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To Your Good Health
By Paul G. Donohue, M.D.
First Aid for
Seizure
DEAR DR. DONOHUE:
When my son was in high school, he was diagnosed
with epilepsy. His first and second seizures
occurred at school. No one there had any training
on how to handle a seizure. I am writing to ask
you to explain to people what a seizure is and
how to help a person having one. There is so much
misinformation about this. Thank you. -- L.L.
ANSWER: There are
many seizure varieties, but I’ll confine my
remarks to a grand mal seizure, the kind with the
most dramatic manifestations. All seizures are
sudden, excessive electrical discharges from
brain cells. A grand mal seizure affects most of
the brain, and that’s why its signs are so
striking. The person stiffens and might make a
loud moaning noise. He or she then falls to the
ground and makes a series of jerking movements of
the arms and legs as muscles contract and relax
rapidly. The jerking usually lasts half a minute
to a minute.
Bystanders who
have never witnessed a seizure are unnerved by
it. Invariably, one will try to pry open the
seizing person’s mouth so the person
doesn’t swallow the tongue. That’s the
wrong thing to do. During a seizure, people never
swallow their tongues. Onlookers should not try
to restrain the arms or legs. They should place
the seizing person on his or her side to keep the
airway open, and they can loosen the collar or
tie.
Once the muscle
contractions have stopped, the person is
unconscious for a while and gradually awakens,
confused. The best course is to offer the person
transportation to a place where treatment can be
given if needed, or to call 911 for help.
OLD GORGON
GRAHAM
More Letters from
a Self-Made
Merchant |
to His Son
by George Horace
Lorimer
First Published
1903
From John Graham,
head of the house of Graham & Company, pork
packers, in Chicago, familiarly known on
‘Change as Old Gorgon Graham, to his son,
Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards.
No. 11
From John Graham,
at Mount Clematis, Michigan, to his son,
Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago.
The young man has sent the old man a dose of his
own medicine, advice, and he is proving himself a
good doctor by taking it.
XI
MOUNT CLEMATIS,
January 25, 1900.
Dear Pierrepont:
They’ve boiled everything out of me except
the original sin, and even that’s a little
bleached, and they’ve taken away my roll of
yellow-backs, so I reckon they’re about
through with me here, for the present. But
instead of returning to the office, I think
I’ll take your advice and run down to
Florida for a few weeks and have a "try at
the tarpon," as you put it. I don’t
really need a tarpon, or want a tarpon, and I
don’t know what I could do with a tarpon if
I hooked one, except to yell at him to go away;
but I need a burned neck and a peeled nose, a
little more zest for my food, and a little more
zip about my work, if the interests of the
American hog are going to be safe in my hands
this spring. I don’t seem to have so much
luck as some fellows in hooking these fifty-pound
fish lies, but I always manage to land a pretty
heavy appetite and some big nights’ sleep
when I strike salt water. Then I can go back to
the office and produce results like a hen in
April with eggs at eleven cents a dozen.
Health is like any
inheritance--you can spend the interest in work
and play, but you mustn’t break into the
principal. Once you do, and it’s only a
matter of time before you’ve got to place
the remnants in the hands of a doctor as
receiver; and receivers are mighty partial to
fees and mighty slow to let go. But if you
don’t work with him to get the business back
on a sound basis there’s no such thing as
any further voluntary proceedings, and the
remnants become remains.
It’s a mighty
simple thing, though, to keep in good condition,
because about everything that makes for poor
health has to get into you right under your nose.
Yet a fellow’ll load up with pie and
buckwheats for breakfast and go around wondering
about his stomach-ache, as if it were a put-up
job that had been played on him when he
wasn’t looking; or he’ll go through his
dinner pickling each course in a different brand
of alcohol, and sob out on the butler’s
shoulder that the booze isn’t as pure as it
used to be when he was a boy; or he’ll come
home at midnight singing "The Old Oaken
Bucket," and act generally as if all the
water in the world were in the well on the old
homestead, and the mortgage on that had been
foreclosed; or from 8 P.M. to 3 G.X. he’ll
sit in a small game with a large cigar, breathing
a blend of light-blue cigarette smoke and
dark-blue cuss-words, and next day, when his
heart beats four and skips two, and he has that
queer, hopping sensation in the knees, he’ll
complain bitterly to the other clerks that this
confining office work is killing him.
Of course, with
all the care in the world, a fellow’s likely
to catch things, but there’s no sense in
sending out invitations to a lot of miscellaneous
microbes and pretending when they call that
it’s a surprise party. Bad health hates a
man who is friendly with its enemies--hard work,
plain food, and pure air. More men die from worry
than from overwork; more stuff themselves to
death than die of starvation; more break their
necks falling down the cellar stairs than
climbing mountains. If the human animal reposed
less confidence in his stomach and more in his
legs, the streets would be full of healthy men
walking down to business. Remember that a man
always rides to his grave; he never walks there.
When I was a boy,
the only doubt about the food was whether there
would be enough of it; and there wasn’t any
doubt at all about the religion. If the pork
barrel was full, father read a couple of extra
Psalms at morning prayers, to express our
thankfulness; and if it was empty, he dipped into
Job for half an hour at evening prayers, to prove
that we were better off than some folks. But you
don’t know what to eat these days, with one
set of people saying that only beasts eat meat,
and another that only cattle eat grain and green
stuff; or what to believe, with one crowd
claiming that there’s nothing the matter
with us, as the only matter that we’ve got
is in our minds; and another crowd telling us not
to mind what the others say, because they’ve
got something the matter with their minds. I
reckon that what this generation really needs is
a little less pie and a little more piety.
I dwell on this
matter of health, because when the stomach and
liver ain’t doing good work, the brain
can’t. A good many men will say that
it’s none of your business what they do in
their own time, but you want to make it your
business, so long as it affects what they do in
your time. For this reason, you should never hire
men who drink after office hours; for it’s
their time that gets the effects, and your time
that gets the after-effects. Even if a boss
grants that there’s fun in drinking, it
shouldn’t take him long to discover that
he’s getting the short end of it, when all
the clerks can share with him in the morning is
the head and the hangover.
I might add that I
don’t like the effects of drinking any more
than the after-effects; and for this reason you
should never hire men who drink during business
hours. When a fellow adds up on whisky, he’s
apt to see too many figures; and when he
subtracts on beer, he’s apt to see too few.
It may have been
the case once that when you opened up a bottle
for a customer he opened up his heart, but booze
is a mighty poor salesman nowadays. It takes more
than a corkscrew to draw out a merchant’s
order. Most of the men who mixed their business
and their drinks have failed, and the new owners
take their business straight. Of course, some one
has to pay for the drinks that a drummer sets up.
The drummer can’t afford it on his salary;
the house isn’t really in the hospitality
business; so, in the end, the buyer always stands
treat. He may not see it in his bill for goods,
but it’s there, and the smart ones have
caught on to it.
After office
hours, the number of drinks a fellow takes may
make a difference in the result to his employer,
but during business hours the effect of one is
usually as bad as half a dozen. A buyer who
drinks hates a whisky breath when he hasn’t
got one himself, and a fellow who doesn’t
drink never bothers to discover whether he’s
being talked to by a simple or a compound breath.
He knows that some men who drink are unreliable,
and that unreliable men are apt to represent
unreliable houses and to sell unreliable goods,
and he hasn’t the time or the inclination to
stop and find out that this particular salesman
has simply had a mild snort as an appetizer and a
gentle soother as a digester. So he doesn’t
get an order, and the house gets a black eye.
This is a very, very busy world, and about the
only person who is really interested in knowing
just how many a fellow has had is his wife, and
she won’t always believe him.
Naturally, when
you expect so much from your men, they have a
right to expect a good deal from you. If you want
them to feel that your interests are theirs, you
must let them see that their interests are yours.
There are a lot of fellows in the world who are
working just for glory, but they are mostly
poets, and you needn’t figure on finding
many of them out at the Stock Yards. Praise goes
a long way with a good man, and some employers
stop there; but cash goes the whole distance, and
if you want to keep your growing men with you,
you mustn’t expect them to do all the
growing. Small salaries make slow workers and
careless clerks; because it isn’t hard to
get an underpaid job. But a well-paid man
sticketh closer than a little
brother-in-law-to-be to the fellow who brings the
candy. For this reason, when I close the books at
the end of the year, I always give every one,
from the errand boys up, a bonus based on the
size of his salary and my profits. There’s
no way I’ve ever tried that makes my men
take an interest in the size of my profits like
giving them a share. And there’s no
advertisement for a house like having its men
going around blowing and bragging because
they’re working for it.
Again, if you
insist that your men shan’t violate the
early-closing ordinance, you must observe one
yourself. A man who works only half a day
Saturday can usually do a day and half’s
work Monday. I’d rather have my men hump
themselves for nine hours than dawdle for ten.
Of course, the
world is full of horses who won’t work
except with the whip, but that’s no reason
for using it on those who will. When I get a
critter that hogs my good oats and then
won’t show them in his gait, I get rid of
him. He may be all right for a fellow who’s
doing a peddling business, but I need a little
more speed and spirit in mine.
A lot of people
think that adversity and bad treatment is the
test of a man, and it is--when you want to
develop his strength; but prosperity and good
treatment is a better one when you want to
develop his weakness. By keeping those who show
their appreciation of it and firing those who
don’t, you get an office full of
crackerjacks.
While your men
must feel all the time that they’ve got a
boss who can see good work around a corner, they
mustn’t be allowed to forget that
there’s no private burying-ground on the
premises for mistakes. When a Western town loses
one of its prominent citizens through some
careless young fellow’s letting his gun go
off sudden, if the sheriff buys a little rope and
sends out invitations to an inquest, it’s
apt to make the boys more reserved about
exchanging repartee; and if you pull up your men
sharp when you find them shooting off their
mouths to customers and getting gay in their
correspondence, it’s sure to cut down the
mortality among our old friends in the trade. A
clerk’s never fresh in letters that the boss
is going to see.
The men who stay
in the office and plan are the brains of your
business; those who go out and sell are its arms;
and those who fill and deliver the orders are its
legs. There’s no use in the brains scheming
and the arms gathering in, if the legs are going
to deliver the goods with a kick.
That’s
another reason why it’s very important for
you to be in the office early. You can’t
personally see every order filled, and tell
whether it was shipped promptly and the right
goods sent, but when the telegrams and letters
are opened, you can have all the kicks sorted
out, and run through them before they’re
distributed for the day. That’s where
you’ll meet the clerk who billed a tierce of
hams to the man who ordered a box; the shipper
who mislaid Bill Smith’s order for lard, and
made Bill lose his Saturday’s trade through
the delay; the department head who felt a little
peevish one morning and so wrote Hardin &
Co., who buy in car-lots, that if they
didn’t like the smoke of the last car of
Bacon Short Clears they could lump it, or words
to that effect; and that’s where you’ll
meet the salesman who played a sure thing on the
New Orleans track and needs twenty to get to the
next town, where his check is waiting. Then, a
little later, when you make the rounds of the
different departments to find out how it
happened, the heads will tell you all the good
news that was in the morning’s mail.
Of course, you can
keep track of your men in a sneaking way that
will make them despise you, and talk to them in a
nagging spirit that will make them bristle when
they see you. But it’s your right to know
and your business to find out, and if you collect
your information in an open, frank manner, going
at it in the spirit of hoping to find everything
all right, instead of wanting to find something
all wrong; and if you talk to the responsible man
with an air of "here’s a place where we
can get together and correct a weakness in our
business"--not my business--instead of with
an "Ah! ha! I’ve-found-you-out"
expression, your men will throw handsprings for
your good opinion. Never nag a man tinder any
circumstances; fire him.
A good boss, in
these days when profits are pared down to the
quick, can’t afford to have any holes, no
matter how small, in his management; but there
must be give enough in his seams so that every
time he stoops down to pick up a penny he
won’t split his pants. He must know how to
be big, as well as how to be small.
Some years ago, I
knew a firm who did business under the name of
Foreman & Sowers. They were a regular
business vaudeville team--one big and
broad-gauged in all his ideas; the other unable
to think in anything but boys’ and
misses’ sizes. Foreman believed that men got
rich in dollars; Sowers in cents. Of course, you
can do it in either way, but the first needs
brains and the second only hands. It’s been
my experience that the best way is to go after
both the dollars and the cents.
Well, sir, these
fellows launched a specialty, a mighty good
thing, the Peep o’ Daisy Breakfast Food, and
started in to advertise. Sowers wanted to use
inch space and sell single cases; Foreman kicked
because full pages weren’t bigger and wanted
to sell in car-lots, leaving the case trade to
the jobbers. Sowers only half-believed in
himself, and only a quarter in the food, and only
an eighth in advertising. So he used to go home
nights and lie awake with a living-picture
exhibit of himself being kicked out of his store
by the sheriff; and out of his house by the
landlord; and, finally, off the corner where he
was standing with his hat out for pennies, by the
policeman. He hadn’t a big enough
imagination even to introduce into this last
picture a sport dropping a dollar bill into his
hat. But Foreman had a pretty good opinion of
himself, and a mighty big opinion of the food,
and he believed that a clever, well-knit ad. was
strong enough to draw teeth. So he would go home
and build steam-yachts and country places in his
sleep.
Naturally, the
next morning, Sowers would come down haggard and
gloomy, and grow gloomier as he went deeper into
the mail and saw how small the orders were. But
Foreman would start out as brisk and busy as a
humming-bird, tap the advertising agent for a new
line of credit on his way down to the office, and
extract honey and hope from every letter.
Sowers begged him,
day by day, to stop the useless fight and save
the remains of their business. But Foreman simply
laughed. Said there wouldn’t be any remains
when he was ready to quit. Allowed that he
believed in cremation, anyway, and that the only
way to fix a brand on the mind of the people was
to burn it in with money.
Sowers worried
along a few days more, and then one night, after
he had been buried in the potter’s field, he
planned a final stroke to stop Foreman, who, he
believed, didn’t know just how deep in they
really were. Foreman was in a particular jolly
mood the next morning, for he had spent the night
bidding against Pierrepont Morgan at an auction
sale of old masters; but he listened patiently
while Sowers called off the figures in a sort of
dirge-like singsong, and until he had wailed out
his final note of despair, a bass-drum crash,
which he thought would bring Foreman to a
realizing sense of their loss, so to speak.
"That,"
Sowers wound up, "makes a grand total of
$800,000 that we have already lost."
Foreman’s
head drooped, and for a moment he was deep in
thought, while Sowers stood over him, sad, but
triumphant, in the feeling that he had at last
brought this madman to his senses, now that his
dollars were gone.
"Eight
hundred thou!" the senior partner repeated
mechanically. Then, looking up with a bright
smile, he exclaimed: "Why, old man, that
leaves us two hundred thousand still to spend
before we hit the million mark!"
They say that
Sowers could only gibber back at him; and Foreman
kept right on and managed some way to float
himself on to the million mark. There the tide
turned, and after all these years it’s still
running his way; and Sowers, against his better
judgment, is a millionaire.
I simply mention
Foreman in passing. It would be all foolishness
to follow his course in a good many situations,
but there’s a time to hold on and a time to
let go, and the limit, and a little beyond, is
none too far to play a really good thing. But in
business it’s quite as important to know how
to be a good quitter as a good fighter. Even when
you feel that you’ve got a good thing, you
want to make sure that it’s good enough, and
that you’re good enough, before you ask to
have the limit taken off. A lot of men who play a
nice game of authors get their feelings hurt at
whist, and get it in the neck at poker.
You want to have
the same principle in mind when you’re
handling the trade. Sometimes you’ll have to
lay down even when you feel that your case is
strong. Often you’ll have to yield a point
or allow a claim when you know you’re dead
right and the other fellow all wrong. But
there’s no sense in getting a licking on top
of a grievance.
Another thing that
helps you keep track of your men is the habit of
asking questions. Your thirst for information
must fairly make your tongue loll out. When you
ask the head of the canning department what
we’re netting for two-pound Corned Beef on
the day’s market for canners, and he has to
say, "Wait a minute and I’ll figure it
out," or turn to one of his boys and ask,
"Bill, what are twos netting us?" he
isn’t sitting close enough to his job, and,
perhaps, if Bill were in his chair, he’d be
holding it in his lap; or when you ask the chief
engineer how much coal we burned this month, as
compared with last, and why in thunder we burned
it, if he has to hem and haw and say he
hasn’t had time to figure it out yet, but he
thinks they were running both benches in the
packing house most of the time, and he guesses
this and reckons that, he needs to get up a
little more steam himself. In short, whenever you
find a fellow that ought to know every minute
where he’s at, but who doesn’t know
what’s what, he’s pretty likely to be
"It". When you’re dealing with an
animal like the American hog, that carries all
its profit in the tip of its tail, you want to
make sure that your men carry all the latest news
about it on the tip of the tongue.
It’s not a
bad plan, once in a while, to check up the facts
and figures that are given you. I remember one
lightning calculator I had working for me, who
would catch my questions hot from the bat, and
fire back the answers before I could get into
position to catch. Was a mighty particular cuss.
Always worked everything out to the sixth decimal
place. I had just about concluded he ought to
have a wider field for his talents, when I asked
him one day how the hams of the last week’s
run had been averaging in weight. Answered like a
streak; but it struck me that for hogs which had
been running so light they were giving up pretty
generously. So I checked up his figures and found
‘em all wrong. Tried him with a different
question every day for a week. Always answered
quick, and always answered wrong. Found that he
was a base-ball rooter and had been handing out
the batting averages of the Chicagos for his
answers. Seems that when I used to see him busy
figuring with his pencil he was working out where
Anson stood on the list. He’s not in
Who’s Who in the Stock Yards any more, you
bet.
Your affectionate
father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
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