Annie Payson Call was a Waltham author. She wrote several books and published articles in Ladies' Home Journal. Many articles are reprinted in her book Nerves and Common Sense. The common theme of her work is mental health.

Excerpt

THE literature relating to the care of the human body is already very extensive. Much has been written about the body's proper food, the air it should breathe, the clothing by which it should be protected, the best methods of its development. That literature needs but little added to it, until we, as rational beings, come nearer to obeying the laws which it discloses, and to feeling daily the help which comes from that obedience. It is of the better use, the truer guidance of this machine, that I wish especially to write.

Although attention is constantly called to the fact of its misuse,-as in neglected rest and in over-strain,-in all the unlimited variety which the perverted ingenuity of a clever people has devised, it seems never to have come to any one's mind that this strain in all things, small and great, is something that can be and should be studiously abandoned, with as regular a process of training, from the first simple steps to those more complex, as is required in the work for the development of muscular strength.

When a perversion of Nature's laws has continued from generation to generation, we, of the ninth or tenth generation, can by no possibility jump back into the place where the laws can work normally through us, even though our eyes have been opened to a full recognition of such perversion.