What will decide whether a human being can resist, successfully, bad tendencies in heredity, or in environment, or in both, and keep a reasonably balanced mind? It demands insight,...
We took a glimpse at random into the mental life of an adult consciousness, and found it very complicated, constantly changing. We found it packed with shifting material, which, on...
When we consider the accumulated possibilities for disorder which the family tree of almost any one of us can show, the wonder is not that there are so many nervous or insane, but...
How to Study.--You learn sooner or later from experience that the quickest and best way to learn anything new is to give it your undivided attention at the moment; to perceive one...
In the use of its functions the mind manifests certain powers and certain modes of expression which can act as powerful allies or as damaging enemies of health. We speak of man as...
The student of life and of the sciences which deal with the origin and development of the human race, and with the relations of man to man and nation to nation--such sciences as bi...
Mind, we found, is born in the form of consciousness when the outside world impresses itself upon the brain-cells by way of the senses. This consciousness, observation and experime...
If the patient's mind is temporarily clouded through infection or suffering, he may be reacting to a delusion, an obsession, a fixed idea of disability, a terrifying fear. Sometime...
While environment may prove the saving grace from poor heredity, it may itself add heavily to the debit side. With the very best of health backgrounds, environment may damage body...
Associated with the central nervous system by connecting nerves--but located outside of it in various parts of the body--are groups of nerve-cells (gray matter) and their fibers, f...
Some emotions, that seem exaggerated at first thought, may be normal under the circumstances. For no one can know the whole background for emotional response in the life of another...
The conclusion or decision that reason has reached we call a judgment. The youth who decides against the sweet between meals, we say, has good judgment. And we base our commendatio...
Accuracy in work, a primary essential to the nurse, can become automatic if she will demand of herself accuracy of perception, and concentrate on learning and doing until details a...
A patient who is suffering from obsessions must carry out certain abnormal actions, or be wretched. She cannot do otherwise. It is as though she were forced by some outside agent,...
Wise men study the sciences which deal with the origins and development of animal life, with the structure of the cells, with the effect of various diseases upon the tissues and fl...
For convenience the various lobes of the cerebrum are known as frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital, according to the parts of the brain referred to: as forehead, temples, cr...
There is no better opportunity for will-training than the hospital affords the nurse. The constant necessity of acting against desire, of doing tasks which in themselves cannot be...
Sometimes a nurse reminds a patient of some one in the past who has complicated her life in an unhappy way, so she distrusts or dreads her or is made constantly uncomfortable in he...
If we control attention we control thought, and with the suggestible patient this principle depends upon the one just now considered. Hope and courage-breeding thoughts can replace...
We have found that mind is entirely dependent upon the bodily organs for its existence. Is the body in the same way dependent upon the mind? Can the mind die and the body go on? Gi...
The nurse soon realizes the uselessness of attempting to argue a patient out of his delusions, of trying to convince him that the things he sees and hears and perhaps tastes and fe...
We have found that the mind's chief end is action, of itself, or of its body. But what are its incentives to action? We see the very young baby giving evidences of an emotional lif...
The one fact we want at this stage of our inquiry is simply this: that consciousness, awaking at birth, very soon becomes complex. However single and simple in content immediate co...
Later still, when the child is older, we may have somewhat the following mechanism: "Sweets, good, want, taste; spank, hurt; don't care, spank not hurt much, maybe never found put,...
In the normal mind the emotional or feeling accompaniment of thought and action is proportionate and adequate to the circumstances, i. e., there is a certain feeling, of a certain...
We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at...
Sleep seldom, if ever, is a condition of utter unconsciousness. We so frequently have at least a vague recollection, when we wake, of dreaming--whether or not we remember the dream...
Adaptability is as essential to life of mind as to life of body; and health of mind as well as health of body is determined by the individual ability to adjust himself to environme...
It is not uncommon to hear a doctor say, "Nothing but his will pulled him through that time." It does not mean quite what it says, for the patient's will would have been helpless t...
The beginning of learning is perception. Keen, accurate perception at the time of first introduction of a new fact or thought, and the linking up of that new material with somethin...