Effect of the Seasons on the Nervous System
The effect of the change in seasons is much more marked in children than in grown people. In the Spring in particular the watchful mother should keep a careful eye on the health of her little ones. “There come with the Spring in many children,” writes a noted physician, “a restlessness and excitability, a perversity and irascibility of temper, or a listlessness, and indisposition for exertion that are not displayed at other times; and there come then, also, more plentifully than at other seasons, physical indications of debility and the scrofulous habit, such as enlarged glands and tonsils, dyspepsia and loss of appetite, strumous ophthalmia, discharges from the ear, and enlargements of joints.”
The moral is that since the body is growing fastest (and therefore has the greatest need of husbanding its vitality) in the Spring time, any extra pressure on the nervous system as from prolonged school hours, or any undue exertion, should be strenuously avoided. Unfortunately with the “final” examinations in the early summer, our school systems demand that the hardest and most strenuous work of preparation falls in the Spring time, the season at which the body is least fitted to withstand abnormal stress.
When a child or growing boy or girl becomes more nervous in the Spring time than is his usual habit, or becomes depressed in mind, or constantly complains of being tired, the only common-sense treatment is to put an end at once to all schooling for the time being, and to turn the child out-of-doors every day for all the hours of sunlight.