Your ShelfYour Projects

Health Rules

5%

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 7, 1877

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 3, No. 23.

Read the full edition

Health Rules.

JOHN WESLEY wrote upon many subjects. Health was prominent among them. He published a work under the title of “Primitive Physic; or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing most Diseases.” From his rules the following are selected:—
1. Pure air is very important.
2. All persons ambitious of good health should be as clean as possible in their houses, furniture and clothes.
3. The great rule in food is to suit the quality and quantity to our digestion.
4. All pickled, salted and highly seasoned food is unwholesome.
5. Nothing conduces more to health than abstinence and plain food, with due labor.
6. Water is the most wholesome of all drinks, most quickens the appetite and strengthens the digestion.
7. Strong, and more especially spirituous, liquors are a certain though slow poison. Experience shows there is no danger in discontinuing them at once.
8. Coffee and tea are extremely injurious.
9. Walking is the best exercise for those who are able to bear it, and riding is the best for those who are not able to bear walking.
10. We may strengthen any weak part of the body by constant exercise. Thus the lungs may be strengthened by loud speaking or by walking up an ascent, the indigestion and nerves by riding, the arms and hands by strongly rubbing them daily.
11. The studious ought to have stated times for exercise, at least two or three hours a day.
12. Those who read or write much should learn to do it standing, otherwise it will impair their health.
13. The fewer clothes any one uses by day or night (provided he is kept warm), the hardier he will be.
14. Exercise should never be taken on a full stomach, it should never be continued to exhaustion, and when we are done, we should be careful not to cool off too suddenly.
15. The flesh-brush is highly beneficial, especially in stimulating a part which is cold and inactive.
16. All violent and sudden passions dispose people to acute diseases. Slow and lasting passions, bring on chronic diseases.
17. The love of God, as in general it is the sovereign remedy for all miseries, so in particular it prevents bodily disorders. And by the unspeakable joy and perfect calm, serenity and tranquility it gives to the mind, it becomes most powerful of all the means of health and long life.