Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1875 — Music as Medicine. [ARTICLE]

Music as Medicine.

The horse knows what he owes to his bells. The factory girls have been instinctively forced into singing, finding in it a solace and assistance in work. And music, the health-giver—what an untrodden field is there! Have we never noticed an invalid forget pain and weariness under the stimulus of music? Have you never seen a pale cheek flush up v a dull . eye sparkle, an alertness and vigor take possession of the whole frame, and, animation succeed to apathy? What does all this mean ? It means a truth that we have not fully grasped, a truth pregnant with vast results to body and mind. It means that music attacks the nervous system directly, reaches and rouses where physic ana a change of air can neither reach nor rouse. Music will some day become a powerful and acknowledged therapeutic; and it is one especially appropriate to this excited age. Half our diseases—some physicians say ajl our diseases—come from disorder of the nerves. How many ills of the mind precede the ills of the body ? Boredom makes more patients than fever; want of interest and excitement, stagnation of the emotional life, or the fatiguqof overwroughtemotion lies at the root of half the ill-health of our young men and women. Can we doubt the power of music to break up that stagnation ? Or, again, can we doubt its power to soothe, to recreate an overstrained emotional life by bending the bow the other way? There are moods of exhausted feeling in which certain kindsof music would act like poison, just as whip and spur, which encourage the racer at first, tire him to death at last. There, are other kindsof .music which soothe and, if I* may use the word, lubricate the worn-out ways of the nervous centers. You will ask what music is good for that? We reply, judgment and common sense, and above all sympathy, affectionate and musical sympathy, will partly be your guide, but experience must decide. Let some person well versed in the divine art sit at the piano and let the tired one file on a couch and prescribe forheraelfor for himself. This will happen Dp not play that Tannhauser overture just now; ft wears me out, I cannot bear it;” or, “ Yes —sing that ‘Du bi»t die Ruh,' and after that I must hear Mendelssohn’s ‘ Notturno,’ out of the ‘ Midsummer Night’s Dream;” and then—and then—what.| must come next must be left to the tact and quick sympathy of the musician. I have known cases where an hour of this treatment did more good than bottlefuls of bark or pailfuls of globules ;but I do not wish to overstate the case. I merely plead for an unrecognized truth and I point to a new vocation—the vocation of the musical healer. How many a girl might turn her at present uncared-for and generally-use-less musical abilitiA to this gentle and tender human use.—Good Word*.