Importance of Rest

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 11, 1865

Importance of Rest.

In his excellent Herald of Health, Dr. Trall thus sagely advises rest: "How much has been written about water, air, food, exercise, dress, and other hygienic materials and influences, and how little about rest! As a remedial measure, rest is of vastly more importance than has been generally supposed. As a therapeutic means, its place is at the very head of the materia medica. Very little skill, comparatively, is required for a practitioner of the Hygeio-Therapeutic school to know when to do something, and what to do. But a vastly greater fund of professional knowledge is required to know when and how to let the patient alone. One-half the world is drugged to death when sick, and one-half of the remainder is fretted to death. We have frequently saved life by standing between the patients and their friends. The world has got a bad fashion of making a terrible ado, keeping up a constant consternation, nursing and fussing continually, while anxious relatives, sympathizing friends, mysteriously gibbering doctors, meddlesome nurses, and whispering watchers, add their mite of mighty influence to the wrong side, and all because somebody is sick and needs rest. And the whole mischief is traceable to a false dogma in medical science in relation to the nature of disease. The authors teach that disease is an entity, a thing which travels about, pervades the air, penetrates our dwellings, and finally attacks us; and this absurd phantasm is easily transmogrified by the ignorant and unthinking multitude (unthinking on this subject, we mean) into something analogous to a witch, a ghost, a goblin, spook, fiend, or demon, which nothing but the doctor's poisons, dealt out by the doctor's own hand or pen, can assuage, pacify, eradicate, exorcise, kill, or cure. The charms, incantations, and amulets of the ancients were not more silly, and the necromancy and pow-wows of the Indian tribes of the present day are not more ridiculous (and they are predicated on precisely the same false notions of the nature of disease) than are the dosing, and drugging, and slopping, and stuffing, and watching, and fretting of the regular physicians of to-day, and the patrons and nurses of their school. Nine out of ten of all the maladies of all the people of the world would get well in a few hours, or days, if left to themselves, with no other appliances than such as instinct would suggest, and common sense employ. Yet in nine cases out of the ten, the doctor is called, and if he be a drugopathic doctor, one-half his patients are in danger of a protracted illness, and one-half of these are sure of a ruined constitution, not because of the disease, but be-consequence of the drugs. When we visit a patient in the country, our greatest difficulty is to keep the friends quiet, when nothing but let-alone ativeness is needed. All are willing to do something; every one is anxious to lend a helping hand; and people generally estimate a physician's knowledge and skill by the extent or variety of his prescriptions. Few can understand the quietly-working, yet efficient remedial resources of nature when undisturbed.—Am. Phrenological Journal.