DOCTOR DISCREDITS OLD SAYINGS.

Evening Star, Issue 15035, 18 November 1912, Page 6

DOCTOR DISCREDITS OLD SAYINGS.

EAT ALL YOU WANT, SLEEP AS LONG AS YOU CAN. Several cherished traditions were severely handled by Dr Woods Hutchinson in an address to the International Health Congress at Washington in September. _Dr Hutchinson, who formerly practised in_ England, but is now one of America's foremost authorities on hygiene, spoke humorously of medicines, and emphasised what most Americans are just beginning to appreciate, that "Nature, even unaided, tends to healing, and not to disease." In prehistoric times, he said, people plucked things from trees, and dug others from the earth. Things that tasted good they labelled food, and their judgment was pretty sound. Things that tasted nasty they dubbed medicines. The nastier the taste the more likely it was that the article was a medicine, and if it was quite altogether vile in its taste it wns surrounded by a sort of glory, and made into a health specific. Tn discussing the health of children, Dr Hutchinson asked his brother scientists to regard with suspicion " fine old sayings." There is a fine old saying that one should rise from the table wanting just a little bit more. This, according to the lecturer, is an exploded theory. Be it a large meal or a small tit-bit that a. child craves for, in nine times out of ton it ought to have it. The rigid Tide that three meals a day are enough for anyone, young or old, active or inactive, is all nonsense. A healthy child can enjoy, nnd assimilate, and very often needs six meals a day. Tn fact, the human stomach is geared for continuous performance. —School Hatred is Natural.—

Another saying equally old and equally fine is " earlv to bod and early to rise." Dr Hutchinson declares that experience shows that a child docs not. benefit by being hustled oil' to bed early so that his parents may have a quiet time for the remainder of the evening. The child knows what it wants better than its parents, and the main thing is that a child should have enough sleep—indeed, plenty of sleep—for sleep is the iiroatest of all cures. Next to food a child needs sleep. The more it sleeps the better. Early to bed is bad enough for most of us, for all the most enjoyable things we do happen about 10 o'clock at night; but early to rise is where the old proverb hurts the youngsters. Let them sleep and never forcibly awaken them. After food and sleep Dr Hutchinson places play—healthy outdoor play—jvhieh builds up the body, mind, and judgment. A child's instinct for .play is God-given ; so is his hatred for school. The lecturer continued:— "Let a. child make his own moral code. Do not preach. If you do, practise your preachments. Neither will the child. If you practise there is no need of preaching. We think we are older than our children, when, as a matter of fact, they are older than we, at least racially speaking. Their instincts have been growing for eight or nine million years, and thev must mean something. Let the child develop in accord with his instincts. The process of putting old heads on to young shoulders, if it could lip carried out literally, would be one of the most disastrous things that could happen to us. None of us ever would grow up under those circumstances." Some members of the Congress expressed the opinion that Dr Hutchinson's views were a trifle ahead of public opinion, but all agreed, says the 'Daily Telegraph,' that there is a danger nowadays of attaching too much importance to " fine old sayings," because most of them have not kept abreast of modern science, and in some cases are diaI metrically opposed to it.