Individual instruction in sex matters should be reserved for the diseased mind, for the boy or girl who has already been morbidly instructed. Discussion of immoral sex diseases should be confined to individual talk. This field teachers have already entered. Repeated physical examination of children will detect symptoms of sex abnormality. When detected, the fact and the meaning should be explained to the individual by school physician, school nurse, or school-teacher. While much can be done through mothers' meetings and through individual instruction of parents, the most effective means of improving the general attitude towards sex health is to give the simple truth to the millions of children who have not yet left school. Armed with the ABC's of sex hygiene at school, boys and girls will be prepared to select employment, associates, and newspapers that will permit normal, healthy sex development. Men and women who are leading normal lives, who have plenty of work, sleep, fresh air, nourishing food, amusement, and exercise are unlikely to be sexually abnormal. After all, the question of instruction in sex hygiene will quickly settle itself when it is made a condition of a teacher's certificate that the applicant shall himself or herself know the personal and social reasons for sex health. The woman who does not know how to take care of her own sex health, the man who is ignorant of a woman's special needs, cannot do justice to the requirements of arithmetic, language, and discipline. Whether men and women teachers are mentally, physically, and morally equipped to be sexually normal and to teach the law of sex health will be disclosed as soon as trustees and superintendent dare to ask the necessary questions. Whether an instructor's personality will enable him to fill the minds of children with interests more wholesome, more absorbing than obscene stories or morbid sex curiosity can also be learned. When school-teachers are prepared to teach the social and economic aspects of general health they will quickly solve the problem of instruction in sex health. Just one word about country morality. It is customary to deplore the influence of large cities on the young. Of late, however, there has been a tendency to question whether, after all, sex morality is apt to be higher in the country than in the city. Parents and teachers in small towns and in rural districts will do well to take an inventory of the influences surrounding their children. It will always be impossible to give country children city diversions. One great disadvantage of country children frequently counteracts the beneficial influence of out-of-door living; namely, isolation. The city child is practically always in or about to be in the sight of, if not in the presence of, other people. Numbers and close contact with people, though they be strangers, mean restraint and pervading social conscience. City children find it difficult to have good times in pairs. No amount of instruction of rural pupils in sex hygiene will take the place of amusements and entertainments for groups of children, forming thus a special antidote for "two's company, three's a crowd." Liberating and standardizing normal intersex relations and discouraging cramped social intersex relations are more urgent needs than instruction in sex diseases. A working environment that permits pure-mindedness will do more to inculcate a reverence for sex cleanliness and for parenthood than lectures and essays on moral prophylaxis. CHAPTER XL THE ELEMENT OF TRUTH IN QUACKERY; HYGIENE OF THE MIND Patent medicines and other forms of quackery could not pay such enormous dividends unless there was some truth in their claims; unless their victim found some beneficial return for his money. They win confidence because they raise hopes and combat fear. They do cure thousands of people of fear and of "ingrowing thoughts." In so doing they remove the sole cause of much disability.1 In so doing they are merely applying by wholesale principles of mental hygiene that are legitimately used by physicians, tradesmen, teachers, and parents who deal successfully with nervousness. Quackery makes cures and makes money because of the undoubted influence of mind in causing and in removing those ailments that originate in fear, imagination, or morbid introspection. A few years ago a little out-of-the-way town in southern Minnesota was visited by train loads of the sick and crippled from miles around. Miraculous cures were heralded broadcast. Life-long cripples left wagon loads of crutches and braces to decorate the little church with the enchanted transom. People who had not walked for years returned to their homes cured. The marvels of famous shrines were fast being duplicated when the church authorities at St. Paul issued an explanation of the alleged miraculous appearance of biblical figures in the transom of the new church. The outlines of a mother carrying a baby had 1 The alliance of mental hygiene, medicine, and religion is discussed in the Emmanuel Church book, Religion and Medicine; the Moral Control of Nervous Disorders; also in its bulletins, Religion and Medicine. been vaguely impressed in the transom glass when molten. When the mystery was explained the excursions and the cures stopped. ୧୯ Nearly every physician and practically every medical charlatan can count scores of cures of ailments that had previously defied the skill of eminent physicians. A child's bumps actually stop aching after the mother or nurse kisses the abused spot. Invalids forget their limitations under stress of some great excitement or some intense desire for pleasures incompatible with invalidism. Many a physician of reputation owes his success in great part to the discriminating use of the placebo, a bread pill designed to supplant the patient's fear with confidence. Hypnotism and suggestion" have been successfully used to cure alcoholism and to fill patients' minds with conviction stronger than the fear that produced the sickness. A well-known writer and preacher cures insomnia by auto-suggestion, telling himself he is sleepy, is very sleepy, is going to sleep, is almost asleep, is fast asleep. Treatment by osteopathy has been followed by disappearance of diseases that cannot possibly be cured by osteopathy. Christian Science has restored to health and happy usefulness hundreds of thousands of chronic invalids. Verily is hygiene of the mind an important factor in the civics of health. Fear can originate with mind. Fear produces fear. Fear disarranges circulation of the blood and the nourishment of muscle and nerve. Fear can produce many bodily disorders which in turn feed fear. Fear cannot last unless bodily symptoms exist or arise to justify and feed it. Fear can be cured and removed in two ways: (1) by driving away fear and releasing bodily disorders from its thraldom; (2) by removing the disorders and making fear impossible to the logical mind. An enforced sea voyage begins with the disorder; a clever, buoyant physician begins with the fear. Patent-medicine proprietors, quacks, and fakes of every kind begin by displacing the fear with hope or cheer; the physical disorders frequently vanish by the same window as fear. For fear write self-pity, morbid self-consciousness, hypertrophied submission; to hope and cheer add smile, relaxation, and zest; and we have the chief elements of mental hygiene and the reason why intelligent as well as unintelligent men like to be swindled by medical or other quacks. The social aspects of mental hygiene are particularly important. Once, admitting the power of the mind to decrease vitality, we recognize the duty of seeming happy, buoyant, cheerful, vital, at least when with others, for the sake of others' minds and bodies. Secondly, we find the duty to refrain from commenting on others' appearance in a way that will start "ingrowing thoughts." A "grouchy" foreman can give blues and indigestion to a roomful of factory girls. A self-pitying teacher can check the heart beats of her class, cause arteries and lungs to contract, and deprive the brain of fresh blood. An oversympathetic neighbor can put a strong man to bed by discovering signs of nervous disintegration. Shall we gradually work out a code of mental hygiene rights and nuisances that will require compulsory notification of the "blues" and compulsory segregation of every person unable to "smile dull care away"? Is the time coming when boards of health will accompany infection leaflets with messages such as this from James Whitcomb Riley : Talk health. The dreary, never-changing tale Of mortal maladies is worn and stale. You cannot charm or interest or please By harping on that minor chord, disease. ee ९९ Whatever the weather may be," says he, Whatever the weather may be, It's the songs ye sing, and the smiles ye wear, |