Health statistics of women students of Cambridge and Oxford and of their sister / by Mrs Henry Sidgwick.

  • Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred, 1845-1936.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health statistics of women students of Cambridge and Oxford and of their sister / by Mrs Henry Sidgwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    deteriorated were on the average decidedly long and their hours of sleep short, being for the Classical students 7.8 hours of work and the same amount of sleep and for Modern Languages students 8 hours of work and 7.6 hours of sleep. It will be remembered (see Table XXXIII.) that the average number of hours of sleep for all students is 8, which is certainly not too high, and (see p. 77) that the average time devoted to study by students reading for Tripos Examinations other than the Natural Sciences Tripos is about 7 hours. We do not give a similar table, showing the connection of different subjects of study with change of health, for Oxford students, because the numbers being small, there would be some risk of revealing individual identity, but at Oxford too the study of Modern Languages has been accompanied by deteriorated health in two cases and by improvement in none. On the other hand English Language and Literature, an important branch of study at Oxford, seems to be improving to the health. The questions as to abstention from study in vacation were asked because it was thought by some that this had an important bearing on health at College. The answers, however, bring out no very clear result. Not only are they difficult to tabulate satisfactorily owing to their great variety, but they are also difficult to interpret. It would probably be a mistake for instance to assume that all the students who say that they did not abstain from study in vacation mean that they took no complete holiday at all. On account of these difficulties we have not attempted to report any answers except those of the students whose health changed at College. Their answers seem to connect abstention from study in vacation with deterioration in health. Among those whose answers are tabulated as ‘Not at all’, ‘For parts’, ‘Under one month’, ‘Between one and two months’, who may perhaps be classed together as having abstained from study little, the number whose health deteriorated exceeds but little the number whose health improved; while among the rest twice as many changed for the worse as for the better. Possibly, in some cases at least, the complete cessa- tion from studying implied the substitution for study of fatiguing occu- pations of other kinds. The preponderance in number of cases of deterioration over cases of improvement when the hours of study are long (8 hours and over) is very clearly shown in Table XL., but the conclusion to be drawn is a little confused by the fact that there is a similar though less marked preponderance among cases of exceptionally short hours of study. It is worth noting, however, that of the 6 students who worked for less