Volume 1

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    expand the lungs while it gives the needed relaxation to the brain, surely it requires no further recommendation from me as one to be encouraged and upheld. But if any one should wish direct proof on the subject, I can refer him to the investigations by Dr Morgan on the oarsmen of Oxford and Cambridge, where the history of each member of the University for ten years was carefully traced, and it was found with reference to class honours that not only was the average of the rowers as good or better than that of any equal number of men taken promiscuously, but that many of them stood in the highest ranks in the Classical and Mathematical Tripos. Looking at it from another point of view, I may refer to the intelligence and ability of the working classes as a proof that hard and constant physical labour in no way tends to depreciate the quality and strength of brain power—nay, rather, it seems to foster it, for it is out of their ranks that many of our greatest geniuses have sprung in almost every department of intellectual life. As Scotsmen, I need only mention such names to you as Burns, Hugh Miller, James Watt, Sir James Simpson, and Thomas Carlyle, as a proof that the working class has been the stock from which many of our best brains have been bred. I might easily dwell longer on this part of our subject, but our time is limited, and I must now take up the effects of exercise on the bones and muscles, and on the tone and vigour of the body generally. It is one of the most beautiful principles in our bodily structure that the supply and demand are made to adapt themselves to one another in equal proportions. When a muscle is exercised there is waste of tissue, but it receives more blood and grows stronger, and is thus better able to do the work required of it, while when its use is no longer required it loses bulk and firmness, and becomes less fit for the same work as before. The arm of a blacksmith is rugged and strong—as Tennyson puts it— And arms on which the standing muscle sloped, As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it, while a clerk's is rounded and soft; but if the clerk were to turu