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Hygienic Physiology

J >> Joel Dorman Steele >> Hygienic Physiology




The most remarkable experiments upon the production of dreams of a
definite character, by subjecting a person during sleep to peculiar
influences, are those of Maury. The hallucinations produced in this way
are called hypnagogic (from its derivation this term is properly applied
only to phenomena observed at the instant when we fall asleep, or when we
are imperfectly awakened, and not to the period of most perfect repose),
and they occur when the subject is not in a condition favorable to sound
sleep.

The experiments made by Maury upon himself are so curious and interesting
that we quote the most striking of them in full.

_First Observation_.--I am tickled with a feather successively on the
lips and inside of the nostrils. I dream that I am subjected to a horrible
punishment, that a mask of pitch is applied to my face, and then roughly
torn off, tearing the skin of the lip, the nose, and the face.

_Second Observation_.--A pair of pincers is held at a little distance
from my ear, and rubbed with steel scissors. I dream that I hear the
ringing of bells; this soon becomes a tocsin, and I imagine myself in the
days of June, 1848. (The time of the French Revolution.)

_Third Observation_.--I am caused to inhale Cologne water. I dream I
am in a perfumer's shop; the idea of perfumes doubtless awakens the idea
of the East; I am in Cairo, in the shop of Jean Farina....

_Fifth Observation_.--I am slightly pinched on the nape of the neck.
I dream that a blister is applied, which recalls to my mind a physician
who had treated me in infancy.

_Seventh Observation_....The words Azar, Castor, Leonore, were
pronounced in my ear; on awaking I recollected that I had heard the last
two words, which I attributed to one of the persons who had conversed with
me in my dream.--FLINT'S _Physiology of Man_.

The transition stage between the dream simple and the dream acted is
witnessed in the spasmodic movements which a vivid dream produces in the
limbs or person of the sleeper. The dreamer engages in a fierce struggle,
and twitchings of his legs and arms indicate the feeble response of body
to the promptings of mind removed from its wonted power over the frame.
Even the dog, as he sleeps, apparently dreams of the chase, and gives vent
to his sensations by the short, sharp bark, or sniffs the air, and starts
in his slumber as if in response to the activity with which, in his
dreaming, he is hurrying along after the object of pursuit....Persons have
been known to swim for a considerable time in the somnambulistic state
without waking at the termination of their journey; others have safely
descended the shaft of a mine, while some have ascended steep cliffs, and
have returned home in safety during a prolonged sleep vigil. (See p.
204.)--DR. ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E., _What Dreams are Made of_.

_Sleep and Conscience_.--Edward Everett Hale says: Never go to bed in
any danger of being hungry. People are kept awake by hunger quite as much
as by a bad conscience. Remembering that sleep is the essential force
which starts the whole system, decline tea or coffee within the last six
hours before going to bed. Avoid all mathematics or intricate study of any
sort in the last six hours. This is the stuff dreams are made of, and hot
heads, and the nuisances of waking hours. Keep your conscience clear.
Remember that because the work of life is infinite, you can not do the
whole of it in any limited period of time, and that therefore you may just
as well leave off in one place as another.

_The Art of Rising Early_.--The proper time to rise is when sleep
ends. Dozing should not be allowed. True sleep is the aggregate of sleeps,
or is a state consisting in the sleeping or rest of all the several parts
of the organism. Sometimes one and at other times another part of the
body, as a whole, may be the least fatigued, and so the first to awake; or
the most exhausted, and therefore the most difficult to arouse. The secret
of good sleep is, the physiological conditions of rest being established,
so to work and weary the several parts of the organism as to give them a
proportionately equal need of rest at the same moment. To wake early, and
feel ready to rise, a fair and equal start of the sleepers should be
secured; and the wise self-manager should not allow a drowsy feeling of
unconsciousness, or weary senses, or an exhausted muscular system, to
beguile him into the folly of going to sleep again when once he has been
aroused. After a few days of self-discipline, the man who resolves not to
doze, that is, not to allow some sleepy part of his body to keep him in
bed after his brain has once awakened, will find himself, without knowing
why, an early riser.

INFLUENCE OF SUNLIGHT (p. 207).--Light is an essential element in
producing the grand phenomena of life, though its action is ill
understood. Where there is light there is life, and any deprivation of
this principle is rapidly followed by disease of the animal frame, and the
destruction of the mental faculties. We have proof of this in the squalor
of those whose necessities compel them to labor in places to which the
blessings of sunshine never penetrate, as in our coal mines, where men
having everything necessary for health, except light, exhibit a singularly
unhealthy appearance. The state of fatuity and wretchedness to which those
individuals have been reduced, who have been subjected for years to
incarceration in dark dungeons, may be referred to the same deprivation.--
ROBERT HUNT, _Poetry of Science_.

_Effect of Dungeon Life_.--"You can not imagine, Mr. Kennan," said a
condemned revolutionist to me in Siberia, "the misery of prolonged
confinement in a casemate of the fortress under what are known as dungeon
conditions. My casemate was sometimes cold, generally damp, and always
gloomy. Day after day, week after week, month after month, I lay there in
solitude, hearing no sound save that of the high-pitched, melancholy bells
of the fortress cathedral, which slowly chimed the quarter hours, and
which always seemed to say: 'Here thou liest--lie here still.' I had
absolutely nothing to do except to pace my cell from corner to corner, and
think. For a long time I used to talk to myself in a whisper; to repeat
softly everything in the shape of literature that I could remember, and to
compose speeches which, under certain imagined conditions, I would
deliver; but I finally ceased to have energy enough to do even this, and
used to sit for hours in a sort of stupor, in which, so far as I can now
remember, I was not conscious of thinking at all. Before the end of the
first year, I grew so weak, mentally and physically, that I began to
forget words. I knew what ideas I desired to express, but some of the
words that I needed had gone from me, and it was with the greatest
difficulty that I could recover them. It seemed sometimes as if my own
language were a strange one to me, or one which, from long disuse, I had
forgotten. I greatly feared insanity, and my apprehension was increased by
the fact that two or three of my comrades in cells on the same corridor
were either insane or subject to hallucinations; and I was often roused at
night and thrown into a violent chill of nervous excitement by their
hysterical weeping, their cries to the guard to come and take away
somebody, or something which they imagined they saw, or their groans and
entreaties when, in cases of violent delirium, they were strapped to their
beds by the _gendarmes_."--GEORGE KENNAN, _in Russian State
Prisoners, The Century, March, 1888_.

THE GROWTH AND POWER OF POISON HABITS (p. 218).--In order to distinguish a
poison stimulant from a harmless and nutritive substance, Nature has
furnished us three infallible tests:

1. The first taste of every poison is either insipid or repulsive.

2. The persistent obtrusion of the noxious substance changes that aversion
into a specific craving.

3. The more or less pleasurable excitement produced by a gratification of
that craving is always followed by a depressing reaction....

One radical fallacy identifies the stimulant habit in all its disguises:
its victims mistake a process of irritation for one of invigoration....
Sooner or later the tonic is sure to pall while the morbid craving
remains, and forces its victims either to increase the quantity of
the wonted stimulant, or else to resort to a stronger poison. A boy begins
with ginger beer and ends in ginger rum; the medical "tonic" delusion
progresses from malt extract to Mumford's Elixir; and the nicotine habit
once introduced, the alcohol habit often follows. The tendency of every
stimulant habit is toward a stronger tonic....We have found that the road
to the rum shop is paved with "mild stimulants," and that every bottle of
medical bitters is apt to get the vender a permanent customer. We have
found that cider and mild ale lead to strong ale, to lager beer, and
finally to rum, and the truth at last dawns upon us that the only safe,
consistent, and effective plan is Total Abstinence from all Poisons.

...More than the hunger after bread, more than the frenzy of love or
hatred, the poison hunger overpowers every other instinct, even the fear
of death. Dr. Isaac Jennings has illustrated this by the following
example: A clergyman of his acquaintance attempted to dissuade a young man
of great promise from habits of intemperance. "Hear me first a few words,"
said the young man, "and then you may proceed. I am sensible that an
indulgence in this habit will lead to the loss of property, the loss of
reputation and domestic happiness, to premature death, and to the
irretrievable loss of my immortal soul; and now, with all this conviction
resting firmly on my mind and flashing over my conscience like lightning,
if I still continue to drink, do you suppose anything you can say will
deter me from the practice?"

...Ignorance is a chief cause of intemperance. The seductions of vice
would not mislead so many of our young men if they could realize the
significance of their mistake. There is still a lingering belief that,
with due precaution against excess and adulteration, a dram drinker might
"get ahead" of Nature, and, as it were, trick her out of some extra
enjoyment. There is no hope of a radical reform till intelligent people
have realized the fact that this "trick" is in every instance a losing
game, entailing penalties which far outweigh the pleasures that the novice
may mistake for enjoyments. For the depression of the vital energy
increases with every repetition of the stimulating process, and in a year
after the first dose all the "grateful and exhilarating tonics" of our
professional poison venders can not restore the vigor, the courage, and
the cheerfulness which the mere consciousness of perfect health imparts to
the total abstainer. A great plurality of all beginners underrate the
difficulty of controlling the cravings of a morbid appetite. They remember
that their natural inclinations at first opposed, rather than encouraged,
the indulgence; and they feel that at the present stage of its development
they could abjure the passion without difficulty. But they overlook the
fact that the moral power of resistance decreases with each repetition of
the dose, and that the time will come when only the practical
impossibility of procuring their wonted tipple will enable them to keep
their pledge of total abstinence. It is true that, by the exercise of a
constant self-restraint, a person of great will force may resist the
progressive tendency of the poison habit and confine himself for years to
a single cigar or a single bottle of wine per day....But the attempt to
resist that bias will overtask the strength of most individuals. According
to the allegory of the Grecian myth, the car of Bacchus was drawn by
tigers; and it is a significant circumstance that war, famine, and
pestilence have so often been the forerunners of veritable alcohol
epidemics....The explanation is that, after the stimulant habit has once
been initiated, every unusual depression of mental or physical vigor calls
for an increased application of the accustomed method of relief....Nations
who are addicted to the worship of a poison god will use his temple as a
place of refuge from every calamity; and children whose petty ailments
have been palliated with narcotics, wine, and cordials, will afterward be
tempted to drown their greater sorrows in deeper draughts of the same
nepenthe.--FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D., _Remedies of Nature, Popular Science
Monthly, October and November, 1883_.

DANGERS FROM THE USE OF NARCOTICS.--It may seem a paradox, it is a truism,
to say that in the value of narcotics lies their peril. Because they have
such power for good, because the suffering which they alleviate is in its
lighter forms so common, because neuralgia and sleeplessness are ailments
as familiar to the present generation as gout, rheumatism, and catarrh
were to our grandfathers, therefore the medicines which immediately
relieve sleeplessness and neuralgic pain are among the most dangerous
possessions, the most subtle temptations of civilized life. Every one of
these drugs has, besides its instant and beneficial effect, other and
injurious tendencies. The relief which it gives is purchased at a certain
price; for, at each repetition of the dose, the immediate relief is
lessened or rendered uncertain, while the mischievous influence is
enhanced and aggravated; till, when the drug has become a necessity of
life it has lost the greater part, if not the whole, of its value, and
serves only to satisfy the need which itself alone has created....We read
weekly of men and women poisoned by an overdose of some favorite sedative,
burned to death or otherwise fatally injured, while insensible from self-
administered ether or chloroform....The narcotist keeps chloroform or
chloral always at hand, forgetful or ignorant that one sure effect of the
first dose is to produce a semistupor more dangerous than actual
somnolence. In that semistupor the patient is aware, or fancies, that the
dose has failed. The pain that has induced a lady to hold a chloroformed
handkerchief under her nostrils returns while her will and her judgment
are half paralyzed. She takes the bottle from the table beside her bed,
intending to pour an additional supply upon her handkerchief. The unsteady
hand perhaps spills a quantity on the sheet, perhaps sinks with the
unstoppered bottle under her nostrils, and in a few moments she has
inhaled enough utterly to stupefy, if not to kill. The sleepless brain
worker also feels that his usual dose of chloral has failed to bring
sleep; he is not aware how completely it has stupefied the brain, to which
it has not given rest. His judgment is gone, so is his steadiness of hand;
and he pours out a second and too often a fatal dose....But the cases that
end in a death terrible to the family, though probably involving little or
no suffering to the victim himself, are by no means the worst. A life
poisoned, paralyzed, rendered worthless for all the uses of intellectual,
rational, we might almost say of human existence, is worse for the
sufferer himself and for all around him than a quick and painless death;
and for one such death there must be twenty, if not a hundred, instances
of this worst death in life....The demoralization of the narcotist is not,
like that of the drunkard, rapid, violent, and palpable; but gradual,
insidious, perceptible at first only to close observers and intimate
friends. Here and there we find a constitution upon which opium exerts few
or none of its characteristic effects. Such cases are, of course, wholly
exceptional; but their very existence is a danger to others, misleading
them into the idea that they may dally with the tempter without falling
under its yoke, or may fall under that yoke and find it a light one. I
doubt, however, whether the most fortunate of its victims would encourage
the latter idea; whether there be an opium eater who would not give a limb
never to have known what opium slavery means....Besides, no one can be
sure, or indeed reasonably hope, that the mischief will be confined to the
individual victim. That the children of drunkards are often predisposed to
insanity is notorious; that the children of habitual opium eaters inherit
an unmistakable taint, whether in a diseased brain, in morbid cravings, or
simply in a will too weak to resist temptation, is less notorious, but
equally certain.--PERCY GREG, _Narcotics and Stimulants, Contemporary
Review_.

Thus also in America scarcely a week passes but we see announced in the
public prints deaths or suicides resulting from the use of narcotics. Now,
it is from tobacco: A Yale College student dies from excessive smoking;
another student in the same college, and as a result of the same habit,
commits suicide; a third young man is found dead in his bed in New York,
from heart disease induced by cigarettes; and so, month by month, and year
by year, grows in rapid increase the list of tobacco deaths.--Or, again,
it is from opium. A Harvard student with two of his college companions in
search of a new sensation, tries opium smoking one fatal night and dies
before morning; a woman in Ohio, belonging to a prominent family, dies at
the age of thirty-three years, from an overdose of morphine, her body
covered with hypodermic scars; another, once the respected wife of a
Baptist clergyman, becomes a morphine drunkard, drifts, step by step, into
a Central New York Almshouse, and there hangs herself; a third, young,
accomplished, and wealthy, falls first a victim to the morphine habit,
then to opium smoking, finally becomes the frequenter of a New York opium
joint, and so is lost forever to home, friends, and respectability.--
Occasionally it is cocaine, as in the case of the Chicago physician, who,
for the purposes of investigation, experiments with this new drug upon
himself, his wife, and finally upon his innocent children; the entire
family being found unconscious from the effects of the subtle narcotic.
These are but solitary instances in an appallingly long list of similar
cases, most of which have occurred within the last two years (1887-'88).

_Cigarette Smoking_ is chargeable with a growing demoralization and
mortality among boys and young men. It is no uncommon sight to see lads of
ten years old and under, with the irresponsibility of ignorant childhood,
puffing the dangerous cigarette, and thus undermining health and intellect
at the very outset of useful existence. Even when told of the near and
remote perils thus incurred, they scarcely listen, for do not they see
their elders smoke and prosper?--Most of them do not understand that there
is more danger to the young than to the old in the tobacco habit, more
danger to some constitutions than to others, and more danger in the
cigarette than even in the pipe or the cigar. Pause a moment to consider
it, boys, when you are tempted to light the clean-looking, paper-covered
roll and place it in your mouth. Think of the heated smoke irritating the
delicate membrane in your throat, dulling your brain, and vitiating the
blood which should be bounding fresh and pure through your veins. Think of
the many filthy and diseased mouths from which have been cast away the
tobacco refuse, picked up in streets and public places to reappear in the
"Cheap and Popular Brand" which looks to you so innocent and so
attractive. It is astonishing, indeed, how an otherwise cleanly boy will
consent to defile himself with these vile abominations. And yet, I have
known lads who--not always with perfect politeness--would fastidiously
refuse "hash" at their mother's breakfast table, but who would shortly
afterward serenely place one of these unknowable compounds between their
lips and walk away with the air of superior manhood!

_Of Chloral Hydrate_, Dr. Fothergill remarks: "When this was
announced with a flourish of trumpets as a perfectly innocuous narcotic,
the sleepless folk hailed its advent with eager acclamation. But a little
experience soon demonstrated that the innocuous, harmless drug was far
from the boon it was proclaimed. In fact, the impression of its
harmlessness was the outcome of ignorance of its properties. Death after
death, even among medical men themselves, as well as nonprofessional
persons, have already resulted from the use, or rather misuse, of this
narcotic agent."

_The Bromides_ (of Soda or Potash), also, should be used with
caution, and only on the prescription of a conscientious physician. "The
bromide of potash," says Percy Greg, "is claimed not to produce sleep by
stupefaction, like chloral or opium, but, at least in small doses, to
allay the nervous irritability which is often the sole cause of
sleeplessness. But in larger quantities and in its ultimate effects, it is
scarcely less to be dreaded than chloral." Overdoses of the bromides will
produce among other evil effects a peculiar eruption upon the face, which,
though generally temporary, is liable to reappear from time to time under
certain conditions of the system, and especially upon a subsequent dose,
however dilute.

_Absinthe_ is a compound of absinthium (the essence of wormwood),
various aromatic oils, and alcohol. Absinthium, taken in small doses,
induces trembling, stupor, and insensibility; in larger doses, epilepsy.
When, therefore, this dangerous essence is added to alcohol, it
strengthens its influence to specific disease. Absinthe drinking is
recognized in France as such a serious vice that it has been officially
prohibited in the army and navy.

_Hasheesh_ is a syrup prepared from the leaves and flowers of Indian
Hemp. Though its use in this country is comparatively small, instances are
not unknown in which reckless or curious persons have fatally experimented
with it. As a medicine, it is in limited use, and with results not always
satisfactory. It acts in a peculiar manner upon the nervous centers,
occasioning that strange condition of the nervous system called catalepsy,
in which the limbs of the unconscious patient remain stationary in
whatever position they may be placed. After an average dose of hasheesh,
the subject becomes the helpless victim of rapidly shifting ideas, a
prominent characteristic of which is an entire loss of judgment as to time
and place. A larger dose produces hallucinations and delirium, with that
distressing sensation of falling through endless space which is induced in
some people by opium. [Footnote: In an article entitled "An Overdose of
Hasheesh" (_Popular Science Monthly_, February, 1884), Miss MARY A.
HUNGERFORD gives a vivid description of a painful experience with this
drug, some portion of which is as follows:

"Being one of the grand army of sufferers from headache, I took, last
summer, by order of my physician, three small daily doses of hasheesh in
the hope of holding my intimate enemy in check....I grew to regard the
drug as a harmless medicine, and one day, when I was assured by some
familiar symptoms that my headache was about to assume an aggravated form,
I took a larger quantity than had been prescribed. Twenty minutes later I
was seized with a strange sinking or faintness which gave my family so
much alarm that they telephoned at once for the doctor.

"...One terrible reality--I can hardly term it a fancy even now--that came
to me again and again, was so painful that it must, I fear, always be a
vividly remembered agony....I died, as I believed, although by a strange
double consciousness I knew that I should again reanimate the body I had
left. In leaving it I did not soar away, as one delights to think of the
freed spirits soaring....I sank, an intangible, impalpable shape, through
the bed, the floors, the cellar, the earth, down, down, down! Like a
fragment of glass dropping through the ocean, I dropped uninterruptedly
through the earth and its atmosphere, and then fell on and on
forever....As time went on, and my dropping through space continued, I
became filled with the most profound loneliness, and a desperate fear took
hold of me that I should be thus alone for evermore, and fall and fall
eternally....There was, it seemed to me, a forgotten text which, if
remembered, would be the spell to stop my fatal falling. I sought in my
memory for it, I prayed to recall it, I fought for it madly, wrestling
against the terrible fate which seemed to withhold it. Single words of it
came to me in disconnected mockery, but erased themselves instantaneously.
Mentally, I writhed in such hopeless agony that, in thinking of it, I
wonder I could have borne such excess of emotion and lived....I began,
then, without having reached any goal, to ascend. As I rose, a great and
terrible voice from a vast distance pronounced my doom: 'Fall, fall, fall,
to rise again in hopeless misery, and sink again in lonely agony forever.'
...Then ensued a wild and terrible commingling of unsyllabled sounds, so
unearthly that it is not in the power of language to fitly describe them.
It was something like a mighty Niagara of shrieks and groans, combined
with the fearful din and crash of thousands of battles and the thunderous
roar of a stormy sea....I fought my upward way in an agony which resembled
nothing so much as the terrible moment when, from strangling or
suffocation, all the forces of life struggle against death, and wrestle
madly for another breath. In place of the woeful sounds now reigned a
deadly stillness, broken only at long but regular intervals by a loud
report, as if a cannon, louder than any I ever heard on earth, were
discharged at my side, almost shot into me, I might say, for the sound
appeared to rend me from head to foot, and then to die away into the dark
chaos about me in strange, shuddering reverberations. Even in the misery
of my ascending I was filled with a dread expectancy of the cruel sound.
It gave me a feeling of acute physical torture, with a lingering intensity
that bodily suffering could not have. It was repeated an incredible number
of times, and always with the same suffering and shock to me. At last the
sound came oftener, but with less force, and I seemed again nearing the
shores of time. Dimly in the far distance I saw the room I had left,
myself lying still and deathlike upon the bed, and the friends watching
me....Then, silently and invisibly I floated into the room, and was one
with myself again.

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