I think we are as often wrong as right. A
good brisk daily walk is for well folks a tonic, breaks down old
tissues, and creates a wholesome demand for food. The same is true for
some sick people. The habit of horse-exercise or a long walk every day
is needed to cure or to aid in the cure of disordered stomach and
costive bowels, but if all exertion gives rise only to increase of
trouble, to extreme sense of fatigue, to nausea, to headache, what shall
we do? And suppose that tonics do not help to make exertion easy, and
that the great tonic of change of air fails us, shall we still persist?
And here lies the trouble: there are women who mimic fatigue, who
indulge themselves in rest on the least pretence, who have no symptoms
so truly honest that we need care to regard them. These are they who
spoil their own nervous systems as they spoil their children, when they
have them, by yielding to the least desire and teaching them to dwell on
little pains. For such people there is no help but to insist on
self-control and on daily use of the limbs. They must be told to exert
themselves, and made to do so if that can be.
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