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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    often his life, in his thoughtless departure from natural simplicities and instinct. The Young Readers, whom I imagine myself now addressing, are old enough to read my advice, and to understand it, and consequently able to make, and to persevere in, their own determined resolutions, which will be sure to conquer in the end the habit alluded to, if it has already been allowed to grow upon them. I advise you to turn back and read again, unless you can distinctly recollect it, the perfect success that I met with in my own case, even at a far more ad- vanced age, and consequently the habit more difficult to correct; and resolve at every moment of your waking hours (except when it is necessary to open them) to keep your lips and teeth firmly pressed together; and your teeth, at all events, under any and every emotion, of pain or of pleasure, of fear, of surprise, or admira- tion ; and from a continual habit of this sort, which will prepare you to meet more calmly and coolly the usual excitements of life, you will find it extending through your sleeping hours, if you will close your lips and your eyes in the fixed determination, and effectually correcting or preventing the disgusting and dangerous habit of sleeping with the mouth open. Not only manly beauty is produced, and manly firmness of character expressed, by a habitual compres- sion of the lips and teeth; but courage, steadiness of