Sleeping With Your Feet Toward the Equator

1884

Dr. J. S. Wright, professor of operative and clinical surgery in the Long Island college hospital, does not think that health is promoted by sleeping with the feet to the equator. He says the subject has never been treated in medical lectures, and he never heard it discussed in any scientific body. He never knew of any hospital where attention was paid to the theory in the arrangement of the beds.

Dr. McCorkle, professor of matoria medica and therapeutics, also of the Long Island college hospital, says he believes the theory of placing the bed north and south is more believed in by the laity than by the medical profession; that he has never tried it himself nor seen it tried by anybody.

Dr. Merzbach, of the same hospital, does not believe in the theory. A venerable physician of New York says: "My opinion is that it is a piece of nonsense worthy of some superstitious old lady. I would rank it with fortune-telling and table-tipping. Some people believe in them. Some people derive benefit from having charms about their persons, and there is no particular harm in their wearing charms if they see fit. I have heard of a man who carried a horse chestnut in his pocket as a preventive of hemorrhoids. He declared that whenever he lost his horse chestnut the disease returned. Yet I never heard of any physician prescribing that mode of cure for hemorrhoids.

"There is no end to the cures that may be worked by imagination. Bulwer hits off this thought capitally when he makes Pisistratus Caxton say: 'A saffron bag worn at the pit of the stomach is a great cure. Oh, foolish boy, it is not the saffron bag, but the belief in the saffron bag. Apply belief to the center of the nerves and all will be well.' So I say that this bed theory is a sort of saffron bag. While I am of the opinion that it is nonsense, and old women's cackle and empiric drivel, I have no doubt people may honestly believe in it and bear testimony to its worth. It is easily tried; it does not cost any money. It will do about as much good as a dose of sweetened water, such as a doctor often gives to people who think they must have something when they don't need anything."

The above opinions will no doubt prove of interest to those people whose rooms are so arranged that they cannot sleep with their heads to the north.

—The Atchison Globe, Atchison, Kansas, Aug. 3, 1884.