Woods Hutchinson

BETTER TO TAKE THAN MEDICINE

When school is over, out you go with a rush, into the open air. You have worked hard all day, and now you have two hours before supper to do just as you like.

Perhaps you will play tag, or prisoner’s base, or stealing sticks, or town ball. They are all fine fun, and they exercise every muscle in your body and make your lungs breathe deeper and your heart beat faster, and make every part of you grow stronger.

Perhaps you have a few chores to do or errands to run; but even these are almost as much fun as play and give you good exercise in the open air and, what is better still, a feeling that you are being of some use in the world, which is one of the happiest and most satisfactory feelings that you will ever have, if you live to be a hundred years old.

But when you have finished your work, you must not forget to play real, lively, jolly games out of doors—ball and tag and hide-and-seek, and all those games that children love.

Hide-and-seek is a good game, because, when you are caught, you can stand still a few minutes and rest. When you are hiding, you can take a good breath for the home-run you have to make. Most games, in fact, are planned like this—a run and a rest, and then another run. While you rest, some one else is taking his turn at the bat, or at being “It,” or whatever is the hardest part of the work. This is one reason why games are so good for you to play.

You see, when you run, you are working your muscles and heart-pump very hard; and if you kept running all the time, you would burn up so much food in the muscles that the heart couldn’t pump blood fast enough to wash away all the waste, and would just chug-chug-chug till it tired itself out. When you are tired, it is time to stop and rest; for being tired means that the poisons are not being carried away from the muscles fast enough, and that your heart is working too hard.What is it in your body that gives it stiffening to stand upright, and makes levers in your legs and arms to move it about? When you feel your body and arms and head with your fingers, what are they like? Isn’t there something hard and then a soft kind of pad over it? We call the hard things bones. Your teacher will show you some. These are white and chalky looking; but when they were alive, they were a beautiful pinkish white color.

So you have a pretty pearl-colored framework, the shape of your body. This, which is called your skeleton, makes you stiff enough to stand up and walk about. Now bend your arm and turn your wrist and open and close your hand. You find that your frame-work is jointed. When you are tired standing, you can bend your joints and sit down. If you want an apple, you can close your fingers and pick it up.

What are the soft pads that you felt over the bones of your arms and legs? Stretch your right arm straight out in front of you and take hold of the upper part of it with your left hand. Now clench your right fist and bring it toward your shoulder. Can you feel the elastic pads, or bands, moving? What are they doing? They are pulling your hand up to your shoulder. When you walk, you can feel the elastic bands moving your legs along. So every move we make, these elastic ropes are at work pulling us about and letting us sit down and making us run and jump. We call them muscles.

You have perhaps seen jointed dolls. The strings and rubber bands on their joints help to make them move; but the dolls don’t act as if they were alive. They have no telephone system to tell their bodies how to move.

If you will stop and think how many “moves” you make in a day, you’ll know how hard your muscles have to work. They’d be quite tired out if they did not have plenty to feed on all the time and did not rest at least nine hours a day. I told you how the food is melted and carried about in the blood. It is the blood that brings the muscles their food and keeps them alive and makes them strong enough to move the joints and the bones.

What does all this playing do for you? It makes you grow not only big, but strong, too. What puny little things you’d be if you couldn’t get out and run and play and make your muscles strong and your nerves do just what you tell them to do.

I know of ten or twelve little chickens that hatched a few weeks ago. There are so many cats about, that the poor little chicks have to be shut up in the barn all day. At first they ran and played and jumped on their mother’s back, but now they hump their shoulders and hang their heads and don’t seem hungry and look sad and sick. They are not so big as some that hatched later. Can you tell me why? Of course you can. You know that it is outdoor exercise and play that chickens need, and that you need to make you grow big and strong, too. Of course, you will have to keep your backbone straight and your chest out and your head up; but all these things will be easy for you if you are perfectly well and strong.

The school tries to take just as good care of your health and growth as it can. Your lessons are short, and you change from one to another frequently, with perhaps drills or calisthenic exercises between, so that you need not sit still too long at a time; and the seats and desks are of different sizes so that you need not sit at a desk that does not fit you. When your teacher urges you to go out of doors and play at recess time, even if you do not want to, you must think to yourself, “It will rest me and make me grow big and straight and strong.”When you come home from school, go out of doors and stay out just as long as you can. Don’t let dolls or toys or picture books tempt you to stay in the house. The pictures out of doors are ever so much prettier, as soon as you learn to see them. But some of you live in crowded cities. I hope you are near a park or a playground, where you can have a good romp with other children, and use the swings and see-saws and bars, and the skating pond in winter, and the swimming pool in summer.

What fun swimming is! You can learn easily if you have a safe place and an older person to teach you the stroke. You can roll over on your back in the water, and float, and dive; but you must not stay in longer than twenty minutes, and not so long as that sometimes. As soon as you begin to feel chilly, come out. Swimming not only cleans your skin, but is splendid exercise for your lungs and muscles.

All this play out of doors will help your appetite, and that will make you ready to eat the right kind of food, and this food will get into your blood and keep your muscles firm and strong.

II. ACCIDENTS

I am going to tell you what to do in the case of some of the little accidents that may happen to anyone, and especially of the kind that children meet with in playing; but I don’t want you to stop playing for fear you’ll be hurt. Mother Nature can usually heal all the bumps and cuts and scratches that come from wholesome play.

You can, however, help her very much by keeping the scratch or cut perfectly clean. This is the chief thing to remember. Wash it thoroughly in clean water. Hold it under the pump, or faucet, and let the water pour down on it.

If you can, pour some antiseptic, or germ killer, over the cut, and wrap it up in a clean cloth. There is a medicine called peroxid of hydrogen, which is good for cuts and wounds, but an older person will have to put it on for you.

If the scratch is from a finger nail or the claw of a cat, or if the wound is the bite of some animal, you must be sure to have your mother or a doctor clean the wound with strong medicine. You see, nails and claws and teeth are, as a rule, dirty, and have on them germs that will get into the cut and make it swell and be very sore indeed.

Sometime you may have a cut that is deep. You will see the bright red blood spurt from it. This means that you have cut one of the blood pipes called arteries. If the cut is on the arm or the leg, you should take a cloth or bandage and tie it tightly around the arm or leg above the cut; and if that does not check the blood, put a piece of stick under the cloth and twist the stick, as in the picture. For a cut like this you must get help as soon as possible, and keep quiet, or else you will increase the flow of blood.

If you get anything in your eye, be sure not to rub the eye; don’t even wink hard if you can help it. You will only make the pain worse, because you will scratch the eyeball. Let some one take out the bit of dust or the cinder or the fly, or whatever it is, as quickly as possible. Often, if you close the lids gently and hold them so, the tears will wash the speck down for you.

If you should bruise yourself, the best way to treat the bruise is to pour either quite cold or quite warm water over it, and keep this up for several minutes; or to put it into a bowl of hot water. Then tie it up in a bandage of soft cotton cloth or gauze and pour over it a lotion containing a little alcohol—about one sixth or one fourth. This, by evaporating, cools off the bruise and relieves the pain.

If your ear, or nose, or a finger should happen to be frozen or frost bitten, the best thing to do is to rub it hard with snow until it thaws out and becomes pink again. Above all, don’t go too near the fire, and don’t go into a very warm room too soon.

If you get one of those uncomfortable itchy swellings on your feet called chilblains, which come from cold floors in your houses, or from wet feet, or from wearing too thin shoes and stockings, don’t put your feet too near the fire, but rub them well with turpentine just before going to bed at night. This will often take all the pain and itching out of them.

Sometimes people make the mistake of drinking something that is poisonous. Of course, one good way to prevent this is to have every bottle in the house carefully marked and never to take anything from a bottle without reading the mark, or label. Another good way is not to have poisons about any more than we actually need to.

Still, even so, sometimes a mistake is made. If you ever make such a mistake, the best thing to do is to drink as much warm water as you can, and into the second cupful to put a tablespoonful of dry mustard or two heaping tablespoonfuls of salt. This will make you vomit, and up will come the poison. The water makes the poison weaker. If this doesn’t make you throw up the poison, have some one tickle the back of your throat with a feather. There are a great many kinds of poison and as many things to take to cure them; but this is the only remedy I shall tell you about, because, by the time you have tried this, some older person will probably have come to help you.

All the medicines that you see advertised as “Headache Cures” are dangerous poisons if taken in too large doses; and most of them in small doses weaken the heart. They are what we call narcotics; they just deaden the nerves to pain without doing anything whatever to relieve or remove the cause.

If you have a headache, the best thing to do is to go and lie down quietly and rest or sleep, until it goes away. A headache always means that something is wrong; it is one of Nature’s most valuable danger signals. When your head aches, Nature is telling you that you have been over-straining your eyes, or breathing foul air, or eating some food that does not agree with you, or forgetting to go to the toilet regularly, or not getting sleep enough. The sensible thing to do is not to swallow some medicine to deaden your nerves to the pain, but to find out what you have been doing that is unhealthful for you, and then stop it.

Most of the medicines called “patent medicines,” which are advertised to “cure” all sorts of pains and troubles, contain poisons, and are particularly dangerous because they easily lead one to form the habit of taking them. Nine tenths of them are either absolute frauds,—of no strength or use whatever,—or else they contain alcohol, or opium, or some of the dangerous drugs made out of coal tar.

Now about burns. You need not wash them, because the heat has killed the troublesome germs. They need to be covered from the air, if the blister is broken. Cover them thickly with olive oil or vaseline, or common baking soda mixed with a few drops of water. This makes a good paste to put over them, and it will ease the pain. (This is the way to treat a wasp or bee sting, too, after you have pulled out the “stinger.”) If the blister of the burn is not broken, just keep putting vaseline or sweet oil on it every half hour or so, and the blister won’t break; for the oil will make it limber and prevent it from bursting.

If ever your clothes should catch fire, do not run; the wind you make will only fan the flames, so that they burn faster. Lie down and roll over and over, as fast as you can. If there is a rug or a quilt handy, wrap yourself up tight in it. My youngest brother once saved a little child’s life this way. He was not very old, but he remembered to put the child on the floor and roll him up in a rug.

However, the best way to prevent accidents with fire is to let fire and lamps and matches and kerosene and sparklers and firecrackers alone.

I am so glad that people are becoming sensible about keeping our nation’s birthday, the Fourth of July, and are doing away with the firecrackers that have killed so many thousands of children. The burns you get from firecrackers are much more dangerous than other burns. A dirt-germ often gets into them that may cause lockjaw. The name tells what it is: it locks the jaws together so that its victim cannot eat; and, of course, if he cannot eat, he cannot live very long. Next Fourth of July try getting flags and bunting and drums and horns, if you like, instead of these dangerous fireworks.

In keeping the Fourth one year not long ago, one hundred and seventy-one children lost one or more fingers; forty-one lost a leg, an arm, or a hand; thirty-six lost one eye, and sixteen lost both eyes; and two hundred and fifteen children were killed! This accounts for only the children; counting everybody, five thousand three hundred and seven people were killed or hurt. No wonder we begin to think that we ought to keep the Fourth in some other way.

In the City of Washington, on one Fourth of July, one hundred and four people were taken to the hospital; but the following year when no fireworks were allowed to be sold, the hospitals did not have a single patient from the accidents of the day.

Water, as well as fire, has its dangers. If you ever fall into the water, be sure to keep your mouth shut and your hands below your chin. Then paddle with your hands gently, and you’ll swim, just as any other young animal does when first thrown into the water. Even your cat, who hates water, can swim easily when she falls in. If you keep your wits as she does, you will get along as well. Some people learn to swim just by trying by themselves.

If anyone in your party, when you are out boating or swimming, should be nearly drowned, the best way to revive him is to lay him, as quickly as possible, flat on his face on level ground, just turning his head a little to one side so that his nose and mouth will not be blocked. Then, kneeling astride of his legs, put both your hands on the small of his back and press downward with all your weight while you count three. This squeezes the abdomen and the lower part of the chest so as to drive the air out of the lungs. Then swing backward so as to take the weight off your hands, while you count three again; and then swing forward again and press down, again forcing the air out of the lungs. Keep up this swing-pumping about ten or fifteen times a minute for at least ten or fifteen minutes, unless the person begins to breathe of himself before this. Don’t waste any time trying to hold him up by the feet, or roll him over a barrel so as to get the water out of his lungs. Just turn him over on his face as quickly as possible and get to work making a weight-pump of yourself on his back.

If there is any life left in the body at all when it is taken out of the water, you will succeed in saving it. It is very seldom, however, that anyone who has been under water more than five minutes can be revived.

And now the thing that I want you to be sure to remember, I have saved for the last. No matter what kind of accident happens, keep your wits about you and keep cool. Be calm and think what it is best to do, instead of letting yourself be frightened. Of course, get some one to help you as soon as you can and, if need be, call for help as loud as your lungs will let you. But use that wonderful “phone” system to send in and out the messages that will help you to help yourself by telling your muscles what to do.

III. THE CITY BEAUTIFUL

One morning I stopped a moment on the street to speak to a friend. Her little nephew had just finished eating some candy, and down went his candy-bag on the pavement. His aunt happened to see it. “Oh, no, Claude,” she said, “don’t you see the big green can there? Better put it into that.” But Claude was only three years old; and the can was so tall that he could not tell what it was, till we led him up to it.

Do you have cans like these in your town, too? It is good to think that every one of us, even such little fellows as Claude, can help to keep the city beautiful. But it is not simply to make things look nice that we have so many cans—cans for ashes, cans for papers, cans for food scraps. No indeed, it is to keep the city clean and make it fit for people to live in; for if dirty papers and scraps were left to blow about the streets, they would fill the air with germs and filth.

Any dust that blows about the streets is likely to be carrying disease germs with it. That is why we have sprinklers driven through the streets to wet them and to keep down the dust; and why, in large cities, the streets are thoroughly flooded at night. If the streets are kept damp and clean, then the air above them is cool and fresh and pure.

How does the city get rid of all the dirt and waste? From every house there are two kinds of waste. Some is taken away in pipes from the sink and bathroom out into pipes that run under the street, and these carry it away from the city to some stream or deep water that takes it entirely away from the town.

The waste stuffs that are not watery, but solid—cabbage leaves, apple cores, potato parings, and other scraps from the kitchen are carted away and burned or fed to pigs. The ashes and tin cans are carted away, also, and used in making new land or filling up hollow places.

Besides taking away the dirt, cities are careful to get clear, pure drinking water. They are very, very careful about this; and they usually have the water tested often, because, as you have learned, even water that looks perfectly pure may give people typhoid fever. That is why, when you are out in the country, on a picnic perhaps, you must not drink from the streams. They may receive the drainage from a farmer’s barnyard, or the sewage from some house.

The more we all learn about these things, the more careful will the city be to protect her people. To be sure, most cities now have Boards of Health who employ men and women to go about and see that the food in the stores is clean—no flies, no dust, and no tobacco smoke on it. They have laws, too, about keeping milk clean; and in New York alone these laws have saved the lives of thousands of babies. And they have laws about the care of streets and buildings and cars and parks and a great many other things.

In all these things we have been talking about, I want you to be thinking how you can help. For a city is made up of people—boys and girls and men and women. The city is what its people make it; and everyone must help, even the smallest children, no older than little Claude.

The first and most important thing for you to do is to keep yourself clean and tidy. And the next thing is for you to keep your back yard as well as your front yard and the school yard and the street free from papers and sticks and cans and old playthings. You can put away your things when you are through playing; or, if you are making a railroad or a town or a playhouse, you can leave it looking nice and tidy. You can help chiefly by putting away your own things. You know the old saying, “A workman is known by his chips”; and a good workman always works in an orderly way.

When you eat apples or bananas or oranges, don’t throw the skins or peelings about, but put them in a garbage can or swill bucket or cover them with soft dirt in the garden or stable yard; and don’t throw peanut shells, or scraps of paper and the like, about the streets or parks. You should begin to notice all these things and talk about them, and that will make other people begin to think about them, too.Then you can make gardens instead of leaving bare, untidy back yards. I think that nicely kept vegetable gardens are almost as pretty as flower gardens. If you cannot mow the lawn, you can at least cut the long grass on the edges; and that makes such a difference! It is wonderful how much boys and girls can do in making and keeping a city really beautiful.

I hope that you have plenty of room to play in now. Of course, when you grow up, you will see that there are plenty of playgrounds and parks for the children. We are beginning to find out that the richest and the most beautiful city is the one whose streets are lined with families of happy, rosy-cheeked children. So, you see, the “City Beautiful” is the one that takes best care of her children, and she can do this only by keeping her streets and houses perfectly clean and seeing that the food her people get is fresh and good, and their drinking water pure. If the city or town you live in is not like this, be sure you do your very best to make it better.

There is one great evil that for hundreds and hundreds of years has been known wherever people are crowded together, and even in the open country, too; and which has been the cause of more untidiness and uncleanliness and unhappiness and disease than any other evil ever known. And that is the drinking of alcohol. People don’t drink clear alcohol, but they can get a great deal of it—enough to poison them badly—in the fermented drinks you learned about some time ago.

In the days when your grandfather was a little boy, every man thought that ale and wine and whiskey were good foods for him when he was well; and good medicine when he was sick. He believed that they gave him an appetite, and increased his strength. But now we have found, by carefully studying the effects of alcohol, in laboratories and in hospitals, that these beliefs were almost entirely mistaken. We know that all that wine, beer, and whiskey do is to make people feel better for a little while, without making them actually stronger or better in any way. In fact, in most respects these drinks make them weaker and worse instead.

Perhaps you will ask, “How do whiskey and wine and beer do us harm?” And here is only part of the answer: (1) They tire the heart and, by enlarging the blood pipes in the skin, make the heart pump too much of the blood out to the skin. In this way they make a person feel warmer when he really is not any warmer. (2) They make the liver work too hard. (3) They dull the brain, so that it cannot think so clearly or so well. (4) If one drinks them frequently, it is harder for him to get well when he is sick; more people die out of those who drink alcohol than out of those who do not.

Alcohol is a narcotic; that is, it deadens our nerves, for the time being, to any sensations of pain or discomfort, much in the same way that a very small dose of morphine or opium would. We may imagine it does us good because, for a little while after drinking it, we may cease to feel pain or fatigue or cold; but, instead of making us really better and able to do more work, it is dulling our nerves so that we work more slowly and more clumsily. Men who have carefully measured the amount of work that they do have found that they do less work on days when they take one or two glasses of beer or wine than they do on days when they drink only water.

The great insurance companies have found that those of their policy holders who drink no alcohol at all live nearly one fourth longer and have nearly one third fewer sicknesses than those who drink alcohol even in moderate amounts.

Indeed, so strong is the evidence as to the bad effects of alcohol, and so steadily is it increasing, that it will probably not be very many years more before the drinking of wine or beer by intelligent, thoughtful people will have become less than half as common as it is now.

Strong, healthy men may be able for a long time to drink small amounts of liquor without noticing any harmful effects; but all the time the alcohol may be doing serious harm to their nerves and brain and kidneys and liver and blood vessels, which they will not find out until it is too late to stop the trouble.

Useless and bad as alcohol is for full-grown men and women, it is even worse for young and growing children; and no child, and no boy or girl under the age of twenty-one, should ever touch a drop of it, except in those rare instances where it may be prescribed as a medicine by a doctor, just as many other drugs are, which in larger doses would be poisons.

Fortunately, it will be no trouble for you children to let it alone entirely; for not one of you would like the taste of it the first time—or, indeed, for the matter of that, for the first ten or twelve times—that you tried to drink it, if you should be so foolish. This is one striking difference between alcohol and all other foods and drinks. Children have absolutely no natural liking, or taste, for the drinks that contain it, as they have for meat, milk, sugar, apples, and the other real foods. This is Nature’s way of telling them that it is not a real food, and not needed in any way for their growth and health. Let it alone absolutely, until you are at least twenty-one years old; and by that time you will probably have become so convinced of the harm that it is doing that you will never begin using it at all.

What we have been saying so far applies, of course, only to the moderate use of alcohol. How terrible the effects of the long or excessive use of alcohol are, you don’t need to learn from a book. All you have to do is to keep your eyes open on the streets, and see the drunken men reeling along the sidewalk, and the wrecks of men that hang around the saloons. The poorhouses and the jails and the insane asylums are filled with them. The most terrible thing that can happen to anyone is to become a drunkard. The best and safest and only sensible thing to do is to keep away from the only stuff that makes drunkards. It may do you the most terrible harm, and it cannot do you the slightest good.

Your city can never become the “City Beautiful” so long as this evil mars it; and, as you grow up, I hope you will do all you can toward making the right kind of city and home.