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.

    715/896 (page 27)
    The next great fact we must take into account looks like a con- tradiction of the first: it is the susceptibility of the brain and the body to be influenced in all directions but the principal ones that are inherent and hereditary, by outward conditions, physical and mental, by food, air, climate, exercise, example, teaching, sym- pathy, fear, emulation, sense of duty, power of self-control, morality and religion. It is one of the great problems yet unsolved to the full extent, just how far the influence of these extends, and how much they can affect the ancestral qualities. The next thing we must take into account, is that the body and mind of every man and woman has strict limits beyond which it cannot be developed, and that every organ and every faculty have their limits of growth too. These limits are not the same for different individuals. The next thing of importance we need to assume as being true in the development of a child, is that each organ of the body and each faculty of the mind bears such a relationship to the whole body and the whole mind, that if the growth of any one of them is unduly great, the growth of some or all the others will be pro- portionally restricted. The sum of the growth and activity in any one child is so far a fixed quantity that is divided into different streams of energy, One to the muscles, another to the bones, another to the heart, another to the motive part of the brain, another to the thinking part of the brain. If one of these streams is increased beyond its due proportion, the others are apt to run small or dry, If you try to develop the mind beyond its hereditary capacity, and unhappily succeed, it can only be at the expense of some bodily function, or of the length of life that was possible to that individual. GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE BODY. Let us now pass to the actual facts in the growth and develop- ment of the body of a child. I can only, of course, glance hurriedly at the most important of them. At birth the average weight of a baby among a town population is ?J lbs., and its height 191 inches, girls being less than half an inch under boys.