napoleon undertook the latter, and died in despair. It would seem a simpler task to bring our own little selves into a state of harmony with our conditions. And yet, this very simple task has never yet been completely accom- 18 plished by mortal man. It remains as the goal, the ideal to which we may look, and toward which we may bend our steps; scarcely hoping to attain, for any generation we may consciously influence, a boon so inestimably precious. But a very practical good will follow our efforts; we shall obtain for ourselves blessed moments of happiness, lucid intervals in the great insanity of disease which possesses us; and secure for our children a hold upon the treasure which shall perhaps make their posterity wealthy.

The rational prelude to every work is an understanding of the end in view. Many of our efforts fail from lack of this knowledge. We ordinarily get only a portion of what we really want because our gaze was diverted from its distant purpose. And I think it. well, at the risk of being temporarily called an idealist, to draw attention to the great truth so often overlooked: that health is harmony, disease discord; and that as to effect harmony in musical sounds there must be one dominating strain, perceived and deferred to by all the lesser notes which waver about it, so, in the sound sane state we term health, there must be, as a recognized leader, the one most characteristic, persistent trait of the individual, and every condition of his life must be considered in reference to 19 it. The primary need of his nature is the key-note, and unless he lives up to it there will never come to him the joy of complete existence. He will be dwarfed, misshapen, diseased. But, unless it takes an early start, our strongest instinct may be baffled and outrun by other impulses. Even before we have begun to live we may be half dead; maimed in the nursery. Our mothers are our fate. If they are imbecile, alas for our happiness.

But is it possible for a parent to see in the blinking infant lying in its cradle, any sign of permanent character, any fore-shadowing of the destiny to which it is called, so that she can labor to educate her offspring in accord with its end? How absurd to exact of a mother a prescience that is superhuman. No one, however gifted with insight, can penetrate for an instant the mysterious veil that shrouds the pensonality of a feeble, insignificant infant. All our great responsibility ends in nothing then, and our great task is a chimera of fancy.

True. From this point of view. But it is the narrow one, the one which again considers the individual as an isolated factor in the world, and looks to find in him traits distinct and unlike those of his fellows. Such traits are, indeed, continually appearing, but they are idiosyncrasies, variations 20 from the sure and definite course of human development, and they are to be wrought out by their possessor, not by his educators. And here is where we often make our fatal mistake; in taking particular account of the whimsies of the child, flattering his oddities, and founding upon the indication of some momentary preference of his, the habits of his nurture. If we were sufficiently self-possessed to distinguish between the transient, fitful impulses of personality and the permanent, inalienable instincts of humanity, we should firmly carry out a method of education agreeing with that course which nature has pursued with living organisms from the least to the greatest. This is to develop, first and principally, the common character of the creature in question, that which belongs to his species and race, and afterwards those special tendencies he has inherited from his family. Thinking first of his welfare as a human being born into society, we should mould him into the general, the universal shape, thus adapting him to the world he has entered. Afterwards, may properly be unfolded the particular aptitudes essential for the niche in it which he will probably occupy.

Different careers demand different kinds and degrees of strength. The porter and the student are not built up of the same materials, nor are the artist and the soldier. But there are yet some few features essential to them all, some elemental principles of life which must be preserved and quickened before they can become men. What are they? Sound limbs, good circulation of the blood — yes, but also, a quality less often thought about, yet as positive, as necessary as these. The person who attains to complete health has within him a natural correspondence with this planet upon which his lot is cast, and with the period during which his career is to run. If the strongest tendencies of his character are retrograde, if he is drawn backward in desires and habits to an earlier, cruder period of the world's history, or downward, toward that lower order of nature's children from which, in the course of evolution, he has proceeded, then he is out of place in his world, out of joint with his times; and instead of being healthy, diseased to the innermost core of his being.

" Times " is but another name for the accumulated effects of all the numerous processes enacting in obedience to a single motive: the motive that passes from nature's processional mood to the hearts of men, and makes their lives a progressive march toward perfection. A deep responsi- 22 bility comes to light and life with the births occurring every moment, that the new-born shall enter the world physically, morally, and mentally up to his hour, and able to press onward joyously toward the future, borne on the current of its great ideals. The past had its duties and its peculiar relations; ages ago man was of necessity nearer akin to the animals; he was in harmony with his conditions and his period when he was a good animal, fulfilling the suggestions of his young conscience, and infringing none of the laws of his caste. But what was perfection then is detestable to-day. Our standards have advanced, and the person who moves in modern society obedient to the primitive instincts of self-assertion and the rule of might over right, is an anachronism. I do not say that anachronisms are not plentiful.

Let us scrutinize the demagogue, however; the keen speculator, the leader and user of others, commercially, politically or socially. In his hours of defeat he is the most miserable being upon the earth, the most misanthropical and feeble. When successful, is he well, is he happy? Where is the light in the eye, the glow upon the cheek, the joyous, confident bearing of the one who knows that he is in unison with whatever is good and true and sound? The nearest approach to an 23 ideal condition of health is sometimes met with in the sham philanthropists; men with the ruddy cheeks and innocent eyes of childhood, who have somehow got themselves into a state of delusion concerning their own characters and enact the part of villains under the mien of saints. But effect the miracle of making one of these bloated sinners see himself as he really is, and he shrinks and trembles with a moral and physical ague. Because the whole prop of his life is a hold upon the vital principle that underlies human society now, after its tour through the dark, rugged paths of primitive existence. He realized that there is a core of goodness at the center of the earth, slowly making its way to the surface; that the trend of all life upon our planet is upward, and the true, the good and the beautiful are nature's own ideal.

Poor, inspired idiot, how excellent he might have been but for his incurable greed, which would have all, the great end and the petty meanwhile; the boon of perfected human life and the animal pleasures in the mire.

There are others who have partly grasped the

great true principle, and whose failure is scarcely

less decided, though not so contemptible. All

those who, having come to believe that the reign of cruelty belongs to an older stage of the world's history, and the reign of human feeling has begun, would yet, in their diseased enthusiasm, cruelly force love upon the world. These are the legions of bigoted saints in religious circles and in scientific circles, and in no circles at all, but on the pinnacle of their own genius, like Carlyle and Milton, exhausting their own vital flame in kindling the fires of intolerance.

Who, in all the crowd of enlightened societies of our period, have the firmest hold upon that secret which nature has as yet but partly revealed to her wisest offspring? I think not the latter-day physical athletes who plume themselves upon their materiality; not the male sports and self-centered women " building up " by courses of golfing, bicycling, massage and gymnastics. There is good in all these things, but not enough. Unless mental and moral culture are pursued pari passu with physical culture, we are merely developing a fine animal ; and again, I say, that is not the ideal that belongs to the period. We shall not attain to complete health until we read into our everyday life and practice the " signs of the times," the lesson of the present with its hint and preparation for a yet better future.

Here and there I have met a man and a woman 25 who are manifestly favorites of nature; who combine sound bodies with a mental serenity full of lofty purpose and practical performance. Their personalities are like glowing bits of color on the sober canvas of the average world. They are well, they are happy, they are good.

We need not curl the lip of scorn at the old maxim, as if it was only fit for children: " Be good and you'll be happy." It is forever false in a way, yet forever true. As surely as we all believe, in our inmost hearts, that there is a sustaining principle of goodness latent in the universe, so we must recognize that nature moulds into flesh the continually increased exactions of our moral sense. And in order to become a symmetrical, healthy personality, one must live upward, beginning in childhood and carrying forward without break or backslide the ideals of the age he is born into, so that he may have every hour of his life the peace that only comes from feeling that he is in harmony with that high principle upon which all life depends.

I am aware of here putting into another form an ethical principle which has been made the corner-stone of most of the modern religions. From Buddhism to Christian Science the ideal of " Abandonment to the Divine Will " has been 26 preached to disciples: in other words, of abandonment to the best and purest revelation of the age; of the conscience developed in the breasts of the most devoted and lofty-minded men to which the special period gives birth. But slow and long has been the course of progress from the ideals of savagery to those of enlightened humanity. The god of Calvinism was a god of cruelty and aggression, stamping out human happiness as a noxious weed in his field of self-glorification. So long as men believed egoism in every form the perfection of morality, despotism was their ideal, and they took a fierce joy in being trampled by their deity even as they loved to trample their fellows. But the happiness and health visiting the breasts of our stern, bigoted forefathers, in their moments of rapt contemplation of Something beyond and above them, fought and wrestled with the advancing ideal of a wiser, finer age, and they were, for the most part, in the habit of considering pleasure a sin only permissible in heaven. Very curiously, sweating laborers in despotical countries believe that enjoyment belongs to the court.

But the leaven of progress crept through the

manifest now, in thousands of bubbling aspirations

and ideas throughout the enlightened world. We dare to retranslate the old formula, " Abandonment to the Divine Will," into confidence in all-pervading Goodness. The reign of bigotry and cruelty is in its decadence; that of true humanity, of tolerance, of sympathy, is in sight. The ideal of our age is that of an unselfish life. The revised creed of our faith is blazoned with the practical precepts of helpfulness to others, and a sane, sound, symmetrical development of all the faculties of our threefold nature. Not in physical strength alone — which is brutality; nor in spirituality alone, which is bigotry — is man to find his regeneration; but in that action which consists in physical obedience to the higher impulses of his mind. The religion of humanity, the philosophy of health, twin stars that light the path of our new century, are visible to the thinker and the practical worker, now. Who voluntarily wills to be diseased, who does not passionately rebel against illness and claim complete health as his birthright? If we entered into life maimed and enfeebled, we blame somebody or something for our condition; and justly. We had the right to be born sound, to begin life in accord with our environment, and to be so imbued, in our early years, with the highest principles of our age that we could keep

well.

If we were compelled to carry on a struggle between mind and body, conscience and practice, during our own early years, and only attained to a saving knowledge through hard experience, let us stretch out a protecting hand over the little ones lying helpless in their cradles. Let us recognize their right, as children of the twentieth century, to the rule of kindness and consideration; to their immediate entrance, without the preliminary of a period of animal life, into the environment of an enlightened humanity.

The infant is not a stone; the young child is not a thing; they feel, they realize, they suffer, they are able to enjoy. How much, we do not know. But let us be cautious of certifying how little. Their lives, their health of the present and of the future, are in our hands, and we should not enter upon a task so difficult, a responsibility so deep, without qualifying ourselves to discharge our full duty. To knowledge of all the little details of hygiene of the nursery must be joined the deeper, riper knowledge of the relations of the child with his world and his age. We must develop him in accordance with the moving principle of his times. We must bend our efforts to unfold in him that prime need of his nature which he shares with his human contemporaries; that 29 general character which precedes in importance his particular character as an individual.

Our medical lights cf old said waggishly, " First, make of the child a good animal "; a saying true to the thoughts of a ruder age. But now our aim shall be to make our child first a good human being; later on, his individuality will unfold itself in correspondence with the tendencies he inherits from his parents, and he will enter upon the personal management of his life.

So much depends upon the right start, upon the wise governing of the habits of infancy, that 1 think we have not been visionary in trying to arrive at a comprehension of the scope and bent of the life of a human being of our century, before going on to considerations less abstract, although not less intimately related to the subjects usually embraced under the term health. 3°