The same effect was uniformly produced on me by evenings passed in
theatres, or crowded concert or lecture rooms. These facts are now
well understood by those who have studied the causes of health and
disease in modern society; and I am assured by medical men that no
source of consumption is so great as that occasioned by the breathing
of these lethal atmospheres of fashionable parties, fashionable
theatres, and concert and lecture halls; and then returning home at
midnight by an abrupt plunge from their heat into damp and cold.
People have said to me, "Oh! it is merely the effect of the unusual
late hour that you have felt!" But, though nite hours, either in
writing or society, have not been my habit, when circumstances of
literary pressure have compelled me occasionally to work late, I have
never felt any such effects. I could rise the next day a little later,
perfectly refreshed and full of spirit for my work.
Another cause to which I attribute my extraordinary degree of health,
has been not merely continued country exercise in walking and
gardening, but, now and then, making a clean breach and change of my
location and mode of life. Travel is one of the great invigorators of
the system, both physically and intellectually. When I have found a
morbid condition stealing over me, I have at once started off on a
pedestrian or other journey. The change of place, scene, atmosphere,
of all the objects occupying the daily attention, has at once put to
flight the enemy.
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