My system : 15 minutes' work a day for health's sake / by J.P. Müller ; specially revised by the author and translated by G.M. Fox-Davies and H.R. Murray.

  • Jørgen Peter Müller
Date:
[between 1920 and 1929?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: My system : 15 minutes' work a day for health's sake / by J.P. Müller ; specially revised by the author and translated by G.M. Fox-Davies and H.R. Murray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    thought out and put together by myself. I tried every way before eventually placing the bath in the middle of the exercises :—the only practical order which renders it possible for ordinary people to take both water and airbath and perform the exercises with open windows, in the winter, without getting cold. Formerly I used to spring straight out of bed and take my bath first, but by so doing one easily becomes chilled before one has finished drying oneself, “bed-warmth ” not lasting so long as the real warmth which comes of a series of exercises. There is another objection to taking the bath first, viz.: that you get into a perspiration and feel the want of another bath if you go through the ex&rcises dressed ; and if one drills without clothes, some of the exercises cannot be performed without one either growing cold or (in the case of those done lying down) becoming dusty again. And if you wait to take your bath last, you undo the effect of the health-giving skin gymnastics, it being too cold to take a waterbath after an airbath. Even people of the so-called educated classes may be heard to exclaim : “ What need to take a bath every day ? One cannot possibly get one’s body so dirty, if one change one’s linen frequently, and do no dirty work ! ” In the first place, I would reply: The loose dirt which comes from without is perhaps blacker, but is not so dangerous as the dirt, consisting of waste matter and poisonous substances, which is given off through the skin in much larger quantities than most people think, and which can be partially absorbed again to poison the body, if it be not removed every day. As a proof of the facility with which substances from without can penetrate through the skin to the internal organs, let me mention that if a solution of salicylic acid be rubbed into the skin, salicylic acid can be detected in the urine a few hours later. And it is not only very injurious to oneself, but very objectionable to those others whose sense of smell has not been blunted by an unhealthy mode of life, to allow perspiration and grease from the skin to stay and putrefy, and be partially reabsorbed by the body. As a rule people are shy of saying such things to one another, but I do not intend to beat about the bush. It is well that people who do not take baths should be told that, even if there be no outwardly visible signs, the fact is patent to one’s sense of smell. When such a person has been in our office or my room for one minute—and the windows are always open—I am obliged to have the door open as well, for a time, that the draught may blow the pestilential vapours away. I am not by any means talking of the products of respiration, or intestinal gases, but purely and simply of ill-smelling emanations from the skin. And this does not refer only to people of the “ working ” classes. I have often met “ gentlemen ” in frock-coats and top-hats and ladies in evening dress of whom you could tell by the smell of them, even at a distance of several feet, that they seldom or never took a bath. It is a special smell, just as people who are addicted to alcohol, for instance, have their peculiar smell. Supposing the person in question to have bad breath and perhaps be short-sighted as well, so that conversation is regarded as
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