Rensselaer Union, Volume 1, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 July 1869 — Sleep for Brain-Workers. [ARTICLE]

Sleep for Brain-Workers.

In & late number of the College Courint is an article on Bleep by Dr. G. W. Beard, from which we make the following extract: “ Students who are really faithful laborious brain-workers need all the sleepthey can get, whether at night or in the day time. The night is the most appropriate season for sleep, and yet we should never hesitate to take a nap in the daytime whenever we find It neoessary. Amid the cares and responsibilities of our modern civilization, there are unnumbered interruptions and contingencies that make it practically impossible for us to obtain our fell amount of sleep in the hours that are usually devoted to that purpose. Now there is no law so imperative on man as the law that requires us to sleep. If wfe deny ourselves of it; if we get behind and, to use the expression of the street, fall into debt to nature in this respect, we most improve the first opportunity to make ourselves good, else we shall ultimately fail. A brainworker who religiously enjoys a liberal amount of sleep may preserve his health and elaatieity, even though he violates every other law of hygiene. On the contrary, he who faithfully observes all the rules of diet, of exercise, and of labor, yet denies himself of sleep, Is really guilty of all, and can by no means escape unpunished. There is no appeal from this law. There is no virtue that can redeem its vio latlon. It admits of no atonement. To sleep ie the one great hygienic commandment,* It is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and last of the great la wa of mental hygiene. He who understands and obeys this law really understands and obeys the whole hygienic decalogue, for no one can long sleep well who persistently disregards the other laws of health. Sleep is one of the best of our thermometers of health. By the quantity and quality of sleep that our patients can take, we can best judge of their daily condition and of their progress toward recovery. We always feel assured tost whatever Improves the sleep of the exhausted invalid to that degree helps him toward recovery, and that whatever disturbs the sleep, So that degree, brings on relapse and disease. Sleeplessness to one of the earliest and most constant symptoms of in sanity, of.ky&rochoadri* ana of ,all the nameless forms of nervous derangement.

our dreams are peculiarly dart, and ugly, and distressing, and leave unsightly scars in the memory, when we roll, and toss, and worry through the watoh of the night, anxiously waiting for the day, when we awake long before our accustomed hour of rising, and find no pleasure in the morning nap, then may we suspect that onr bark to nearing the quicksands and shallows, and then, without delay, should we examine onr charts, revise our calculations, and, according to our best judgment, return to the channel from which we have suffered ourselves to be driven.