Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin.

  • George Catlin
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    youth and manhood arc full of them ? The answer is, as has been given in former pages, that one-half of the human species who are allowed carelessly to contract the habit of sleeping with the mouth open, die in infancy and childhood, and the other half, their lungs unable longer to withstand the abuse, disappear from the stage of life before they pass from manhood into old age. These are melancholy (but existing) facts, in all civilized communities, and rendered more striking by the contrast we meet in all savage societies. During my travels amongst the numerous tribes of Indians of North and South America, I never (to my knowledge) met or even could hear of, a stuttering Indian. Their lips and teeth are habitually, firmly closed; their articulation prompt, and their words clearly spoken. Stuttering, unseemly and unfortunate as it is, is not one of the fatal results of the habit I am com- bating, though I have said that it is seldom, if ever, known to exist in old age—disappearing in manhood, with the life of its patient. It is the cause producing the stuttering, and not the stuttering, that causes pre- mature death. The diseases of a fatal character, resulting from the habit of sleeping with the mouth open, are of greater importance ; and though they have already been
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