GOOD HEALTH | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 28, 1877

GOOD HEALTH.

Necessity of Fresh Air.

We have no doubt that a large proportion of the delicate females, with which our cities especially are filled, owe their ill-health to a neglect of exercise and fresh air. Take the daughter of a family in good circumstances. From her infancy she is guarded as if the least breath of air would injure her, never going out without being wrapped up to the chin, and often being sent to school even in a carriage. Her natural instinct to exercise is restrained as a vulgarity; she is called a tomboy, a romp, and a dozen other contemptuous names; and thus, at last, she is drilled into a mere social machine, finally losing even the spirits to wish to take active exercise. Her days are spent in learning enormous lessons, or in practicing crochet work or embroidery, varied with an occasional children's party, where she is allowed whatever she pleases, and to dance herself into a fever. When she leaves school her existence becomes even more monotonous. Perhaps, if it is winter, and the family keeps no carriage, she is weeks without being out of the house; and in the house she does nothing but dawdle over a novel, stitch a bit of fancy work, or sit over the register of the furnace. If her father keeps a carriage, she may ride out occasionally; but she is always furred to the throat; and so things are no better. In a word, she is a hot-house plant, forced, like it, to a premature development; and like it doomed, in consequence, to a premature and unnatural decay.

Surely, if there is a reform in social life needed, in one particular more than in another it is required in the education of our daughters, and in the life we allow them to lead afterward. They are dying, by hundreds, for want of fresh air; and yet we take almost no note of the fact. When the English prisoners perished in the Black Hole in Calcutta, from the foul atmosphere they were compelled to breathe, the whole civilized world cried out with indignation at the perpetrators of the deed; and though nearly a century has since elapsed, the story is still never told without exciting horror. But we permit our daughters, and to a certain extent our wives also, to die by slow degrees, equally for want of pure air. In fact, where the Black Hole of Calcutta stifled its hundreds, the close rooms inhabited by American females slay their thousands.—Health Reformer.