HEALTH COLUMN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2325, 22 September 1898, Page 54

HEALTH COLUMN.

How to Breathe. Bad nauits of breathing are common among both sick and well. With many the daily occupation favours the stooping posture and sedentary habits— a combination favourable to lung diseases. Bookkeepers, clerks, and other indoor workers must guard against a lnibit of short, shallow breathing and a cliromi stoop. These indicate infallibly an insufficient expansion of the lungs. Rapid and shallow breathing is strictly unhygienic. It leaves a great portion of the lungs entirely unused, and part of the air in them unchanged. Deep breathing strengthens and increases the muscles of the chesfc and the abdomen. Th 3 abdonlinal muscle directly overlies the intestines, and its motion stimulates the whole digestive apparatus, thus contributing t) its healthful activity. Persons who occasionally or continually suffer from cough should Lake pains to cultivare deep breathing. Almost all such persors breathe improperly. In many cases lack of lung power is inherited ; in others habit or occupation plaj's an unfavourable part; in not a few instances a fear of the lungs being delicate superinduces a habit of shallow breathing, from an erroneous idea that the lungd are in this way favoured. The health of an organ depends largely upon a proper exercise of its functions, Dis-

eases of the lungs, of a chronic nature especially, are often wholly, always partially, chaigeable to an unhygienic method of breathing. The part of the lungs most likely to become affected with disease is the acpe\, or uppermost portion. The reason for tii s lies in the fact that this part of the lung is fully expanded only on talcing a deep inspiration. In many persons this part of the lv ig is therefore seldom expanded j its funcUrn is impaired, and it falls more readily a pre- r to disease. laght clothing is especially harmful about t ! ie neck and shoulders, and in this respect men err as often as women. A tightly-con-structed waist, while limiting fre© respiration, is perhaps not so harmful to the lungs as to other adjacent organs of the body.