Warning: Reading is hazardous to your health!

Once upon a time, before the advent of the internet, television and even the radio, reading used to be the past-time of choice.  Back then people read much for the same reasons they read today, except without all the distractions modern technology brings.

Surprisingly, I came across an essay in the New York Times Books Section that talks about reading being hazardous to your health in those olden days:

But until radio and television dethroned the book, social reformers worried about too much reading, not too little. Advice about when and where not to read was once a medical specialty. In an 1806 diagnosis, a British doctor hypothesized that the "excess of stimulus" produced by reading novels "affects the organs of the body and relaxes the tone of the nerves." Reading at the table interfered with your digestion, reading before lunch with your morals.

But the article continues, making a surprising comparison:

Another expert, in 1867, warned that "to read when in bed … is to injure your eyes, your brain, your nervous system, your intellect." Cue to the other in-bed activity that makes you go blind. Like masturbation, reading was too pleasurable for its own good; like masturbation, it threatened to upstage real human contact (messy, tedious, disappointing) with virtual pleasures.

I have never heard of reading being compared to masturbation (unless it’s in the context of erotica, which is a subject worthy of another post at another time). Yes, I’d agree that reading is very pleasurable, but in a much different way than masturbation. Reading stimulates the mind and imagination. After I read in bed (uh oh, I’m in trouble) before going to sleep, I often find myself laying awake at night thinking about the events of the book, the characters, and sometimes the inspiration it provides to my own writing.

But attitudes towards reading have certainly changed since then:

Then, reading was a sign of laziness; now, readers get credit for hard work.

This is certainly true, as a survey recently done showed that most Americans didn’t read any books in the past year. Even among my own non-English major friends, reading is pretty low on their list of "fun things to do on a lazy, rainy Sunday".

As I have always maintained, I think we are reaching a point when technology is finally starting to compliment reading – we are seeing it with ebooks and the vast amounts of online content we all seem to consume daily.

A hundred years from now, historians might look back and wonder about our own reading habits. I’d like to imagine we’d be judged as a literate society, but then I talk to people who can’t remember the last time they cracked a novel and I seriously begin to wonder.

You are what you read

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