He who would get the benefit of sleep must look after health.

Health, after all, is merely that condition where all parts of the human organism work together without friction. We think of health as something that is bestowed upon us from without; something over which we have no control and almost no influence. Perhaps this queer idea is partly responsible for the general lack of health to-day.

It seems incredible that it is necessary that human beings endowed with tremendous capacity for enjoyment, with everything at hand to enjoy, should be hindered by a mere lack of that harmony that we call health from fully enjoying life. It seems only reasonable that there must be some explanation of lack of health and some way of escape from it.

It is now generally admitted that most of the diseases to which man thinks himself heir are due to improper, unnatural living. It could safely be added that the remainder of our ill-health and distress comes in large part from improper, unnatural thinking.

The common man may laugh at the idea that we make our own ill-health; if you were not more intelligent than the common man, you would not read this book, so that you will probably see at once that your own experience has taught you the truth of it. You will discover that you have learned for yourself, albeit for the most part unconsciously, that what a man thinks about, that he becomes. So it would seem that the natural and proper thing to do, if we find ourselves suffering from sleeplessness and ill-health, is to look after our way of living and thinking.

Medical science was once the attempt to cure disease; as Dr. Woods Hutchinson says, it is now coming to be the science of preventing disease, and everything that tends to that end is properly a part of the science of medicine, though it have no connection with the myriad drugs of the pharmacopoeia.

Until we compare conditions to-day with those of even fifty years ago, we can form no idea of our rapid strides toward natural living. If we walk the streets of the city or the roads of suburban towns and villages very early in the morning, at any season of the year, we shall find the vast majority of the houses with open windows. It is true that the opening may not always be very wide, but they are open. Fifty years ago all would have been closed.

Within the recollection of those whose memories go back a quarter of a century, we were taught that night air was dangerous to breathe and was to be completely shut out from our houses. Now we know that the organism needs fresh air by night as well as by day, and that the most dangerous thing about night air is the lack of it.

We now treat the most dreaded diseases, pneumonia and tuberculosis, almost wholly by fresh air and nourishing food, administering drugs only to check the symptoms until the system gets into condition to throw them off. More than that, we know now that consumption, at least, is not a mysterious dispensation of Providence visited upon certain people without regard to individual responsibility. Rather it is always the result of improper living or thinking, or both, and, when it is the scourge of a district, as in thickly settled city slums, it is the direct result of monopoly and oppression that deny the common interests of all mankind.

In 1865 Dr. W. W. Hall of New York published his book, “Sleep,” in the preface of which he said: “It is the end and aim of this book to show that as a means of high health, good blood, and a strong mind to old and young, sick or well, each one should have a single bed in a large, clean, light room, so as to pass all the hours of sleep in a pure, fresh air, and that those who fail in this, will in the end fail in health and strength of limb and brain, and will die while yet their days are not all told.” That this physician with a large practice should find it necessary to write a book to set forth the necessity of fresh air during sleeping-hours, goes to show how little the mass of our people knew even fifty years ago. We hear so much about fresh air in these days that we forget that the preceding generation was in deadly terror of it.

All things point to a marked advance during the past decades, in the understanding of conditions necessary for health, but, after all, we have come but a very little way along the road we must travel to get the most out of life.

We owe a good deal of our advance in this direction to physicians and others who have broken loose from traditions and have not feared to put their ideas and discoveries to the test. Nature has provided all things for “the healing of the nations,” if we but trust her. As Dr. Shattuck, a famous Boston surgeon, used to say in making his rounds in the Massachusetts General Hospital, “There is one inestimable gift God has given to man—an abundance of fresh air.” It was his method of announcing that he did not think the ventilation of room or ward was sufficient, and the nurses understood that, and immediately admitted more air into the room.

In the wards of that great institution were dozens of persons who had never before heard of the value of fresh air: being compelled by evil social conditions to live in districts where sunshine and air were rarities, they had never heard of any relation between health and fresh air. They frequently learned that lesson there.

A little device which we call “the Perfect Gift of Sleep” is a great help in excluding the light without excluding the air, and especially valuable in that most delightful change, sleeping out of doors. A bag is made of dark green or blue or black silk or satin, about four inches wide and eight inches long, and very loosely filled with sweet pine needles. It is laid lightly over the eyes.

This may seem too trivial to bother about, but the increased comfort and the better quality of sleep which it brings is astonishing.