Manawatu Daily Times NOISE AND NERVES

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6912, 18 May 1929, Page 6

Manawatu Daily Times NOISE AND NERVES

A HEALTH official in England, reporting on the large numbe£ of deaths due to heart failure, declares that the noises on modern roads are most harmful to sufferers from gout and heart complaints. They need iron nerves, ho remarks, to stand up to the noise of pneumatic drills, screeching brakes, ’buses and trams. Of course they do 1 It hardly needed a medical man to tell us that. But medical men are sometimes listened to when laymen are ignored, and their testimony on such matters is welcome. Some months ago the British Medical Association did decide to enter its protest against unnecessary noise and to ask for legislation that might afford a remedy against the nuisance, u might have been much earlier in the field in ranging itself on the side of investigators who, like Professor Spooner, h»v» worked strenuously to initiate an effective anti-noise campaign. Anyone who has ears to hear must realise that the world has become abominably noisy. But there seems to have been a great deal of tacit assumption that noises due to traffic and industrial occupations cannot be abated, and should therefore bo tolerated in a cheerful spirit. That would mean a following of the line of least resistance. But if noise is not only inimical to health, but is also destructive of efficiency, as doctors and investigators agree, there can be little excuse for tolerating it wherever the suppression of it is not impossible. Even outstanding features of the noise nuisance, such as are apparent to everybody, arc permitted to continue in the average community as though they were a matter of no concern. We allow a few irresponsible persons to ride rough-shod over us in this matter, to harass our ears and nerves without any serious effort to bring them to book. “There is, for instance," says the Otago Daily Times, “the motor-cycle. For every silent motor-cycle there are a score of noisy machines that are allowed to race along our streets with car-splitting exhausts and clattering valve-gears, the intolerable clamour reaching a climax when sudden acceleration occurs, particularly on hills, of which we have so many in Dunedin." Apparently they have not banned the “open exhaust” yet in the far south. But even in these more enlightened latitudes there arc still a few' brainless individuals who defy the law and annoy the inhabitants with their intolerable din. A very distressing aspect of the modem noise nuisance has relation to its effect on invalids and occupants of hospitals. Professor Spooner has written: “Had I not witnessed day after day and month after month the almost paralysing effects of intermittent nerve-shattering noise on # men who were physically strong, I could not have believed it possible. Since then I never pass a hospital or a nursing-home situated in a busy thoroughfare without a feeling of pity for the poor sufferers within, whose very lives may be dependent on the recuperative powers of undisturbed sleep.”