Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 January 1913 — BEST TO EMPLOY LEFT HAND [ARTICLE]

BEST TO EMPLOY LEFT HAND

Persona to Whom This Is Natural Should Not Be Forced to Use the Right. Of every million persons born at least 30,000, probably more, are naturally left-handed, so that in the United States there are nearly 3,000,000, and in the world more than 45,000,000 thus handicapped. Dr. G. M. Gould, writing in the Medical Record, says that an indefinite number of these have been “doubly cursed by the efforts of the foolish parent or teacher to make them right-handed,” Dr. Gould says these efforts are due to the association of the word, “right,” which should only mean dextral or righthanded, with good, moral, advisable; while “left,” or sinistral, has come to mean sinister, awkward, unlucky, to be avoided, both person and thing. “Dexterity” and “dextrousness” properly meaning only “dextrality,” have become synonymous with expertness and exceptional proficiency, whereas everybody knows that the lefthanded person, if purely so, is as cunning of hand as the right-handed. In the brain the center for writing is in normal persons situated op the left side of the head. In left-handed persons it is situated on the right. The effort to teach a left-handed child to write with its right hand is the cause, Dr. Gould believes, of many cases of stuttering, stupidity and backwardness, the effort having crippled the nature-given center and imperfectly developed the artificial center. The right side of the body is normally the dominant. An engineer stands on the right side of his cab because he can look ahead with his right or dominant eye and without sticking his whole head out.