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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    and overheated rooms, the relaxing effects of which have been mentioned, with their pitiable and fatal conse- quences. There are many, of course, in all ranks and grades of society, who escape from contracting this early and dangerous habit, and others who commence it in child- hood, or in manhood, a very few of whom live and suffer under it to old age, with constitutions sufficiently strong to support Nature in her desperate and con- tinuous struggle against abuse. When we observe amongst very aged persons that they almost uniformly close the mouth firmly, we are regarding the results of a long-practised and healthy habit, and the surviving few who have thereby escaped the fatal consequences of the evil practice I am con- demning. Though the majority of civilized people are more or less addicted to the habit I am speaking of, compara- tively few will admit that they are subject to it. They go to sleep and awake, with their mouths shut, not knowing that the insidious enemy, like the deadly Vampire that imperceptibly sucks the blood, gently steals upon them in their sleep and does its work of death whilst they are unconscious of the evil. Tew people can be convinced that they snore in their sleep, for the snoring is stopped when they awake ; and so with breathing through the mouth, which is