Memory and intellectual improvement applied to self-education and juvenile instruction / by O.S. Fowler.

  • Fowler, O. S. (Orson Squire), 1809-1887.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memory and intellectual improvement applied to self-education and juvenile instruction / by O.S. Fowler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    improvement alone can enhance mental power. Nor can educational facilities strengthen the memory except in and by enhancing cerebral vigor. 408. STRENGTHENING INTELLECT BY PRESERVING HEALTH. Since memory and intellect can be improved only by aug- menting the energy of the intellectual lobe 7 407, and since the cerebral conditions are reciprocal with the physiological16, therefore the first means of strengthening both is to promote physical energy by invigorating the health ; directions for effecting which are given in-volume one. Hundreds might be specified whose memories have been impaired by sickness or a decline of health, but restored on its welcome return. A Frenchman, from Mexico, unable to recollect the name of a former schoolmate, who was physician to the king of France, said that ever since he came near being suffocated from sleep- ing in a close room filled with carbonic acid gas evolved by charcoal burnt in it, his memory had been poor, though excel- lent before. Nervous diseases always impair the memory, because they enfeeble the brain. Many readers are living witnesses of a concomitant decline of both health and memory. If asked for the first and best known means of strengthening both intellect and memory, it would be, Invigorate the brain by improving the health. But the reader is referred to volume one, on Physiology, both for the proof of this vitally important doc- trine, and for directions by which health may be improved, and cerebral and mental energy thereby augmented, to the illustration of which that entire volume is devoted. 409 STRENGTHENING INTELLECT AND MEMORY BY THEIR EXERCISE. The only other means of increasing the power and activity of the intellectual organs, and of course of disciplining the mind, improving the memory, and augmenting the intellect and capabilities, is by their exercise. Brain cannot be bought. No royal road to these greatest of ends exists but exercise— a road open to all. Excepting those hereditary influences