The Necessity for Holidays.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 2003, 9 May 1885, Page 2 (Supplement)

The Necessity for Holidays.

Tirvr a holiday is a necessity, and not merely a luxury, is a fact which it especially behoves members of our hard-working profession to remember in the regulation of their own lives as well as in their dealings with their patients. For tho brain-worker periodical remission of accustomed toil has always been a neceesary condition of continued vigor. For him tho heightened tension of modern life haa especially accentuated the need for occasional periods devoted to tho recreation and reaccumulation ©f energy. The cogent physiological principles and practical purposes of systematic holidays are generally admitted. All workers, if they arc to last, must have holidays. For some persons and for some occupations frequent short holidays are the beat ; with other natures and other circumstances only comparatively long periods of release from routine are of service. Few real workers, if any, can safely continue to deny themselves at least a yearly holiday. Mere rest, that i 3, mere cessation from work, while it is better than unbroken toil, does not recreate the fairly vigorous so thoroughly as does a complete change of activity from accustomed channels. For the strong worker, either with brain or muscle, diversion or activity recreates better than rest alone. The whole body feeds as it works, and grows as it feeds. Rest may oheok expenditato of force, but it is chiefly by expending energy that the stoics of energy can be replenished. We mostly need holidays because our ordinary daily life tends to sink into a narrow groovo of routine exertion, working and wearing some part of our organism disproportionately, so that its powers of work and its faculty of recuperation are alike worn down. In a wellarranged holiday we do not cease from activity, we only change its channels. With such change wo give a new and saving stimulus to assimilation and the transmutation of its products into force. As a rule, the hardest workers live longest, but only those live long who sufficiently break their wonted toil by the recreating variety of welltimed and well-spent holidays.