REST AS A MEDICINE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 357, 20 February 1880, Page 17

REST AS A MEDICINE.

The benefits of rest in aiding the healing process in disease might be exemplified in a hundred different ways. Indeed, the disease is often merely the result of disobedience, often wilful, of the great natural result and universal law which orders that a period of rest must in every case be sequel to one of activity. In the vegetable, as well as in the animal kingdom, this law holds good. Trees and shrubs go to sleep in winter ; flowers are generally more tender in their constitutions and go to rest during the night ; while others, again, fiud it necessary to take a nap, so to speak, during certain hours of the day, and this they do with such regularity that one can pretty correctly tell the time from the opening or closing of their petals. I always look upon a tree as a thing not only of life— that we all know it is— but a thing of feeling. Those lordly poplars yonder, for instance, now gently waving their tall arms and their wealth of quivering leaves to and fro in the sunlight, have neither thought nor voluntary motion, but a pleasant sensation of warmth I have not the slighest doubt they possess. If I lop a branch from one of them, pain it cannot feel, but probably, what might be called a vegetable equivalent to pain, a sense of cold on the surface that has been laid bare by a knife. My poplar trees have been very active during the summer ; they are already showing signs of fatigue ; by-and-bye the»r leaves will drop in showers, but though bared of foliage they will not feel the winter's cold— they will all be sound asleep. . . Many people suffer from chronic indigestion, from the mere fact that having first and foremost produced the dyspepsia by overloading the stomach, or by other errors in diet, they give it no rest, they keep on worrying it to get well, the very medicines they keep pouring into it keep up the irritation in probably five cases out of ten. In those cases lam convinced that two or three hours' complete rest to the stomach every day from both meat and medicine would soon induce a healthy hunger. Those who have this organ in good working order would do well to remember that the time when every particle of food has left the stomach is nou the time to put more in. An hour's rest, at least, is needed, and if we give it this before each meal it will be a willing servant, and will never think of suggesting the propriety of a sherry ana bitters before you sit down to dinner ; and remember, a willing servant makes a glad master, and a good tempered one to boot, — The Family Doctor, in " Cassell's Magazine," for October,