The Project Gutenberg EBook of Health Lessons, by Alvin Davison

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Title: Health Lessons
Book 1

Author: Alvin Davison

Release Date: March 13, 2010 [EBook #31616]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: Book Cover]

HEALTH LESSONS
BOOK I

BY
ALVIN DAVISON, M.S., A.M., PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY IN LAFAYETTE COLLEGE

[Illustration: Publisher Symbol]

NEW YORK . CINCINNATI . CHICAGO
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
ALVIN DAVISON.

ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL, LONDON.

HEALTH LESSONS. BK. 1.
W. P. 6

[Illustration: Exercise, clean air, and well-chewed food make a strong
and healthy body.]

PREFACE

Scarcely one half of the children of our country continue in school
much beyond the fifth grade. It is important, therefore, that so far
as possible the knowledge which has most to do with human welfare
should be presented in the early years of school life.

Fisher, Metchnikoff, Sedgwick, and others have shown that the health
of a people influences the prosperity and happiness of a nation more
than any other one thing. The highest patriotism is therefore the
conservation of health. The seven hundred thousand lives annually
destroyed by infectious diseases and the million other serious cases
of sickness from contagious maladies, with all their attendant
suffering, are largely sacrifices on the altar of ignorance. The
loving mother menaces the life of her babe by feeding it milk with a
germ content nearly half as great as that of sewage, the anemic girl
sleeps with fast-closed windows, wondering in the morning why she
feels so lifeless, and the one-time vigorous boy goes to a
consumptive's early grave, because they did not know (what every
school ought to teach) the way to health.

Doctor Price, the Secretary of the State Board of Health of Maryland,
recently said before the American Public Health Association that the
text-books of our schools show a marked disregard for