Health Through Will Power
by James J. Walsh · English · Gutenberg #37109 · 368,740 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Health Through Will Power
Author: James J. Walsh
Release date: August 17, 2011 [eBook #37109]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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[Transcriber's Notes]
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred
in the original book.
This book is derived from a copy on the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012175505
Obvious spelling or typographical errors have been corrected.
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[End Transcriber's Notes]
HEALTH THROUGH WILL POWER
BY
JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D., Etc.
MEDICAL DIRECTOR OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY;
PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
AT CATHEDRAL COLLEGE; LECTURER ON PSYCHOLOGY,
MARYWOOD COLLEGE, ETC.
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1919
_Copyright, 1919,_
By Little, Brown, and Company.
_All rights reserve_
Published, November, 1919
_Norwood Press_
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.,
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
_To_
J. H. W.
EX ANIMO ET CORDE
J. J. W.
{vii}
PREFACE
A French surgeon to whom the remark was made in the third year of the
War that France was losing an immense number of men replied: "Yes, we
are losing enormously, but for every man that we lose we are making
two men." What he meant, of course, was that the War was bringing out
the latent powers of men to such an extent that every one of those who
were left now counted for two. The expression is much more than a mere
figure of speech. It is quite literally true that a man who has had
the profound experience of a war like this becomes capable of doing
ever so much more than he could before. He has discovered his own
power. He has tapped layers of energy that he did not know he
possessed. Above all, he has learned that his will is capable of
enabling him to do things that he would have hesitated about and
probably thought quite impossible before this revelation of himself to
himself had been made.
{viii}
In a word, the War has proved a revival of appreciation of the place
of the human will in life. Marshal Foch, the greatest character of the
War, did not hesitate even to declare that "A battle is the struggle
of two wills. It is never lost until defeat is accepted. They only are
vanquished who confess themselves to be."
Our generation has been intent on the development of the intellect. We
have been neglecting the will. "Shell shock" experiences have shown us
that the intellect is largely the source of unfavorable suggestion.
The will is the controlling factor in the disease. Many another
demonstration of the power of will has been furnished by the War. This
volume is meant to help in the restoration of the will to its place as
the supreme faculty in life, above all the one on whose exercise, more
than any other single factor, depends health and recovery from
disease. The time seems opportune for its appearance and it is
commended to the attention of those who have recognized how much the
modern cult of intellect left man unprepared for the ruder trails of
life yet could not see clearly what the remedy might be.
{ix}
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface vii
CHAPTER
I The Will in Life 1
II Dreads 19
III Habits 42
IV Sympathy 57
V Self-Pity 69
VI Avoidance of Conscious Use of the Will 80
VII What the Will Can Do 102
VIII Pain and the Will 112
IX The Will and Air and Exercise 133
X The Will to Eat 148
XI The Place of the Will in Tuberculosis 167
XII The Will in Pneumonia 187
XIII Coughs and Colds 196
XIV Neurotic Asthma and the Will 207
XV The Will in Intestinal Function 215
XVI The Will and the Heart 227
XVII The Will in So-Called Chronic Rheumatism 240
XVII Psycho-Neuroses 258
XIX Feminine Ills and the Will 270
Index 285
{1}
HEALTH THROUGH WILL POWER
CHAPTER I
THE WILL IN LIFE
"What he will he does and does so much
That proof is called impossibility."
_Troilus and Cressida._
The place of the will in its influence upon health and vitality has
long been recognized, not only by psychologists and those who pay
special attention to problems of mental healing, but also, as a rule,
by physicians and even by the general public. It is, for instance, a
well-established practice, when two older folk, near relatives, are
ill at the same time, or even when two younger persons are injured
together and one of them dies, or perhaps has a serious turn for the
worse, carefully to keep all knowledge of it from the other one. The
reason is a very definite conviction that in the revulsion of feeling
caused by learning of the fatality, or as {2} a result of the
solicitude consequent upon hearing that there has been a turn for the
worse, the other patient's chances for recovery would probably be
seriously impaired. The will to get better, even to live on, is
weakened, with grave consequences. This is no mere popular impression
due to an exaggeration of sympathetic feeling for the patient. It has
been noted over and over again, so often that it evidently represents
some rule of life, that whenever by inadvertence the serious condition
or death of the other was made known, there was an immediate
unfavorable development in the case which sometimes ended fatally,
though all had been going well up to that time. This was due not
merely to the shock, but largely to the "giving up", as it is called,
which left the surviving patient without that stimulus from the will
to get well which means so much.
It is surprising to what an extent the will may affect the body, even
under circumstances where it would seem impossible that physical
factors could any longer have any serious influence. We often hear it
said that certain people are "living on their wills", and when they
are of the kind who take comparatively little food and yet succeed in
accomplishing {3} a great deal of work, the truth of the expression
comes home to us rather strikingly. The expression is usually
considered, however, to be scarcely more than a formula of words
elaborated in order to explain certain of these exceptional cases that
seem to need some special explanation. The possibility of the human
will of itself actually prolonging existence beyond the time when,
according to all reason founded on physical grounds, life should end,
would seem to most people to be quite out of the question. And yet
there are a number of striking cases on record in which the only
explanation of the continuance of life would seem to be that the will
to live has been so strongly aroused that life was prolonged beyond
even expert expectation. That the will was the survival factor in the
case is clear from the fact that as soon as this active willing
process ceased, because the reason that had aroused it no longer
existed, the individuals in question proceeded to reach the end of
life rapidly from the physical factors already at work and which
seemed to portend inevitably an earlier dissolution than that which
happened. Probably a great many physicians know of striking examples
of patients who have lived beyond the time when ordinarily death would
{4} be expected, because they were awaiting the arrival of a friend
from a distance who was known to be coming and whom the patient wanted
very much to see. Dying mothers have lived on to get a last embrace of
a son or daughter, and wives have survived to see their husbands for a
last parting--though it seemed impossible that they should do so, so
far as their physical condition was concerned--and then expired
within a short time. Of course there are any number of examples in
which this has not been true, but then that is only a proof of the
fact that the great majority of mankind do not use their wills, or
perhaps, having appealed to them for help during life never or but
slightly, are not prepared to make a definite serious call on them
toward the end. I am quite sure, however, that a great many country
physicians particularly can tell stories of incidents that to them
were proofs that the will can resist even the approach of death for
some time, though just as soon as the patients give up, death comes to
them.
Professor Stokes, the great Irish clinician of the nineteenth century,
to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the diseases of the heart
and lungs, and whose name is enshrined in terms commonly used in
medicine in {5} connection with these diseases, has told a striking
story of his experiences in a Dublin hospital that illustrates this
very well. An old Irishman, who had been a soldier in his younger
years and had been wounded many times, was in the hospital ill and
manifestly dying. Professor Stokes, after a careful investigation of
his condition, declared that he could not live a week, though at the
end of that time the old soldier was still hanging on to life, ever
visibly sinking. Stokes assured the students who were making the
rounds of his wards with him that the old man had at most a day or two
more to live, and yet at the end of some days he was still there to
greet them on their morning visits. After the way of medical students
the world over, though without any of that hard-heartedness that would
be supposed ordinarily to go with such a procedure, for they were
interested in the case as a medical problem, the students began to bet
how long the old man would live.
Finally, one day the old man said to Stokes in his broadest brogue:
"Docther, you must keep me alive until the first of the month, because
me pension for the quarther is then due, and unless the folks have it,
shure they won't have anything to bury me with."
{6}
The first of the month was some ten days away. Stokes said to his
students, though of course not in the hearing of the patient, that
there was not a chance in the world, considering the old soldier's
physical condition, that he would live until the first of the month.
Every morning, in spite of this, when they came in, the old man was
still alive and there was even no sign of the curtains being drawn
around his bed as if the end were approaching. Finally on the morning
of the first of the month, when Stokes came in, the old pensioner said
to him feebly, "Docther, the papers are there. Sign them! Then they'll
get the pension. I am glad you kept me alive, for now they'll surely
have the money to bury me." And then the old man, having seen the
signature affixed, composed himself for death and was dead in the
course of a few hours. He had kept himself alive on his will because
he had a purpose in it, and once that purpose was fulfilled, death was
welcome and it came without any further delay.
There is a story which comes to us from one of the French prisons
about the middle of the nineteenth century which illustrates forcibly
the same power of the will to maintain life after it seemed sure,
beyond peradventure, {7} that death must come. It was the custom to
bury in quicklime in the prison yard the bodies of all the prisoners
who died while in custody. The custom still survives, or did but
twenty years ago, even in English prisons, for those who were
executed, as readers of Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" will
recall. Irish prisons still keep up the barbarism, and one of the
reasons for the bitterness of the Irish after the insurrection of 1916
in Dublin was the burial of the executed in quicklime in the prison
yard. The Celtic mind particularly revolts at the idea, and it
happened that one of the prisoners in a certain French prison, a
Breton, a Celt of the Celts, was deeply affected by the thought that
something like this might happen to him. He was suffering from
tuberculosis at a time when very little attention was paid to such
ailments in prisoners, for the sooner the end came, the less bother
there was with them; but he was horrified at the thought that if he
died in prison his body would disappear in the merciless fire of the
quicklime.
So far as the prison physician could foresee, the course of his
disease would inevitably reach its fatal termination long before the
end of his sentence. In spite of its advance. {8} however, the
prisoner himself declared that he would never permit himself to die in
prison and have his body face such a fate. His declaration was
dismissed by the physician with a shrug and the feeling that after all
it would not make very much difference to the man, since he would not
be there to see or feel it. When, however, he continued to live,
manifestly in the last throes of consumption, for weeks and even
months after death seemed inevitable, some attention was paid to his
declaration in the matter and the doctors began to give special
attention to his case. He lived for many months after the time when,
according to all ordinary medical knowledge, it would seem he must
surely have died. He actually outlived the end of his sentence, had
arrangements made to move him to a house just beyond the prison gate
as soon as his sentence had expired, and according to the story, was
dead within twenty-four hours after the time he got out of prison and
thus assured his Breton soul of the fact that his body would be given,
like that of any Christian, to the bosom of mother earth.
But there are other and even more important phases of the prolongation
of life by the will that still better illustrates its power. {9} It
has often been noted that men who have had extremely busy lives,
working long hours every day, often sleeping only a few hours at
night, turning from one thing to another and accomplishing so much
that it seemed almost impossible that one man could do all they did,
have lived very long lives. Men like Alexander Humboldt, for instance,
distinguished in science in his younger life, a traveler for many
years in that hell-hole of the tropics, the region around Panama and
Central America, a great writer whose books deeply influenced his
generation in middle age. Prime Minister of Prussia as an older man,
lived to be past ninety, though he once confessed that in his forties
he often slept but two or three hours a night and sometimes took even
that little rest on a sofa instead of a bed. Leo XIII at the end of
the nineteenth century was just such another man. Frail of body,
elected Pope at sixty-four, it was thought that there would soon be
occasion for another election; he did an immense amount of work,
assumed successfully the heaviest responsibilities, and outlived the
years of Peter in the Papal chair, breaking all the prophecies in that
regard and not dying till he was ninety-three.
Many other examples might be cited. {10} Gladstone, always at work,
probably the greatest statesman of the nineteenth century in the
better sense of that word, was a scholar almost without a peer in the
breadth of his scholarly attainments, a most interesting writer on
multitudinous topics, keen of interest for everything human and always
active, and yet he lived well on into the eighties. Bismarck and Von
Moltke, who assumed heavier responsibilities than almost any other men
of the nineteenth century, saw their fourscore years pass over them a
good while before the end came. Bismarck remarked on his eighty-first
birthday that he used to think all the good things of life were
confined to the first eighty years of life, but now he knew that there
were a great many good things reserved for the second eighty years. I
shall never forget sitting beside Thomas Dunn English, the American
poet, at a banquet of the Alumni of the University of Pennsylvania,
when he repeated this expression for us; at the time he himself was
well past eighty. He too had been a busy man and yet rejoiced to be
with the younger alumni at the dinner.
My dear old teacher, Virchow, of whom they said when he died that four
men died, for he was distinguished not only as a pathologist, {11}
which was the great life-work for which he was known, but as an
anthropologist, a historian of medicine and a sanitarian, was at
seventy-five actively accomplishing the work of two or three men. He
died at eighty-one, as the result of a trolley injury, or I could
easily imagine him alive even yet. Von Ranke, the great historian of
the popes, began a universal history at the age of ninety which was
planned to be complete in twelve volumes, one volume a year to be
issued. I believe that he lived to finish half a dozen of them. I have
some dear friends among the medical profession in America who are in
their eighties and nineties, and all of them were extremely busy men
in their middle years and always lived intensely active lives. Stephen
Smith and Thomas Addis Emmet, John W. Gouley, William Hanna Thompson,
not long dead, and S. Weir Mitchell, who lived to be past eighty-five,
are typical examples of extremely busy men, yet of extremely long
lives.
All of these men had the will power to keep themselves busily at work,
and their exercise of that will power, far from wearing them out,
actually seemed to enable them to tap reservoirs of energy that might
have remained {12} latent in them. The very intensiveness of their
will to do seemed to exert an extensive influence over their lives,
and so they not only accomplished more but actually lived longer. Hard
work, far from exhausting, has just the opposite effect. We often hear
of hard work killing people, but as a physician I have carefully
looked into a number of these cases and have never found one which
satisfied me as representing exhaustion due to hard work. Insidious
kidney disease, rheumatic heart disease, the infections of which
pneumonia is a typical example, all these have been the causes of
death and not hard work, and they may come to any of us. They are just
as much accidents as any other of the mischances of life, for it is as
dangerous to be run into by a microbe as by a trolley car. Using the
will in life to do all the work possible only gives life and gives it
more abundantly, and people may rust out, that is be hurt by rest,
much sooner than they will wear out.
Here, then, is a wellspring of vitality that checks for a time at
least even lethal changes in the body and undoubtedly is one of the
most important factors for the prolongation of life. It represents the
greatest force for health and power of accomplishment that we have.
{13} Unfortunately, in recent years, it has been neglected to a great
extent for a number of reasons. One of these has been the discussions
as to the freedom of the will and the very common teaching of
determinism which seemed to eliminate the will as an independent
faculty in life. While this affected only the educated classes who had
received the higher education, their example undoubtedly was pervasive
and influenced a great many other people. Besides, newspaper and
magazine writers emphasized for popular dissemination the ideas as to
absence of the freedom of the will which created at least an
unfortunate attitude of mind as regards the use of the will at its
best and tended to produce the feeling that we are the creatures of
circumstances rather than the makers of our destiny in any way, or
above all, the rulers of ourselves, including even to a great extent
our bodily energies.
Even more significant than this intellectual factor, in sapping will
power has been the comfortable living of the modern time with its
tendency to eliminate from life everything that required any exercise
of the will. The progress which our generation is so prone to boast of
concerns mainly this making of people {14} more comfortable than they
were before. The luxuries of life of a few centuries ago have now
become practically the necessities of life of to-day. We are not asked
to stand cold to any extent, we do not have to tire ourselves walking,
and bodily labor is reserved for a certain number of people whom we
apparently think of as scarcely counting in the scheme of humanity.
Making ourselves comfortable has included particularly the removal of
nearly all necessity for special exertion, and therefore of any
serious exercise of the will. We have saved ourselves the necessity
for expending energy, apparently with the idea that thus it would
accumulate and be available for higher and better purposes.
The curious thing with regard to animal energy, however, is that it
does not accumulate in the body beyond a certain limited extent, and
all energy that is manufactured beyond that seems to have a definite
tendency to dissipate itself throughout the body, producing discomfort
of various kinds instead of doing useful work. The process is very
like what is called short-circuiting in electrical machinery, and this
enables us to understand how much harm may be done. Making ourselves
comfortable, therefore, may in the {15} end have just exactly the
opposite effect, and often does. This is not noted at first, and may
escape notice entirely unless there is an analysis of the mode of life
which is directed particularly to finding out the amount of exertion
of will and energy that there is in the daily round of existence.
The will, like so many other faculties of the human organism, grows in
power not by resting but by use and exercise. There have been very few
calls for serious exercise of the will left in modern life and so it
is no wonder that it has dwindled in power. As a consequence, a good
deal of the significance of the will in life has been lost sight of.
This is unfortunate, for the will can enable us to tap sources of
energy that might otherwise remain concealed from us. Professor
William James particularly called attention to the fact, in his
well-known essay on "The Energies of Men", that very few people live
up to their _maximum_ of accomplishment or their _optimum_ of conduct,
and that indeed "_as a rule men habitually use only a small part of
the powers which they actually possess and which they might use under
appropriate conditions._"
It is with the idea of pointing out how much the will can accomplish
in changing things for {16} the better that this volume is written.
Professor James quoted with approval Prince Pueckler-Muskau's
expression, "I find something very satisfactory in the thought that
man has the power of framing such props and weapons out of the most
trivial materials, indeed out of nothing, merely by the force of his
will, which thereby truly deserves the name of omnipotent."
[Footnote 1]
[Footnote 1: "Tour in England, Ireland and France."]
It is this power, thus daringly called omnipotent, that men have not
been using to the best advantage to maintain health and even to help
in the cure of disease, which needs to be recalled emphatically to
attention. The war has shown us in the persons of our young soldiers
that the human will has not lost a single bit of its pristine power to
enable men to accomplish what might almost have seemed impossible. One
of the heritages from the war should be the continuance of that fine
use of the will which military discipline and war's demands so well
brought into play. Men can do and stand ever so much more than they
realize, and in the very doing and standing find a satisfaction that
surpasses all the softer pleasant feelings that come from mere comfort
and lack of necessity for physical and {17} psychical exertion. Their
exercise of tolerance and their strenuous exertion, instead of
exhausting, only makes them more capable and adds to instead of
detracting from their powers.
How much this discipline and training of the will meant for our young
American soldiers, some of whom were raised in the lap of luxury and
almost without the necessity of ever having had to do or stand hard
things previously in their lives, is very well illustrated by a letter
quoted by Miss Agnes Repplier in the _Century_ for December. It is by
no means unique or even exceptional. There were literally thousands of
such letters written by young officers similarly circumstanced, and it
is only because it is typical and characteristic of the spirit of all
of these young men that I quote it here. Miss Repplier says that it
came from "a young American lieutenant for whom the world had been
from infancy a perilously pleasant place." He wrote home in the early
spring of 1918:
"It has rained and rained and rained. I am as much at home in a mud
puddle as any frog in France, and I have clean forgotten what a dry
bed is like. But I am as fit as a fiddle and as hard as nails. I can
eat scrap iron and sleep standing. Aren't there things {18} called
umbrellas, which you pampered civilians carry about in showers?" If we
can secure the continuance of this will exertion, life will be ever so
much heartier and healthier and happier than it was before, so that
the war shall have its compensations.
{19}
CHAPTER II
DREADS
"O, know he is the bridle of your will.
There's none but asses will be bridled so."
_A Comedy of Errors._
It must be a surprise to most people, after the demonstration of the
power of the will in the preceding chapter, that so many fail to make
use of it. Indeed, the majority of mankind are quite unable to realize
the store of energy for their health and strength and well-being which
is thus readily available, though so often unused or called upon but
feebly. The reason why the will is not used more is comparatively easy
to understand, however, once its activity in ordinary conditions of
humanity is analyzed a little more carefully. The will is
unfortunately seldom permitted to act freely. Brakes are put on its
energies by mental states of doubt and hesitation, by contrary
suggestion, and above all by the dreads which humanity has allowed to
fasten {20} themselves on us until now a great many activities are
hampered. There is the feeling that many things cannot be done, or may
be accomplished only at the cost of so much effort and even hardship
that it would be hopeless for any but those who are gifted with
extremely strong wills to attempt them. People grow afraid to commit
themselves to any purpose lest they should not be able to carry it
out. Many feel that they would never be able to stand what others have
stood without flinching and are persuaded that if ever they were
placed in the position where they had to withstand some of the trials
that they have heard of they would inevitably break down under the
strain.
Just as soon as a human being loses confidence that he or she may be
able to accomplish a certain thing, that of itself is enough to make
the will ever so much less active than it would otherwise be. It is
like breaking a piece of strong string: those who know how wrap it
around their fingers, then jerk confidently and the string is broken.
Those who fear that they may not be able to break it hesitate lest
they should hurt themselves and give a half-hearted twitch which does
not break the string; the only thing they succeed {21} in doing is in
hurting themselves ever so much more than does the person who really
breaks it. After that abortive effort, they feel that they must be
different from the others whose fingers were strong enough to break
the string, and they hesitate about it and will probably refuse to
make the attempt again.
It is a very old story,--this of dreads hampering the activities of
mankind with lack of confidence, and the fear of failure keeping
people from doing things. One of his disciples, according to a very
old tradition, once asked St. Anthony the Hermit what had been the
hardest obstacle that he found on the road to sanctity. The story has
all the more meaning for us here if we recall that health and holiness
are in etymology the same. St. Anthony, whose temptations have made
him famous, was over a hundred at the time and had spent some seventy
years in the desert, almost always alone, and probably knew as much
about the inner workings of human nature from the opportunities for
introspection which he had thus enjoyed as any human being who ever
lived. His young disciple, like all young disciples, wanted a short
cut on the pathway that they were both traveling. The old man said to
him, "Well, {22} I am an old man and I have had many troubles, but
most of them never happened."
Many a nightmare of doubt and hesitation disappears at once if the
dread of it is overcome. The troubles that never happen, if dwelt
upon, paralyze the will until health and holiness become extremely
difficult of attainment.
There is the secret of the failure of a great many people in life in a
great many ways. They fear the worst, dread failure, dampen their own
confidence, and therefore fritter away their own energy. Anything that
will enable them to get rid of the dreads of life will add greatly to
their power to accomplish things inside as well as outside their
bodies. Well begun is half done, and tackling a thing confidently
means almost surely that it will be accomplished. If the dread of
failure, the dread of possible pain in its performance, the dread of
what may happen as a result of activity,--if all these or any of them
are allowed to obtrude themselves, then energy is greatly lessened,
the power to do things hampered and success becomes almost impossible.
This is as true in matters of health and strength as it is with regard
to various external accomplishments. It takes a great {23} deal of
experience for mankind to learn the lesson that their dreads are often
without reality, and some men never learn it.
Usually when the word dreads is used, it is meant to signify a series
of psychic or psychoneurotic conditions from which sensitive, nervous
people suffer a great deal. There is, for instance, the dread of dirt
called learnedly misophobia, that exaggerated fear that dirt may cling
to the hands and prove in some way deleterious which sends its victims
to wash their hands from twenty to forty times a day. Not infrequently
they wash the skin pretty well off or at least produce annoying skin
irritation as the result of their feeling. There are many other dreads
of this kind. Some of them seem ever so much more absurd even than
this dread of dirt. Most of us have a dread of heights, that is, we
cannot stand on the edge of a height and look down without trembling
and having such uncomfortable feelings that it is impossible for us to
stay there any length of time. Some people also are unable to sit in
the front row of the balcony of a theater or even to kneel in the
front row of a gallery at church without having the same dread of
heights that comes to others at the edge of a high precipice. I have
among my {24} patients some clergymen who find it extremely difficult
to stand up on a high altar, though, almost needless to say, the whole
height is at most five or six ordinary steps.
Then there are people who have an exaggerated dread of the dark, so
that it is quite impossible for them to sleep without a light or to
sleep alone. Sometimes such a dread is the result of some terrifying
incident, as the case in my notes in which the treasurer of a
university developed an intense dread of the dark which made sleep
impossible without a light, after he had been shot at by a burglar who
came into his room and who answered his demand, "Who is that?" by a
bullet which passed through the head of the bed. Most of the
skotophobists, the technical name for dark-dreaders, have no such
excuse as this one. Victims of nervous dreads have as a rule developed
their dread by permitting some natural feeling of minor importance to
grow to such an extent that it makes them very miserable.
Some cannot abide a shut-in place. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, the
English writer and painter, often found a railroad compartment in the
English cars an impossible situation and had to break his journey in
order to get over {25} the growing feeling of claustrophobia, the
dread of shut-in places, which would steal over him.
There are any number of these dreads and, almost needless to say, all
of them may interfere with health and the pursuit of happiness. I have
seen men and women thrown into a severe nervous state with chilly
feelings and cold sweat as the result of trying to overcome one of
these dreads. They make it impossible for their victims to do a great
many things that other people do readily, and sadly hamper their
wills. There is only one way to overcome these dreads, and that is by
a series of acts in the contrary direction until a habit of
self-control with regard to these haunting ideas is secured. All
mankind, almost without exception, has a dread of heights, and yet
many thousands of men have in recent years learned to work on high
buildings without very much inconvenience from the dread. The wages
are good, they _want_ to work this way, and the result is they take
themselves in hand and gradually acquire self-control. I have had many
of them tell me that at first they were sure they would never be able
to do it, but the gradual ascent of the building as the work proceeded
accustomed them to height, {26} and after a while it became almost as
natural to work high up in the air as on the first or second story of
a building or even on the level ground.
The overcoming of these dreads is not easy unless some good reason
releases the will and sets it to exerting its full power. When this is
the case, however, the dread is overcome and the brake lifted after
some persistence, with absolute assurance. Men who became brave
soldiers have been known to have had a great dread of blood in early
life. Some of our best surgeons have had to leave the first operation
that they ever saw or they would have fainted, and yet after repeated
effort they have succeeded in overcoming this sensitiveness. As a
matter of fact, most people suffer so much from dreads because they
yielded to a minor dread and allowed a bad habit to be formed. It is a
question of breaking a bad habit by contrary acts rather than of
overcoming a natural disposition. Many of those who are victims have
the feeling that they cannot be expected to conquer nature this way.
As a result, they are so discouraged at the very idea that success is
dubious and practically impossible from their very attitude of mind;
but it is only the {27} second nature of a habit that they have to
overcome, and this is quite another matter, for exactly contrary acts
to these which formed a habit will break it.
Some of these dreads seem to be purely physical in origin or character
yet prove to be merely or to a great degree only psychic states.
Insomnia itself is more a dread than anything else. In writing for the
International Clinics some years ago (Volume IV, Series XXVI) I dwelt
on the fact that insomnia as a dread was probably responsible for more
discomfort and complaints from mankind than almost anything else.
Insomniaphobia is just such a dread as agoraphobia, the dread of open
spaces; or akrophobia, the dread of heights; or skotophobia, the dread
of the dark, and other phobias which afflict mankind. It is perfectly
possible in most cases to cure such phobias by direct training against
them, and this can be done also with regard to insomnia.
Some people, particularly those who have not been out much during the
day and who have suffered from wakefulness a few times, get it on
their mind that if this state keeps up they will surely lose their
reason or their bodily health, and they begin to worry about {28} it.
They commence wondering about five in the afternoon whether they are
going to be awake that night or not. It becomes a haunt, and no matter
what they do during the evening every now and then the thought recurs
that they will not sleep. By the time they actually lie down they have
become so thoroughly occupied with that thought that it serves to keep
them awake. Some of them avoid the solicitude before they actually get
to bed, but begin to worry after that, and if after ten minutes they
are not asleep, above all if they hear a clock strike somewhere, they
are sure they are going to be awake, they worry about it, get
themselves thoroughly aroused, and then they will not go to sleep for
hours. It is quite useless to give such people drugs, just as useless
as to attempt to give a man a drug to overcome the dread of heights or
the dread of the dark or of a narrow street through which he has to
pass. They must use their wills to help them out of a condition in
which their dreads have placed them.
Apart from these neurotic dreads, quite unreasoning as most of them
are, there are a series of what may be called intellectual dreads.
These are due to false notions that have come to be accepted and that
serve to {29} keep people from doing things that they ought to do for
the sake of their health, or set them performing acts that are
injurious instead of beneficial. The dread of loss of sleep has often
caused people to take somnifacients which eventually proved ever so
much more harmful than would the loss of sleep they were meant to
overcome. Many a person dreading a cold has taken enough quinine and
whisky to make him more miserable the next day than the cold would
have, had it actually made its appearance, as it often does not. The
quinine and whisky did not prevent it, but the expectation was founded
on false premises. There are a great many other floating ideas that
prove the source of disturbing dreads for many people. A discussion of
a few typical examples will show how much health may be broken by the
dreads associated with various ills, for they often interfere with
normal, healthy living.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" applies particularly in this
matter. There are many morbid fears that disturb mankind and keep us
from accomplishing what might otherwise be comparatively easy. A great
many people become convinced that they have some diseased condition,
or morbid elements at least, {30} in them which make it impossible for
them to do as much as other people. Sometimes this morbid persuasion
takes the form of hypochrondia and the individuals feel that they have
a constitution that unfits them for prolonged and strenuous effort of
any kind, so they avoid it. The number of valetudinarians, that is of
those who live their lives mainly engaged in caring for their health,
though their physicians have never been able to find anything
organically wrong with them, is much larger than might be imagined.
This state of mind has been with us for many centuries, for the word
which describes it, hypochondria, came to us originally from Greece
and is an attempt to localize the affection in connection with its
principal symptom, which is usually one of discomfort in the stomach
region or to one side or the other of it, that is, in the hypochondria
or beneath the ribs.
Such a state of mind, in which the patient is constantly complaining
of one symptom or another, quite paralyzes the will. The individual
may be able to do some routine work but he will not be able to have
any initiative or energy for special developments of his occupation,
and of course, when any real affection occurs, he will feel that he is
quite {31} unable to bear this additional burden of disease.
Hypochondriacs, however, sometimes fairly enjoy their ill health and
therefore have been known not infrequently to live on to a good, round
old age, ever complaining more and more. It is their dread of disease
that keeps them from getting better and prevents their wills from
throwing off whatever symptoms there are and becoming perfectly well.
Until something comes along and rouses their wills, there is no hope
of affecting them favorably, and it is surprising how long the state
may continue without any one ever having found any organic affection
to justify all the discomforts of which they complain. Quite
literally, they are suffering from complaints and not from disease in
the ordinary sense of the word.
Sometimes these dreads of disease are dependent on some word which has
taken on an exaggerated significance in people's minds. A word that in
recent years has been the source of a great deal of unfavorable
suggestion is "catarrh", and a mistaken notion of its meaning has been
productive of a serious hampering of their will to be well in a number
of persons. In itself, both according to its derivation and its
accepted scientific {32} significance, the word means only that first
stage of inflammatory irritation of mucous membranes which causes
secretion to flow more freely than normally. _Catarrhein_ in Greek
means only to flow down. [Footnote 2]
[Footnote 2: The word has, by the way, the same meaning as
rheumatism, which is also from the Greek verb, to flow, though its
application is usually limited to the serous membranes of the joints
or the serous surfaces of the intermuscular planes. By derivation,
catarrh is the same word also as gout, which comes from _gutta_ in
Latin, meaning a drop and implying secretory disturbances. These
three words--catarrh, rheumatism, gout--have been applied to all
sorts of affections and are so general in meaning as to be quite
hard to define exactly. They have for this very reason, their
vagueness, become a prolific source of unfortunate suggestion and of
all kinds of dreads that disturb health.]
By abuse, however, the word _catarrh_ has come to mean in the minds of
a great many people in our time a very serious inflammation of the
mucous membranes, almost inevitably progressive and very often
resulting in fetid diseased conditions of internal or external mucous
membranes, very unpleasant for the patient and his friends and the
source of serious complications and _sequelae_. This idea has been
fostered sedulously by the advertisers of proprietary remedies and the
ingenious exploiters of various modes of treatment. As a result, a
great many people who for one reason or another--usually because of
some slight increase of secretion in the nose and {33} throat--become
convinced they have catarrh begin to feel that they cannot be expected
to have as much resistive vitality as others, since they are the
subjects of this serious progressive disease. As a matter of fact,
very few people in America, especially those living in the northern or
eastern States, are without some tendency to mild chronic catarrh. The
violent changes of temperature and the damp, dark days predispose to
it; but it produces very few symptoms except in certain particularly
sensitive individuals whose minds become centered on slight
discomforts in the throat and nose and who feel that they must
represent some serious and probably progressive condition.
As a matter of fact, catarrh has almost nothing of the significance
attributed to it so often in magazine and newspaper advertisements.
Simple catarrh decreases without producing any serious result, and
indeed it is an index of a purely catarrhal condition that there is a
complete return to normal. Sometimes microbes are associated with its
causation, but when this is so, they are bacteria of mild pathological
virulence that do not produce deep changes. As for catarrh developing
fetid, foul-smelling discharges or odors, that {34} is out of the
question. There are certain affections, notably diphtheria, that may
produce such serious changes in the mucous membranes that there will
always even long after complete recovery be an unpleasant odorous
condition, but it is probable that even in these cases there exists a
special form of microbe quite rare in occurrence which produces the
state known as _ozena_.
As to catarrh spreading from the nose and throat to the other mucous
membranes, that is also quite out of the question if it is supposed to
occur in the way that the advertising specialist likes to announce.
Catarrhal conditions may occur in the stomach, but like those of the
nose and throat they are not serious, heal completely, and produce no
definite changes. A pinch of snuff may cause a catarrhal condition of
the nose, that is an increase of secretion due to hyperaemia of the
mucous membrane; the eating of condiments, of Worcestershire sauce,
peppers, and horse-radish may cause it in the stomach. It may be due
to microbic action or to irritant or decomposing food, but it is not a
part of a serious, wide-spreading pathological condition that will
finally make the patient miserable. It is surprising, however, how
many people say with an air of finality {35} that they have catarrh,
as if it should be perfectly clear that as a result they cannot be
expected at any time to be in sufficiently good health to be called on
for any special work, and of course if any affection should attack
them, their natural immunity to disease has been so lowered by this
chronic affection, of which they are the victims, that no strong
resistance could be expected from them.
All this is merely a dread induced by paying too much attention to
medical advertisements. It is better not to know as much as some
people know, or think they know about themselves, than to know so many
things that are not so. Their dreads seriously impair their power to
work and leave them ill disposed to resist affections of any kind that
may attack them. It is a sad confession to make, but not a little of
the enforced study of physiology in our schools has become the source
of a series of dreads and solicitudes rather than of helpful
knowledge. We have as a result a generation who know a little about
their internal economy, but only enough to make them worry about it
and not quite enough to make them understand how thoroughly capable
our organisms are of caring for themselves successfully and with
resultant good health, if we will only {36} refrain from putting
brakes on their energies and disturbing their functions by our worries
and anxieties.
Another such word as catarrh in its unfavorable suggestiveness in
recent years has been auto-intoxication. It is a mouth-filling word,
and therefore very probably it has occupied the minds of the better
educated classes. Usually the form of auto-intoxication that is most
spoken of is intestinal auto-intoxication, and this combination has
for many people a very satisfying polysyllabic length that makes it of
special significance. Its meaning is taken to be that whenever the
contents of the intestines are delayed more than twenty hours or
perhaps a little longer, or whenever certain irritant materials find
their way into the intestinal tract, there is an absorption of toxic
matter which produces a series of constitutional symptoms. These
include such vague symptomatic conditions as sleepiness, torpor after
meals, an uncomfortable sense of fullness--though when we were young
we rather liked to have that feeling of fullness--and sometimes a
feeling of heat in the skin with other sensations of discomfort in
various parts of the body. At times there is headache, but this is
rather rare; lassitude and a feeling of {37} inability to do things is
looked upon as almost characteristic of the condition. Usually there
are nervous symptoms of one kind or another associated with the other
complaints and there may be distinctly hysterical or psycho-neurotic
manifestations.
Auto-intoxication as just described has become a sort of fetish for a
great many people who bow down and worship at its shrine and give some
of the best of their energies and not a little of their time to
meditation before it. As a matter of fact, in the last few years it
has come to be recognized that auto-intoxication is a much abused word
employed very often when there are serious organic conditions in
existence elsewhere in the body and still more frequently when the
symptoms are due merely to functional nervous troubles. These are
usually consequent upon a sedentary life, lack of fresh air and
exercise, insufficient attention to the diet in the direction of
taking simple and coarse food, and generally passing disturbances that
can be rather readily catalogued under much simpler affections than a
supposed absorption of toxic materials from the intestines. Reflexes
from the intestinal tract, emphasized by worries about the condition,
are much more responsible for the feelings {38} complained of--which
are often not in any sense symptoms--than any physical factors
present.
As Doctor Walter C. Alvarez said in a paper on the "Origin of the
So-called Auto-intoxicational Symptoms" published from the George
Williams Hooper Foundation for Medical Research of the University of
California Medical School, [Footnote 3] as the conclusion of his
investigation of the subject:
[Footnote 3: _Journal of the American Medical Association_,
January 4, 1919.]
"Auto-intoxication is commonly diagnosed when a physical examination
would show other more definite causes for the symptoms. Those who
believe that intestinal stasis can account for a long list of
disease conditions have little proof to offer for their views. Many
of the assumptions on which they rest their case have proved to be
wrong.
"The usual symptoms of the constipated disappear so promptly after a
bowel movement that they cannot be due to absorbed toxins. They must
be produced mechanically by distension and irritation of the colon.
They occur in nervous, sensitive people. It has been shown that
various activities of the digestive tract can profoundly affect the
sensorium and the vasomotor nerves. The {39} old ideas of insidious
poisoning led to the formation of hypochrondriacs; the new
explanation helps to cure many of them."
There are many other terms in common use that have unfortunate
suggestions and make people feel, if they once get the habit of
applying them to themselves, that they are the subject of rather
serious illness. I suppose that one of the most used and most abused
of these is uric acid and the uric acid diathesis. Scientific
physicians have nearly given up these terms, but a great many people
are still intent on making themselves miserable. All sorts of symptoms
usually due to insufficient exercise and air, inadequate diversion of
mind and lack of interests are attributed to these conditions. Some
time or other a physician or perhaps some one who is supposed to be a
friend suggested them and they continue to hamper the will to be well
by baseless worries founded on false notions for years afterwards.
What is needed is a definite effort of the will to throw off these
nightmares of disease that are so disturbing and live without them.
It is surprising how much vital energy may be wasted in connection
with such dreads. Unfortunately, too, medicines of various kinds are
taken to relieve the symptoms connected {40} with them and the
medicine does ever so much more harm than good. Oliver Wendell Holmes
declared a generation ago that if all the medicines that had ever been
taken by mankind were thrown into the sea it would be much better for
mankind and much worse for the fishes. The expression still has a
great truth in it, especially as regards that habit of self-drugging
so common among the American people. In the course of lecture
engagements, I stay with very intelligent friends on a good many
occasions each year, and it is surprising how many of them have
medicine bottles around, indicating that they are subject to dreads of
various kinds with regard to themselves for which they feel medicine
should be taken. These dreads unfortunately often serve to lessen
resistive vitality to real affections when they occur and therefore
become a source of real danger.
All these various dreads, then, have the definite effect of lessening
the power of the will to enable people to do their work and remain
well. They represent serious brakes upon the flow of nerve impulses
from the spiritual side of man's nature to the physical. This is much
more serious in its results than would usually be thought; and one of
the {41} things that a physician has to find out from a great many
patients is what sources of dread they are laboring under so as to
neutralize them or at least correct them as far as possible. It is
surprising how much good can be accomplished by a deliberate quest
after dreads and the direct discussion of them, for they are always
much less significant when brought out of the purlieus of the mind
directly into the open. Many a neurotic patient, particularly, will
not be improved until his dreads are relieved. This form of
psycho-analysis rather than the search for sex insults, as they are
called, or sexual incidents of early life, is the hopeful phase of
modern psychological contribution to therapeutics.
{42}
CHAPTER III
HABITS
"Why, will shall break it; will and nothing else."
_Love's Labor's Lost_.
Dreads are brakes on the will, inhibitions which prevent its exercise
and make accomplishment very difficult and sometimes impossible. They
represent mainly a state of mind, yet often they contain physical
elements, and the disposition counts for much. Their counterpart in
the opposite direction is represented by habits which are acquired
facilities of action for good or for ill. Habits not only make
activities easy but they even produce such a definite tendency to the
performance of certain actions as to make it difficult not to do them.
They may become so strong as to be tyrants for ill, though it must not
be forgotten that properly directed they may master what is worst in
us and help us up the hill of life. Acts that are entirely voluntary
and very difficult at first may become by habit so {43} natural that
it is extremely difficult to do otherwise than follow the ingrained
tendency. Nature's activities are imperative. Habitual actions may
become equally so. When some one once remarked to the Duke of
Wellington that habit was second nature, he replied:
"Oh, ever so much more than that! Habit may be ten times as strong as
nature."
The function of the will in health is mainly to prevent the formation
of bad habits or break those that have been formed, but above all, to
bring about the formation of habits that will prevent as far as is
possible the development of tendencies to disease in the body, Man
probably faces no more difficult problem in life than the breaking of
a bad habit. Usually it requires the exercise of all his will power
applied to its fullest extent. If there is a more difficult problem
than the breaking of a bad habit it is the formation of a good one
late in life because of the persistency of advertence and effort that
is required. It is comparatively easy to prevent the formation of bad
habits and also easy to form good habits in the earlier years. The
organism is then plastic and yields itself readily and thus becomes
grooved to the habit or hardened against it by the performance of even
a few acts.
{44}
All the psychologists insist that after the period of the exercise of
instinct as the basis of life passes, habit becomes the great force
for good or for ill. We become quite literally a bundle of habits, and
the success of life largely depends on whether these habits are
favorable or unfavorable to the accomplishment of what is best in us.
More than anything else health depends on habit. We begin by doing
things more or less casually, and after a time a tendency to do them
is created; then almost before we know it, we find that we have a
difficult task before us, if we try not to do them.
To begin with, the activity which becomes the subject of a habit may
be distinctly unpleasant and require considerable effort to
accomplish. Practically every one who has learned to smoke recalls
more or less vividly the physical disturbance caused by the first
attempt and how even succeeding smokes for some time, far from being
pleasant, required distinct effort and no little self-control. After a
time, the desire to smoke becomes so ingrained that a man is literally
made quite miserable by the lack of it and finds himself almost
incapable of doing anything else until he has had his smoke.
{45}
Even more of an effort is required to establish the habit of chewing
tobacco, and it is even more difficult to break when once it has been
formed. Any one who has seen the discomfort and even torments endured
by a man who, after he had chewed tobacco for many years, tried to
stop will appreciate fully what a firm hold the habit has obtained. I
have known a serious business man who almost had to give up business,
who lost his sleep and his appetite and went through a nervous crisis
merely by trying to break the habit of chewing tobacco.
In the Orient they chew betel nut. It is an extremely hot material
which burns the tongue and which a man can stand for only a very short
time when he first tries it. After a while, however, he finds a
pleasant stimulation of sensation in the constant presence of the
biting betel nut in his mouth; he craves it and cannot do his work so
well without it. He will ever advert to its use and will be restless
without it. He continues to use it in spite of the fact that the
intense irritation set up by the biting qualities of the substance
causes cancer of the tongue to occur ten times as frequently among
those who chew betel nut as among the rest of the population. Not all
{46} those who chew it get cancer, for some die from other causes
before there is time for the cancer to develop, and some seem to
possess immunity against the irritation. The betel nut chewer ignores
all this, proceeds to form the habit, urged thereto by the force of
example, and then lets himself drift along, hoping that it will have
no bad effects.
The alcohol and drug habits are quite as significant in shortening
life as betel nut and yet men take them up quite confident in the
beginning that _they_ will not fall victims, and then find themselves
enmeshed. It is probable that the direct physical effects of none of
these substances shorten life to a marked degree unless they are
indulged in to very great excess, but the moral hazards which they
produce, accidents, injuries of various kinds, exposure to disease,
all these shorten life. Men know this very well, and yet persist in
the formation of these habits.
Any habit, no matter how strong, can be broken if the individual
really wishes to break it, provided the subject of it is not actually
insane or on the way to the insane asylum. He need only get a motive
strong enough to rouse his will, secure a consciousness of his own
power, and then the habit can be broken. {47} After all, it must never
be forgotten that the only thing necessary in order to break a habit
effectively is to refuse to perform a single act of it, the next time
one is tempted. That breaks the habit and makes refusal easier and one
need only continue the refusal until the temptation ceases.
Men who have not drawn a sober breath for years have sometimes come to
the realization of the fools that they were making of themselves, the
injury they were doing their relatives, or perhaps have been touched
by a child's words or some religious motive, and after that they have
never touched liquor again. Father Theobald Mathew's wonderful work in
this regard among the Irish in the first half of the nineteenth
century has been repeated by many temperance or total abstinence
advocates in more recent generations. I have known a confirmed
drunkard reason himself into a state of mind from which he was able to
overcome his habit very successfully, though his reasoning consisted
of nothing more than the recognition of the fact that suggestion was
the root of his craving for alcohol. His father had been a drunkard
and he had received so many warnings from all his older relatives and
had himself so come to dwell on {48} the possible danger of his own
formation of the habit that he had suggested himself into the frame of
mind in which he took to drink. I have known a physician on whom some
half a dozen different morphine cures had been tried--always followed
by a relapse--cure himself by an act of his own will and stay cured
ever since because of an incident that stirred him deeply enough to
arouse his will properly to activity. One day his little boy of about
four was in his office when father prepared to give himself one of his
usual injections of morphine. The little boy gave very close attention
to all his father's manipulations, and as the doctor was hurrying to
keep an appointment, he did not notice the intent eye witness of the
proceedings. Just as the needle was pushed home and the piston shot
down in the barrel, the little boy rushed over to his father and said,
"Oh, Daddy, do that to me." Apparently this close childish observer
had noted something of the look of satisfaction that came over his
father's face as he felt the fluid sink into his tissues. It is almost
needless to say that the shock the father received was enough to break
his morphine habit for good and all. It simply released his will and
then he found that if he {49} really wanted to, he could accomplish
what the various cures for the morphine habit only lead up to--and in
his case unsuccessfully--the exercise of his own will power.
The word "habit" suggests nearly always, unfortunately, the thought of
bad habits, just as the word "passion" implies, with many people, evil
tendencies. But it must not be forgotten that there are good passions
and good habits that are as helpful for the accomplishment of what is
best in life as bad passions and bad habits are harmful. A repetition
of acts is needed for the formation of good habits just as for the
establishment of customs of evil. Usually, however, and this must not
be forgotten, the beginning of a good habit is easier than the
beginning of a bad habit. Once formed, the good habits are even more
beneficial than the bad habits are harmful. It is almost as hard to
break a good habit as a bad one, provided that it has been continued
for a sufficient length of time to make that groove in the nervous
system which underlies all habit. We cannot avoid forming habits and
the question is, shall we form good or bad habits? Good habits
preserve health, make life easier and happier; bad habits have the
opposite effect, though {50} there is some countervailing personal
element that tempts to their formation and persistence.
Every failure to do what we should has its unfortunate effect upon us.
We get into a state in which it is extremely difficult for us to do
the right things. We have to overcome not only the original inertia of
nature, but also a contrary habit. If we do not follow our good
impulses, the worse ones get the upper hand. As Professor James said,
for we must always recur to him when we want to have the clear
expression of many of these ideas:
"Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of
evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch
from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity
will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention,
presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are but
two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they
correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that
they do depend on brain processes at all and are not pure acts of
the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject
to the law of habit, which is a material law."
It must not be forgotten that we mold not {51} alone what we call
character, but that we manifestly produce effects upon our tissues
that are lasting. Indeed it is these that count the most, for health
at least. It is the physical basis of will and intellect that is
grooved by what we call habit. As Doctor Carpenter says:
"Our nervous systems have grown to the way in which they have been
exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or
folded, tends to fall forever afterwards into the same identical
fold."
Permitting exceptions to occur when we are forming a habit is almost
necessarily disturbing. The classical figure is that it is like
letting fall a ball of string which we have been winding. It undoes in
a moment all that we have accomplished in a long while. As Professor
Bain has said it so much better than I could, I prefer to quote him:
"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from
the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile
powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the
other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation never
to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of
many conquests on the {52} right. The essential precaution,
therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one
may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has
fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the
opposition under any circumstances."
This means training the will by a series of difficult acts,
accomplished in spite of the effort they require, but which gradually
become easier from repeated performance until habit replaces nature
and dominates the situation.
Serious thinkers who faced humanity's problems squarely and devoted
themselves to finding solutions for them had worked out this formula
of the need of will training long ago, and it was indeed a principal
characteristic of medieval education. The old monastic schools were
founded on the idea that training of the will and the formation of
good habits was ever so much more important than the accumulation of
information. They frankly called the human will the highest faculty of
mankind and felt that to neglect it would be a serious defect in
education. The will can only be trained by the accomplishment of
difficult things day after day until its energies are aroused and the
man becomes conscious of his own powers and the {53} ability to use
them whenever he really wishes. There was a time not so long since,
and there are still voices raised to that purport, when it was the
custom to scoff at the will training of the older time and above all
the old-fashioned suggestion that mortifications of various
kinds--that is, the doing of unpleasant things just for the sake of
doing them--should be practiced because of the added will power thus
acquired. The failure of our modern education which neglected this
special attention to the will is now so patent as to make everyone
feel that there must be a recurrence to old time ideas once more.
The formation of proper habits should, then, be the main occupation of
the early years. This will assure health as well as happiness, barring
the accidents that may come to any human being. Good habits make
proper living easy and after a time even pleasant, though there may
have been considerable difficulty in the performance of the acts
associated with them at the beginning. Indeed, the organism becomes so
accustomed to their performance after a time that it becomes actually
something of a trial to omit them, and they are missed.
Education consists much more in such {54} training of the will than in
storing the intellect with knowledge, though the latter idea has been
unfortunately the almost exclusive policy in our education in recent
generations. We are waking up to the fact that diminution of power has
been brought about by striving for information instead of for the
increase of will energy.
Professor Conklin of Princeton, in his volume on "Heredity and
Environment", emphasized the fact that "Will is indeed the supreme
human faculty, the whole mind in action, the internal stimulus which
may call forth all the capacities and powers." He had said just before
this: "It is one of the most serious indictments against modern
systems of education that they devote so much attention to the
training of the memory and intellect and so little attention to the
training of the will, upon the proper development of which so much
depends."
Nor must it be thought that the idea behind this training of the will
is in any sense medievally ascetic and old-fashioned and that it does
not apply to our modern conditions and modes of thinking. Professor
Huxley would surely be the one man above all whom any one in our times
would be least likely to think of {55} as mystical in his ways or
medieval in his tendencies. In his address on "A Liberal Education and
Where to Find It", delivered before the South London Workingmen's
College some forty years ago, in emphasizing what he thought was the
real purpose of education, he dwelt particularly on the training of
the will. He defined a liberal education not as so many people might
think of it in terms of the intellect, but rather in terms of the
will. He said that a liberal education was one "which has not only
prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural
laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards
which nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties." And then
he added:
"That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so
trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and
does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is
capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all
its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order, ready,
like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the
gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is
stored with a knowledge of the great {56} and fundamental truths of
nature and of the laws of her operations; one who is no stunted
ascetic but who is full of life and fire, but whose passions are
trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender
conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or
of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.
"Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education;
for he is, completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature."
This is the liberal education in habits of order and power that every
one must strive for, so that all possible energies may be available
for the rewards of good health. Details of the habits that mean much
for health must be reserved for subsequent chapters, but it must be
appreciated in any consideration of the relation of the will to health
that good habits formed as early as possible in life and maintained
conservatively as the years advance are the mainstay of health and the
power to do work.
{57}
CHAPTER IV
SYMPATHY
"Never could maintain his part but in the force of his will."
_Much Ado about Nothing_.
A great French physician once combined in the same sentence two
expressions that to most people of the modern time would seem utter
paradoxes. "Rest," he said, "is the most dangerous of remedies, never
to be employed for the treatment of disease, except in careful doses,
under the direction of a physician and rarely for any but sufferers
from organic disease"; while "sympathy", he added, "is the most
insidiously harmful of anodynes, seldom doing any good except for the
passing moment, and often working a deal of harm to the patient."
With the first of these expressions, we have nothing to do here, but
the second is extremely important in any consideration of the place of
the will in human life. Nothing is so prone {58} to weaken the will,
to keep it from exerting its full influence in maintaining vital
resistance, and as a result, to relax not only the moral but the
physical fiber of men and women as misplaced sympathy. It has almost
exactly the same place in the moral life that narcotics have in the
physical, and it must be employed with quite as much nicety of
judgment and discrimination.
Sympathy of itself is a beautiful thing in so far as it implies that
_suffering with_ another which its Greek etymology signifies. In so
far as it is pity, however, it tends to lessen our power to stand up
firmly under the trials that are sure to come, and is just to that
extent harmful rather than helpful. There is a definite reaction
against it in all normal individuals. No one wants to be pitied. We
feel naturally a little degraded by it. In so far as it creates a
feeling of self-pity, it is particularly to be deprecated, and indeed
this is so important a subject in all that concerns the will to be
well and to get well that it has been reserved for a special chapter.
What we would emphasize here is the harm that is almost invariably
done by the well-meant but so often ill-directed sympathy of friends
and relatives which proves relaxing of moral {59} purpose and hampers
the will in its activities, physical as well as ethical.
Human nature has long recognized this and has organized certain
customs of life with due reference to it. We all know that when
children fall and even hurt themselves, the thing to do is not to
express our sympathy and sorrow for them, even though we feel it
deeply, but unless their injury is severe, to let them pick themselves
up and divert their minds from their hurts by suggesting that they
have broken the floor, or hurt it. For the less sympathy expressed,
the shorter will be the crying, and the sooner the child will learn to
take the hard knocks of life without feeling that it is especially
abused or suffering any more than comes to most people. Unfortunately,
it is not always the custom to do the same thing with the children of
a larger growth. This is particularly true when there is but a single
child in the family, or perhaps two, when a good deal of sympathy is
likely to be wasted on their ills which are often greatly increased by
their self-consciousness and their dwelling on them. Diversion of
mind, not pity, is needed. The advice to do the next thing and not cry
over spilt milk is ever so much better than sentimental recalling of
the past.
{60}
Many a young man who went to war learned the precious lesson that
sympathy, though he might crave it, instead of doing him good would do
harm. Many a manly character was rounded out into firm self-control
and independence by military discipline and the lack of anything like
sentimentality in camp and military life. A good many mothers whose
boys had been the objects of their special solicitude felt very sorry
to think that they would have to submit to the hardships and trials
involved in military discipline. Most of them who were solicitous in
this way were rather inclined to feel that their boy might not be able
to stand up under the rigidities of military life and hoped at most
that he would not be seriously harmed. They could not think that early
rising, hard work, severe physical tasks, tiring almost to exhaustion,
with plain, hearty, yet rather coarse food, eaten in slapdash fashion,
would be quite the thing for their boy of whom they had taken so much
care. Not a few of them were surprised to find how the life under
these difficult circumstances proved practically always beneficial.
I remember distinctly that when the soldiers were sent to the Mexican
border the mother of {61} a soldier from a neighboring State remarked
rather anxiously to me that she did not know what would happen to Jack
under the severe discipline incident to military life. He had always
gone away for five or six weeks in the summer either to the mountains
or to the seashore, and the Mexican border, probably the most trying
summer climate in the United States, represented the very opposite of
this. Besides, there was the question of the army rations; Jack was an
only son with five sisters. Most of them were older than he, and so
Jack had been coddled as though by half a dozen mothers. He was
underweight, he had a rather finicky appetite, he was capricious in
his eating both as to quantity and quality, and was supposed to be a
sufferer from some form of nervous indigestion. Personally, I felt
that what Jack needed was weight, but I had found it very hard to
increase his weight. He was particularly prone to eat a very small
breakfast, and his mother once told me that whenever he was at home,
she always prepared his breakfast for him with her own hands. This did
not improve matters much, however, for Jack was likely to take a small
portion of the meat cooked for him, refuse to touch the potatoes, and
eat marmalade and toast with {62} his coffee and nothing more. No
wonder that he was twenty pounds underweight or that his mother should
be solicitous as to what might happen to her Jack in army life at the
Border.
I agreed with her in that but there were some things that I knew would
not happen to Jack. His breakfast, for instance, would not be
particularly cooked for him, and he might take or leave exactly what
was prepared for every one else. Neither would the Government cook
come out and sit beside Jack while he was at breakfast and tempt him
to eat, as his mother had always done. I knew, too, that at other
meals, while the food would be abundant, it would usually be rather
coarse, always plain, and there would be nothing very tempting about
it unless you had your appetite with you. If ever there is a place
where appetite is the best sauce, it is surely where one is served
with army food.
I need scarcely tell what actually happened to Jack, for it was
exactly what happened to a good many Jacks whose mothers were equally
afraid of the effects of camp life on them. Amid the temptations of
home food, Jack had remained persistently underweight. Eating an army
ration with the sauce of appetite due to prolonged physical efforts in
the outdoor {63} air every day, Jack gained more than twenty pounds in
weight, in spite of the supposedly insalubrious climate of the Border
and the difficult conditions under which he had to live. It was
literally the best summer vacation that Jack had ever spent, though if
the suggestion had ever been made that this was the sort of summer
vacation that would do him good, the idea would have been scoffed at
as impractical, if not absolutely impossible.
Homer suggested that a mollycoddle character whom he introduces into
the "Iliad" owed something of his lack of manly stamina to the fact
that he had six sisters at home, and an Irish friend once translated
the passage by saying that the young man in question was "one of seven
sisters." This had been something of Jack's trouble. He had been asked
always whether he changed his underwear at the different seasons,
whether he wore the wristlets that sisterly care provided for him,
whether he put on his rubbers when he went out in damp weather and
carried his umbrella when it was threatening rain, and all the rest.
He got away from all this sympathetic solicitude in army life and was
ever so much better for it.
It is extremely difficult to draw the line {64} where the sympathy
that is helpful because it is encouraging ends, and sentimental pity
which discourages begins. There is always danger of overdoing and it
is extremely important that growing young folks particularly should be
allowed to bear their ills without help and learn to find resources
within themselves that will support them. The will can thus be
buttressed to withstand the difficulties of life, make them much
easier to bear, and actually lessen their effect. Ten growing young
folks have been seriously hurt by ill-judged sympathy for every one
that has been discouraged by the absence of sympathy or by being made
to feel that he must take the things of life as they come and stand
them without grouchy complaint or without looking for sympathy.
This is particularly true as regards those with any nervous or
hysterical tendencies, for they readily learn to look for sympathy.
The most precious lesson of the war for physicians has been that which
is emphasized in the chapter on "The Will and the War Psychoneuroses."
There was an immense amount of so-called "shell-shock" which really
represented functional neurotic conditions such as in women used to be
called hysteria. At the {65} beginning of the war there was a good
deal of hearty sympathy with it, and patients were encouraged by the
physicians and then by the nurses and other patients in the hospital
to tell over and over again how their condition developed. It was
found after a time that the sympathy thus manifested always did harm.
The frequent repetition of their stories added more and more
suggestive elements to the patients' condition, and they grew worse
instead of better. It was found that the proper curative treatment was
to make just as little as possible of their condition, to treat them
firmly but with assurance--once it had been definitely determined that
no organic nervous trouble was present--and to bring about a cure of
whatever symptoms they had at a single sitting by changing their
attitude of mind towards themselves.
Some of the patients proved refractory and for these isolation and
rather severe discipline were occasionally necessary. The isolation
was so complete as to deprive them not only of companionship but also
of reading and writing materials and the solace of their tobacco.
Severe cases were sometimes treated by strong faradic currents of
electricity which were extremely painful. Patients who insisted that
{66} they could not move their muscles were simply made to jump by an
electric shock, thus proving to them that they could use the muscles,
and then they were required to continue their use.
Those suffering from shell-shock deafness and muteness were told that
an electrode would be applied to their larynx or the neighborhood of
their ear and when they felt pain from it, that was a sign that they
were able to talk and to hear if they wished, and that they must do
so. Relapses had to be guarded against by suggestion, and where
relapses became refractory and stronger currents of electricity to ear
and larynx were deemed inadvisable, the strict isolation treatment
usually proved effective.
In a word, discipline and not sympathy was the valuable mode of
treating them. Sympathy did them harm as it invariably does. The world
has recognized this truism always, but we need to learn the lesson
afresh, or the will power is undermined. Character is built up by
standing the difficult things of life without looking for the narcotic
of sympathy or any other anaesthetizing material. These are "hard
sayings," to use a Scriptural expression, but they represent the
accumulation of wisdom of human experience. Sympathy can be {67}
almost as destructive of individual morale as the dreads, and it is
extremely important that it should not be allowed to sap will energy.
In our time above all, when the training of the will has been
neglected, though it is by far the most important factor in education,
this lesson with regard to the harmful effect of sympathy needs to be
emphasized.
For nervous people, that is, for those who have, either from
inheritance or so much oftener from environment, yielded to
circumstances rather than properly opposed them, sympathy is quite as
dangerous as opium. George Eliot once replied to a friend who asked
her what was duty, that duty consisted in facing the hard things in
life without taking opium.
Healthy living to a great extent depends on standing what has to be
borne from the bodies that we carry around with us without looking for
sympathy. It has often been emphasized that human beings are eminently
lonely. The great experiences of life and above all, death and
suffering, we have to face by ourselves and no one can help us. We may
not be, as Emerson suggested, "infinitely repellent particles", but at
all the profoundest moments of life we feel our alone-ness. The more
{68} that we learn to depend bravely on ourselves and the less we seek
outside support for our characters, the better for us and our power to
stand whatever comes to us in life.
Physical ills are always lessened by courageously facing them and are
always increased by cringing before them. The one who dreads suffers
both before and during the time of the pain and thus doubles his
discomfort. We must stand alone in the matter and sympathy is prone to
unman us. Looking for sympathy is a tendency to that self-pity which
is treated in a subsequent chapter and which does more to increase
discomfort in illness, exaggerate symptoms, and lower resistive
vitality than anything else, in the psychic order at least.
Suffering is always either constructive or destructive of character.
It is constructive when the personal reaction suffices to lessen and
make it bearable. It is destructive whenever there is a looking for
sympathy or a leaning on some one else. Character counts in
withstanding disease, and even in the midst of epidemics, according to
many well-grounded traditions, those who are afraid contract the
disease sooner than others and usually suffer more severely. Sympathy
must not be allowed to produce any such effect as this.
{69}
CHAPTER V
SELF-PITY
"The will dotes that is attributive
To what infectiously itself affects."
_Troilus and Cressida_.
The worst brake on the will to be well is undoubtedly the habit that
some people have of pitying themselves and feeling that they are
eminently deserving of the pity of others because of the trials, real
or supposed, which they have to undergo. Instead of realizing how much
better off they are than the great majority of people--for most of the
typical self-pitiers are not real subjects for pity--they keep looking
at those whom they fondly suppose to be happier than themselves and
then proceed to get into a mood of commiseration with themselves
because of their ill health--real or imaginary--or uncomfortable
surroundings. Just as soon as men or women assume this state of mind,
it becomes extremely difficult for them to stand any real {70} trials
that appear, and above all, it becomes even more difficult for them to
react properly against the affections of one kind or another that are
almost sure to come. Self-pity is ever a serious hamperer of resistive
vitality.
A great many things in modern life have distinctly encouraged this
practice of self-pity and conscious commiseration of one's state until
it has become almost a commonplace of modern life for those who feel
that they are suffering, especially if they belong to what may be
called the sophisticated classes. We have become extremely sensitive
as a consequence about contact with suffering. Editors of magazines
and readers for publishing houses often refuse in our time to accept
stories that have unhappy endings, because people do not care to read
them, it is said. The story may have some suffering in it and even
severe hardships, especially if these can be used for purposes of
dramatic climax, but by the end of the story everything must have
turned out "just lovely", and it must be understood that suffering is
only a passing matter and merely a somewhat unpleasant prelude to
inevitable happiness.
Almost needless to say, this is not the way of life as it must be
lived in what many {71} generations of men have agreed in calling
"this vale of tears." For a great many people have to suffer severely
and without any prospect of relief--none of us quite escape the
necessity of suffering--and as some one has said, all human life,
inasmuch as there is death in it, must be considered a tragedy. The
old Greeks did not hesitate, in spite of their deep appreciation of
the beauty of nature and cordial enthusiasm for the joy of living,
even to emphasize the tragedy in life. They were perhaps inclined to
think that the sense of contrast produced by tragedy heightened the
actual enjoyment of life and that indeed all pleasure was founded
rather on contrast than positive enjoyment. One may not be ready to
agree with the saying that the only thing that makes life worth while
is contrast, but certainly suffering as a background enhances
happiness as nothing else can.
Aristotle declared that tragedy purges life, that is, that only
through the lens of death and misfortune could one see life free from
the dross of the sordid and merely material to which it was attached.
His meaning was that tragedy lifted man above the selfishness of mere
individualism, and by showing him the misfortunes of others prepared
him to struggle {72} for himself when misfortune might come, as it
almost inevitably would; and at the same time lifted him above the
trifles of daily life into a higher, broader sphere of living, where
he better realized himself and his powers.
For man is distinctly prone to forget about death and suffering, and
when he does, to become eminently selfish and forgetful of the rights
of others and his duties towards them. The French have a saying,
consisting of but four words and an intervening shrug of the
shoulders, that is extremely illuminating. They quote as the
expression of the usual thought of men when brought face to face with
the fact that people are dying all around them, "_On meurt--les
autres!_" "People die--Oh, yes (with an expressive shrug of the
shoulders), other people!" We refuse to recognize the fact that we too
must go until that is actually forced upon us by advancing years or by
some incurable disease. As for suffering, a great many people have
come almost to resent that they should be asked to suffer, and
character dissolves in self-pity as a result.
Instead of the constant, continuous reading of what may be called
Sybaritic literature--for it is said that the Sybarite finds it
impossible to sleep if there is a crushed rose leaf next {73} his
skin--instead of being absorbed in the literature which emphasizes the
pleasures of life and pushes its pains into the background, young
people, and especially those of the better-to-do classes, should be
taught from their early years to read the lives of those who have
endured successfully hardships of various kinds and have succeeded in
getting satisfaction out of their accomplishment in life, despite all
the suffering that was involved. These are human beings like
ourselves, and what mortal has done, other mortals can do.
There was a school of American psychologists before the war who had
come to recognize the value of that old-fashioned means of
self-discipline of mind, the reading of the lives of the saints. For
those to whom that old-fashioned practice may seem too reactionary,
there are the lives and adventures of our African and Asiatic
travelers and our polar explorers as a resource.
War books have been a godsend for our generation in this regard. They
have led people to contemplate the hardest kind of suffering--and very
often in connection with those who are nearest and dearest to them--
and thus made them understand something of the possibilities of human
nature to withstand {74} trials and sufferings. As a result they have
been trained not to make too much of their own trivial trials, as they
soon learned to recognize them in the face of the awful hardships that
this war involved. What Belgium endured was bad enough, while the
experiences of Poland, Servia, Armenia were an ascending scale of
horrors, but also of humanity's power to stand suffering.
Life in the larger families of the olden times afforded more
opportunities for the proper teaching of the place of suffering than
in the smaller families of the modern time. Older children, as they
grew up, had before them the example of mother's trials and hardships
in bearing and rearing children, and so came to understand better the
place of hard things in life. In a large family it was very rare when
one or more of the members did not die, and thus growing youth was
brought in contact with the greatest mystery in life, that of death.
Very frequently at least one of the household and sometimes more, had
to go through a period of severe suffering with which the others were
brought in daily contact. It is sometimes thought in modern times that
such intimacy with those who are suffering takes the joy out of life
for those who {75} are young, but any one who thinks so should consult
a person who has had the actual experience; while occasionally it may
be found that some one with a family history of this kind may think
that he or she was rendered melancholy by it, nine out of ten or even
more will frankly say that they feel sure that they were benefited.
There is nothing in the world that broadens and deepens the
significance of life like intimate contact with suffering, if not in
person, then in those who are near and dear to us.
As a physician, I have often felt that I should like to take people
who are constantly complaining of their little sorrows and trials, who
are downhearted over some minor ailment, who sometimes suffer from
fits of depression precipitated by nothing more, perhaps, than a dark
day or a little humid weather, or possibly even a petty social
disappointment, and put them in contact with cancer patients or others
who are suffering severely day by day, yes, hour by hour, night and
day, and yet who are joyful and often a source of joy to others. Let
us not forget that nearly one hundred thousand people die every year
from cancer in this country alone.
As a physician, I have often found that a {76} chronic invalid in a
house became the center of attraction for the whole household, and
that particularly when it was a woman, whether mother or elder sister,
all of the other members brought their troubles to her and went away
feeling better for what she said to them. I have seen this not in a
few exceptional instances, but so often as to know that it is a rule
of life. Chronic invalids often radiate joy and happiness, while
perfectly well people who suffer from minor ills of the body and mind
are frequently a source of grumpiness, utterly lack sympathy, and are
impossible as companions. An American woman, bedridden for over thirty
years, has organized by correspondence one of the most beautiful
charities of our time.
Pity properly restricted to practical helpfulness without any
sentimentality is a beautiful thing. There is always a danger,
however, of its arousing in its object that self-pity which is so
eminently unlovely and which has so often the direct tendency to
increase rather than decrease whatever painful conditions are present.
Crying over oneself is always to be considered at least hysterical.
Crying, except over a severe loss, is almost unpardonable. {77} It is
often said that a good cry, like a rainstorm, clears the atmosphere of
murk and the dark elements of life, but it is dangerous to have
recourse to it. It is a sign of lack of character almost invariably
and when indulged in to any extent will almost surely result in
deterioration of the power to withstand the trials of life, whatever
they may be.
Professor William James has suggested that not only should men and
women stand the things that come to them in the natural course of
events, but they should even go out and seek certain things hard to
bear with the idea of increasing their power to withstand the
unpleasant things of life. This is, of course, a very old idea in
humanity, and the ascetics from the earliest days of Christianity
taught the doctrine of self-inflicted suffering in order to increase
the power of resistance.
It is usually said that the principal idea which the hermits and
anchorites and the saintly personages of the early Middle Ages, of
whose mortifications we have heard so much, had in inflicting pain on
themselves was to secure merit for the hereafter. Something of that
undoubtedly was in their minds, but their main purpose was quite
literally ascetic. _Ascesis_, from the Greek, means in its strict {78}
etymology just exercise. They were exercising their power to stand
trials and even sufferings, so that when these events came, as
inevitably they would, seeing that we carry round with us what St.
Paul called "this body of our death," they would be prepared for them.
Practically any psychologist of modern times who has given this
subject any serious thought will recognize, as did Professor James,
the genuine psychology of human nature that lies behind these ascetic
practices. Nothing that I know is so thoroughgoing a remedy for
self-pity as the actual seeking at times of painful things in order to
train oneself to bear them. The old-fashioned use of disciplines, that
is, little whips which were used so vigorously sometimes over the
shoulders as to draw blood, or the wearing of chains which actually
penetrated the skin and produced quite serious pain no longer seems
absurd, once it is appreciated that this may be a means of bracing up
character and making the real trials and hardships of life much easier
than would otherwise be the case.
Not that human nature must not be expected to yield a little under
severe trials and bend before the blasts of adverse fortune, but {79}
that there should not be that tendency to exaggerate one's personal
feelings which has unfortunately become characteristic of at least the
better-to-do classes in our time. Not that we would encourage stony
grief, but that sorrow must be restrained and, above all, must not be
so utterly selfish as to be forgetful of others.
Tears should, to a large extent, be reserved, as they are in most
perfectly normal individuals, for joyous rather than sad occasions,
for no one ever was supremely joyful without having tears in the eyes.
It is when we feel most sympathetic to humanity that the gift of tears
comes to us, and no feeling is quite so completely satisfying as comes
from the tears of joy. Mothers who have heard of their boy's bravery,
its recognition by those above him, and its reward by proper symbols,
have had tears come welling to their eyes, while their hearts were
stirred so deeply with sensations of joy and pride that probably they
have never before felt quite so happy.
{80}
CHAPTER VI
AVOIDANCE OF CONSCIOUS USE OF THE WILL
"Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners."
_Othello_.
Doctor Austin O'Malley, in his little volume, "Keystones of Thought",
says: "When you are conscious of your stomach or your will you are
ill." We all appreciate thoroughly, as the result of modern progress
in the knowledge of the influences of the mind on the body, how true
is the first part of this saying, but comparatively few people realize
the truth of the second part. The latter portion of this maxim is most
important for our consideration. It should always be in the minds of
those who want to use their own wills either for the purpose of making
themselves well, or keeping themselves healthy, but above all, should
never be forgotten by those who want to help others get over various
ills that are manifestly due in whole or in part to the failure to use
the vital energies in the body as they should be employed.
{81}
Conscious use of the will, except at the beginning of a series of
activities, is always a mistake. It is extremely wasteful of internal
energy. It adds greatly to the difficulty of accomplishing whatever is
undertaken. It includes, above all, watching ourselves do things,
constantly calculating how much we are accomplishing and whether we
are doing all that we should be doing, and thus makes useless demands
on power partly by diversion of attention, partly by impairment of
concentration, but above all by adding to the friction because of the
inspection that is at work.
The old kitchen saw is "a watched kettle never boils." The real
significance of the expression is of course that it seems to take so
long for the water to boil that we become impatient while watching and
it looks to us as though the boiling process would really never occur.
This is still more strikingly evident when we are engaged in watching
our own activities and wondering whether they are as efficient as they
should be. The lengthening of time under these circumstances is an
extremely important factor in bringing about tiredness. Ask any human
being unaccustomed to note the passage of time to tell you when two
minutes have elapsed; {82} inevitably he will suggest at the end of
thirty to forty seconds that the two minutes must be up. Only by
counting his pulse or by going through some regular mechanical process
will he be enabled to appreciate the passage of time in anything like
its proper course. When watched thus, time seems to pass ever so much
more slowly than it would otherwise.
It is extremely important then that people should not acquire the
impression that they must be consciously using their will to bring
themselves into good health and keep themselves there, for that will
surely defeat their purpose. What is needed is a training of the will
to do things by a succession of harder and harder tasks until the
ordinary acts of life seem comparatively easy. Intellectual persuasion
as to the efficiency of the will in this matter means very little. The
ordinary feeling that reasoning means much in such matters is a
fallacy. Much thinking about them is only disturbing of action as a
rule and Hamlet's expression that the "native hue of resolution is
sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" is a striking bit of
psychology.
Shakespeare had no illusions with regard to the place of the will in
life and more than any English author has emphasized it. I have {83}
ventured to illustrate this by quotations from him under each chapter
heading, but there are many more quite as applicable that might
readily be found. He knew above all how easy it was for human beings
to lessen the power of their wills and has told us of "the cloy'd will
that satiateth unsatisfied desire" and "the bridles of our wills", and
has given us such adjectives as "benumbed" and "neutral" and "doting",
which demonstrates his recognition of how men weaken their wills by
over-deliberation.
The mode of training in the army is of course founded on this mode of
thinking. The young men in the United States Army want to accomplish
every iota of their duty and are not only willing but anxious to do
everything that is expected of them. There were some mighty difficult
tasks ahead of them over in Europe and our method of preparing the men
was not by emphasizing their duty and dinning into their ears and
minds how great the difficulty would be and how they must nerve
themselves for the task. Such a mode of preparation would probably
have been discouraging rather than helpful. But they were trained in
exercises of various kinds in an absolutely regular life under plain
living in the {84} midst of hard work until their wills responded to
the word of command quite unconsciously and immediately without any
need of further prompting. Their bodies were trained until every
available source of energy was at command, so that when they _wanted_
to do things they set about them without more ado, and as they were
used to being fatigued they were not constantly engaged in dreading
lest they should hurt themselves, or fostering fears that they might
exhaust their energies or that their tiredness, even when apparently
excessive, would mean anything more than a passing state that rest
would repair completely.
If at every emergency of their life at war soldiers had to go through
a series of conscious persuasions to wake up their will and set their
energies at work, and if they had to occupy themselves every time in
presenting motives why this activity should not be delayed, then
military discipline, at least in so far as it involves prompt
obedience, would almost inevitably be considerable of a joke. What is
needed is unthinking, immediate obedience, and this can be secured
only by the formation of deeply graven habits which enable a man to
set about the next thing that duty calls for at once.
{85}
Every action that we perform is the result of an act of the will, but
we do not have to advert to that as a rule; whenever any one gets into
a state of mind where it is necessary to be constantly adverting to
it, then, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, there is
something the matter with the will. The faculty is being hampered in
its action by consciousness, and such hampering leads to a great waste
of energy.
The will is the great, unconscious faculty in us. By far the greater
part of what has come unfortunately to be called the unconscious and
the subconscious and that has occupied so much of the attention of
modern writers on psychological subjects is really the will at work.
It attains its results we know not how, and it is prompted to their
accomplishment in ways that are often very difficult for us to
understand. Its effects are often spoken of as due to the submerged
self or the subliminal self or the other self, but it is only in rare
and pathological cases as a rule that such expressions are justified
once the place of the will is properly recognized.
It is often said, for instance, that the power some people have of
waking after a certain {86} period of sleep at night or after a short
nap during the daytime, a power that a great many more people would
possess if only they deliberately practised it, is due to the
subconsciousness or the subliminal personality of the individual which
wakes him up at the determined time. Why those terms should be used
when other things are accomplished by the human will just as
mysteriously is rather difficult to understand. It is well recognized
that if an individual in the ordinary waking state wants to do
something after the lapse of an hour or so he will do it, provided his
will is really awake to the necessity of accomplishing it. It is true
that he may become so absorbed in his current occupation as to miss
the time, but such abstraction usually means that he was not
sufficiently interested in the duty that was to be performed as to
keep the engagement with himself, or else that he is an individual in
whom the intellectual over-shadows the voluntary life. We speak of him
as an impractical man.
We all know the danger there is in putting off calling some one by
telephone on being told that "the line is busy", for not infrequently
it will happen that several hours will elapse before we think of the
matter again {87} and then perhaps it may be too late. If we set a
definite time limit with ourselves, however, then our will will prompt
us quite as effectively, though quite as inexplicably, at the
expiration of that time as it awakes those who have resolved to be
aroused at a predetermined moment. We may miss our telephone
engagement with ourselves, but we practically never miss an important
train, because having deeply impressed upon ourselves the necessity
for not missing this, our will arouses us to activity in good time.
There is not the slightest necessity, however, for appealing to the
unconscious or the subconscious in this. It is true that there is a
wonderful sentinel within us that awakes us from daydreams or disturbs
the ordinary course of some occupation to turn our attention to the
next important duty that we should perform. We know that this sentinel
is quite apart from our consciousness; but the power we have of
setting ourselves to doing anything is exemplified in very much the
same way. When I want a book, I do not know what it is that sets my
muscles in motion and brings me to a shelf and then directs my
attention to choosing the one I shall take down and consult. It is an
unconscious activity, but not the activity of {88} unconsciousness,
which is only a contradiction in terms. [Footnote 4]
[Footnote 4: It is true that there is a particular phase of our
intellectual effort included under the modern terms unconscious or
subconscious that is mysterious enough to deserve a special name,
but we already have an excellent term for this quality which is not
vague but thoroughly descriptive of its activity. This is
intuition,--a word that has been in use for nearly a thousand years
now and signifies the immediate perception of a truth,--by a flash
as it were. We may know nothing about a subject and may have only
begun to think about it, when there flashes on us a truth that has
perhaps never occurred to any one else and certainly has never been
in our minds before. It has been suggested in recent years that such
flashes of intelligence are due to the secondary personality or the
subliminal self or the other self, and it is often added that it is
the development of our knowledge of these phases of psychology that
represents modern progress in the science of mind. Only the term for
it is new, however, for intuition has been the subject of special
intensive study for a long while. Indeed, the reason why the
old-time poet appealed to the muses for aid and the modern poet
suggests inspiration as the source of his poetic thought, is because
both of them knew that their best thoughts flash on them, not as the
result of long and hard thinking, but by some process in which with
the greatest facility come perceptions that even they themselves are
surprised to learn that they have. To say that such things come from
the unconscious is simply to ignore this wonderful power of original
thought, that is, primary perception. Emerson suggested that
intuition represented all the knowledge that came without tuition,
as if this were the etymology, and the hint is excellent for the
meaning, though the real derivation of the word has no relation to
tuition. To attribute these original thoughts to the unconscious or
any partly conscious faculty in us is to ignore a great deal of
careful study of psychology before our time. It is besides to
entangle oneself in the absurdity of discussing an unconscious
consciousness.]
While many people are inclined to feel almost helpless in the presence
of the idea that it is their unconscious selves that enable them {89}
to do things or initiate modes of activity, the feeling is quite
different when we substitute for that the word "will." All of us
recognize that our wills can be trained to do things, and while at
first it may require a conscious effort, we can by the formation of
habits not only make them easy, but often delightful and sometimes
quite indispensable to our sense of well being. Walking is extremely
difficult at the beginning, when its movements are consciously
performed, but it becomes a very satisfying sort of exercise after a
while and then almost literally a facile, nearly indispensable
activity of daily life, so that we feel the need for it, if we are
deprived of it.
This has to be done with regard to the activities that make for
health. We have to form habits that render them easy, pleasant, and
even necessary for our good feelings. This can be done, as has been
suggested in the chapter on habits, but we have to avoid any such
habit as that of consciously using the will. That is a bad habit that
some people let themselves drop into but it should be corrected.
Having set our activities to work we must, as far as possible, forget
about them and let them go on for themselves. It is not only possible
but even easy and above all almost {90} necessary that we should do
this. Hence at the beginning people must not expect that they will
find the use of their will easy in suppressing pain, lessening
tiredness, and facilitating accomplishment, but they must look forward
to the time quite confidently when it will be so. In the meantime the
less attention paid to the process of training, the better and more
easily will the needed habits be formed.
Failure to secure results is almost inevitable when conscious use of
the will comes into the problem. As a rule a direct appeal should not
be made to people to use their wills, but they should be aroused and
stimulated in various ways and particularly by the force of example.
What has made it so comparatively easy for our young soldiers to use
their wills and train their bodies and get into a condition where they
are capable of accomplishing what they would have thought quite
impossible before, has been above all the influence of example. A lot
of other young men of their own age are standing these things
exemplarily. They are seen performing what is expected of them without
complaint, or at least without refusal, and so every effort is put
forth to do likewise without any time spent on reflection as to how
{91} difficult it all is or how hard to bear or how much they are to
be pitied. It is not long before what was hard at first becomes under
repetition even easy and a source of fine satisfaction. Getting up at
five in the morning and working for sixteen hours with only
comparatively brief intervals for relaxation now and then, and often
being burdened with additional duties of various kinds which must be
worked in somehow or other, seems a very difficult matter until one
has done it for a while. Then one finds everything gets done almost
without conscious effort. Will power flows through the body and lends
hitherto unexpected energy, but of this there is no consciousness;
indeed, conscious reflection on it would hamper action. No wonder that
as a result of the facility acquired, one comes to readily credit the
assumption that the will is a spiritual power and that some source of
energy apart from the material is supplying the initiative and the
resources of vitality that have made accomplishment so much easier
than would have been imagined beforehand. This is quite literally what
training of the will means: training ourselves to use all our powers
to the best advantage, not putting obstacles in their way nor brakes
on their exertion, but {92} also not thinking very much about them or
making resolutions. The way to do things is to do them, not think
about them.
Professor James is, as always, particularly happy in his mode of
expressing this great truth. He insists that the way to keep the will
active is not by constantly thinking about it and supplying new
motives and furbishing up old motives for its activity, but by
cultivating the faculty of effort. His paragraph in this regard is of
course well known, and yet it deserves to be repeated here because it
represents the essence of what is needed to make the will ready to do
its best work. He says:
"As a fine practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we
may, then, offer something like this: _Keep the faculty of effort
alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day_. That is, be
systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do
every day or two something for no other reason than that you would
rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it
may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on
his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time and {93}
possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire _does_ come,
his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man
who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention,
energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will
stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his
softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast."
To do things on one's will without very special interest is an
extremely difficult matter. It can be done more readily when one is
young and when certain secondary aims are in view besides the mere
training of the will, but to do things merely for will training
becomes so hard eventually that some excuse is found and the task is
almost inevitably given up. Exercising for instance in a gymnasium
just for the sake of taking exercise or keeping in condition becomes
so deadly dull after a while that unless there is a trainer to keep a
man up to the mark, his exercise dwindles from day to day until it
amounts to very little. Men who are growing stout about middle life
will take up the practice of a cold bath after ten minutes or more of
morning exercises with a good deal of enthusiasm, but they will not
keep it up long, or if they do continue for several months, any {94}
change in the daily routine will provide an excuse to drop it.
Companionship and above all competition in any way greatly helps, but
it takes too much energy of the will to make the effort alone.
Besides, when the novelty has worn off and routine has replaced
whatever interest existed in the beginning in watching the effect of
exercise on the muscles, the lack of interest makes the exercise of
much less value than before. If there is not a glow of satisfaction
with it, the circulation, especially to the periphery to the body, is
not properly stimulated and some of the best effect of the exercise is
lost. Athletes often say of solitary exercise that it leaves them
cold, which is quite a literal description of the effect produced on
them. The circulation of the surface is not stimulated as it is when
there is interest in what is being done and so the same warmth is not
produced at the surface of the body.
It is comparatively easy to persuade men who need outdoor exercise to
walk home from their offices in the afternoon when the distance is not
too far, but it is difficult to get them to keep it up. The walk
becomes so monotonous a routine after a time that all sorts of excuses
serve to interrupt the habit, and then it is not long before it is
done so irregularly as to lose {95} most of its value. Here as in all
exercise, companionship which removes conscious attention from
advertence to the will greatly aids. On the other hand, as has been so
clearly demonstrated in recent years, it is very easy to induce men to
go out and follow a little ball over the hills in the country, an
ideal form of exercise, merely because they are interested in their
score or in beating an opponent. Any kind of a game that involves
competition makes people easily capable of taking all sorts of
trouble. Instead of being tired by their occupation in this way and
not wanting to repeat it, they become more and more interested and
spend more and more time at it. The difference between gymnastics and
sport in this regard is very marked.
In sport the extraneous interest adds to the value of the exercise and
makes it ever so much easier to continue; when it sets every nerve
tingling with the excitement of the game, it is doing all the more
good. Gymnastics grow harder unless in some way associated with
competition, or with the effort to outdo oneself, while indulgence in
sport becomes ever easier. Many a young man would find it an
intolerable bore and an increasingly difficult task if asked to give
as much time and energy {96} to some form of hard work as he does to
some sport. He feels tired after sport, but not exhausted, and becomes
gradually able to stand more and more before he need give up, thus
showing that he is constantly increasing his muscular capacity.
Conscious training of the will is then practically always a mistake.
It is an extremely difficult thing to do, and the amount of inhibition
which accumulates to oppose it serves after a time to neutralize the
benefit to be derived. Good habits should be formed, but not merely
for the sake of forming them. There should be some ulterior purpose
and if possible some motive that lifts men up to the performance of
duty, no matter how difficult it is.
Our young men who went to the camps demonstrated how much can be
accomplished in this manner. They were asked to get up early in the
morning, to work hard for many hours in the day, or take long walks,
sometimes carrying heavy burdens, and were so occupied that they had
but very little time to themselves. They were encouraged to take
frequent cold baths, which implied further waste of heat energy, and
then were very plainly fed, though of course with a good, rounded
diet, {97} well-balanced, but without any frills and with very little
in it that would tempt any appetite except that of a hungry man. They
learned the precious lesson that hunger is the best sauce for food.
Most of these men were pushed so hard that only an army officer
perfectly confident of what he was doing and well aware that all of
his men had been thoroughly examined by a physician and had nothing
organically wrong with them would have dared to do it. A good many of
us had the chance to see how university men took the military regime.
Long hours of drilling and of hard work in the open made them so tired
that in the late afternoon they could just lie down anywhere and go to
sleep. I have seen young fellows asleep on porches or in the late
spring on the grass and once saw a number of them who found excellent
protection from the sun in what to them seemed nice soft beds--at
least they slept well in them--inside a series of large earthen-ware
pipes that were about to be put down for a sewer. Some of them were
pushed so hard, considering how little physical exercise they had
taken before, that they fainted while on drill. Quite a few of them
were in such a state of nervous tension that they fainted on {98}
being vaccinated. Almost needless to say, had they been at home, any
such effect would have been a signal for the prompt cessation of such
work as they were doing, for the home people would have been quite
sure that serious injury would be done to their boys. These young
fellows themselves did not think so. Their physicians were confident
that with no organic lesion present the faint was a neurotic
derangement and not at all a symptom of exhaustion. The young soldiers
would have felt ashamed if there had been any question of their
stopping training. They felt that they could make good as well as
their fellows. They would have resented sympathy and much more pity.
They went on with their work because they were devoted to a great
cause. After a time, it became comparatively easy for them to
accomplish things that would hitherto have been quite impossible and
for which they themselves had no idea that they possessed the energy.
It was this high purpose that inspired them to let more and more of
their internal energy loose without putting a brake on, until finally
the habit of living up to this new maximum of accomplishment became
second nature and therefore natural and easy of accomplishment.
{99}
Here is the defect in systems which promise to help people to train
their wills by talking much about it, and by persuading them that it
can be done, that all they have to do is to set about it. Unless one
has some fine satisfying purpose in doing things, their doing is
difficult and fails to accomplish as much good for the doer as would
otherwise be the case. Conscious will activity requires, to use
old-fashioned psychological terms, the exercise of two faculties at
the same time, the consciousness and the will. This adds to the
difficulty of willing. What is needed is a bait of interest held up
before the will, constantly tempting it to further effort but without
any continuing consciousness on the part of the individual that he
must will it and keep on willing it. That must ever be a hampering
factor in the case. Human nature does not like imperatives and writhes
and wastes energy under them. On the contrary, optatives are pleasant
and give encouragement without producing a contrary reaction; and it
is this state of mind and will that is by far the best for the
individual.
Above all, it is important that the person forming new habits should
feel that there is nothing else to be done except the hard things
{100} that have been outlined. If there is any mode of escape from the
fulfillment of hard tasks, human nature will surely find it. If our
young soldiers had felt that they did not have to perform their
military duties and that there was some way to avoid them, the taking
of the training would have proved extremely difficult. They just _had_
to take it; there was no way out, so they pushed themselves through
the difficulties and then after a time they found that they were
tapping unsuspected sources of energy in themselves. For when people
_have_ to do things, they find that they can do ever so much more than
they thought they could, and in the doing, instead of exhausting
themselves, they actually find it easier to accomplish more and more
with ever less difficulty. The will must by habit be made so prompt to
obey that obedience will anticipate thought in the matter and
sometimes contravene what reason would dictate if it had a chance to
act. The humorous story of the soldier who, carrying his dinner on a
plate preparatory to eating it, was greeted by a wag with the word
"Attention!" in martial tones, and dropped his dinner to assume the
accustomed attitude, is well known. Similar practical jokes are said
to have been played, on a certain number {101} of occasions in this
war, with the thoroughly trained young soldier.
The help of the will to the highest degree is obtained not by a series
of resolutions but by doing whatever one wishes to do a number of
times until it becomes easy and the effort to accomplish it is quite
unconscious. Reason does not help conduct much, but a trained will is
of the greatest possible service. It can only be secured, however, by
will action. The will is very like the muscles. There is little use in
showing people how to accomplish muscle feats; they must do them for
themselves. The less consciousness there is involved in this, the
better.
{102}
CHAPTER VII
WHAT THE WILL CAN DO
"I can with ease translate it to my will."
_King John_.
It should be well understood from the beginning just what the will can
do in the matter of the cure or, to use a much better word, the relief
of disease, not forgetting that disease means etymologically and also
literally discomfort rather than anything else. The will cannot cure
organic disease in the ordinary sense of that term. It is just as
absurd to say that the will can bring about the cure of Bright's
disease as it is to suggest that one can by will power replace a
finger that has been lost. When definite changes have taken place in
tissues, above all when connective tissue cells have by inflammatory
processes come to take the place of organic tissue cells, then it is
idle to talk of bringing about a cure, though sometimes relief of
symptoms may be secured; above all the compensatory powers of the body
{103} may be called upon and will often bring relief, for a time, at
least. What is true of kidney changes applies also to corresponding
changes in other organs, and there can be no question of any amount of
will power bringing about the redintegration of organs that have been
seriously damaged by disease or replacing cells that have been
destroyed.
There are however a great many organic diseases in which the will may
serve an extremely useful purpose in the relief of symptoms and
sometimes in producing such a release of vital energy previously
hampered by discouragement as will enable the patient to react
properly against the disease. This is typically exemplified in
tuberculosis of the lungs. Nothing is so important in this disease, as
we shall see, as the patient's attitude of mind and his will to get
well. Without that there is very little hope. With that strongly
aroused, all sorts of remedies, many of them even harmful in
themselves, have enabled patients to get better merely because the
taking of them adds suggestion after suggestion of assurance of cure.
The cells of the lungs that have been destroyed by the disease are not
reborn, much less recreated, but nature walls off the diseased parts,
and the rest of {104} the lungs learn to do their work in spite of the
hampering effect of the diseased tissues. When fresh air and good food
are readily available for the patient, then the will power is the one
other thing absolutely necessary to bring about not only relief from
symptoms, but such a betterment in the tissues as will prevent further
development of the disease and enable the lungs to do their work. The
disease is not cured, but, as physicians say, it is arrested, and the
patient may and often does live for many years to do extremely useful
work.
In a disease like pneumonia the will to get well, coupled with the
confidence that should accompany this, will do more than anything else
to carry the patient over the critical stage of the affection.
Discouragement, which is after all by etymology only disheartenment,
represents a serious effect upon the heart through depression. The
fullest power of the heart is needed in pneumonia and discouragement
puts a brake on it. As we shall see it is probably because whiskey
took off this brake and lifted the scare that it acquired a reputation
as a remedy in pneumonia and also in tuberculosis. In spite of what
was probably an unfavorable physical effect, whiskey {105} actually
benefited the patient by its production of a sense of well being and
absence of regard for consequences. Hence its former reputation. This
extended also to its use in a continued fever where the same
disheartenment was likely to occur with unfortunate consequences on
the general condition and above all with disturbance of appetite and
of sleep. Worry often made the patients much more restless than they
would otherwise have been and they thus wasted vital energy needed to
bring about the cure of the affection under which they were laboring.
In all of these cases solicitude led to surveillance of processes
within the body and interfered with their proper performance. It is
perfectly possible to hamper the lungs by watching their action, and
the same thing may be done for the heart. Whenever involuntary
activities in the body are watched, their proper functioning is almost
sure to be disturbed. We have emphasized that in the chapter on
"Avoidance of Conscious Use of the Will," and so it need not be dwelt
on further here.
Even apart from over-consciousness there occur some natural dreads
that may disturb nature's vital reactions, and these can be {106}
overcome through the will. There is a whole series of inhibitions
consequent upon fears of various kinds that sadly interfere with
nature's reaction against disease. To secure the neutralization of
these the will must be brought into action, and this is probably
better secured by suggestion, that is, by placing some special motive
before the individual, than by any direct appeal. Particularly is this
true if patients have not been accustomed before this to use their
wills strenuously, for they will probably be disturbed by such an
appeal.
What will power when properly released can do above all is to bring
the relief of discomfort. In a great many cases the greater part of
the discomfort is due to over-sensitization and over-attention. Even
in such severe organic diseases as cancer, the awakening of the will
may accomplish very much to bring decided relief. This is why we have
had so many "cancer cures" that have failed. They made the patient
feel better at first, and they relieved pain to some extent and
therefore were thought to be direct remedial agents for the cancer
itself. The malignant condition however has progressed without
remission, though sometimes, possibly as the result of the new courage
given flowing as surplus vitality into {107} the tissues, perhaps the
progress of the lesion has been retarded. The patient sometimes has
felt so much better as to proclaim himself cured. What is thus true of
cancer will be found to occur in any very serious organic condition,
such as severe injury, chronic disease involving important organs, and
even such nutritional diseases as anemia or diabetes. The awakening in
the patient of the feeling that there is hope and the maintenance of
that hope in any way will always bring relief and usually some
considerable remission in the disease.
It is in convalescence above all, however, that the will power
manifests its greatest helpfulness. When patients are hopeful and
anxious to get well they are tempted to eat properly, to get out into
the air; they thus sleep better and recovery is rapid. Whenever they
are disheartened, as for instance when husband and wife have been
together in an injury, or both have contracted a disease and one of
them dies, the survivor is likely to have a slow and lingering
convalescence. The reason is obvious: there is literal lack of will
power or at least unwillingness to face the new conditions of life,
and vitality is spent in vain regret for the companionship that has
been {108} lost. This depression can only be lifted by motives that
appeal to the inner self and by such an awakening of the will for
further interests in life as will set vital energies flowing freely
again.
In convalescence from injuries received after middle life or from
affections that have been accompanied by incapacity to use muscles
there is particular need of the will. A great many older people refuse
to go through the pain and discomfort, soreness and tenderness as the
younger folk who are training their muscles call them, which must be
borne in order to bring about redevelopment of muscles, after they
have once become atrophic from disuse. The refusal to push through a
period of what is often rather serious discomfort leads many people to
foster disabilities and use their muscles in wrong ways sometimes even
for years. Something occurs then to arouse their wills and they get
better. Anything that will do this will cure them. Sometimes it is a
new liniment, sometimes a new mode of manipulation or massage,
sometimes some supposed electrical or magnetic discovery and sometimes
the touch of a presumed healer. Anything at all will be effective
provided it wakens their wills into such activity {109} as will enable
them to persist in the use of their muscles through the period of
soreness and tenderness necessary to restore proper muscular
functions.
It is quite surprising to see what can be accomplished in this way,
and the quacks and charlatans of the world have made their fortunes
out of such patients always, while their cure has been the greatest
possible advertisement and has attracted ever so many other patients
to these so-called healers. Nothing that can be done for these
patients will have any good results unless their own wills are
aroused, new hope given them and they themselves made to tap the
layers of energy in them that can restore them to health. To tell them
that they were to be cured by their own will, however, would probably
inhibit utterly this energy that is needed, so that somehow they have
to be brought to the state of mind in which they will accomplish the
purpose demanded of them by indirection.
The will is particularly capable of removing obstacles to nutrition
that have often hampered the activities and sometimes seriously
impaired the health of patients. Many people are not eating enough for
one reason or another and need to have their diet regulated, not in
{110} the direction of a limitation or selection of food, though this
appeals to so many people under the term dieting, but so that they
shall eat enough and of the proper variety to maintain their health
and bodily functions. A great many nervous diseases are dependent on
lack of sufficient food. Eating in those who lead sedentary lives much
indoors is ever so much more a matter of will than of appetite. When
people say that they eat all they want to, what they mean, as a rule,
is that they eat all that they have formed the habit of eating. Other
habits can readily be formed and will often do them good. For a great
many of the less serious symptoms which make people valetudinarians,
nervous indigestion, insomnia, tendencies to headache, queer feelings
in the head, constipation, the proper habit secured by will power, of
eating so as to secure sufficient food, is the most important single
factor. This the will must be trained to accomplish.
Now that disease prevention has become even more important than cure,
the will is an extremely efficient element. Air, food, exercise are
important factors for healthy living. A great many people are
neglecting them and then seem surprised that they should suffer from
various symptoms of impaired {111} functioning of bodily organs. Many
men and a still greater number of women are staying in the house so
much that their oxidation within the body is at a low ebb, and it is
no wonder that vital processes are not carried on to the best
advantage. Our generation has eliminated exercise from life to a great
extent, and now that the auto and the trolley car limit walking, not
only the feet of mankind suffer severely, but all the organs in the
body work at a disadvantage for lack of the exercise that they should
have. No wonder that under the circumstances appetite is impaired and
other functions of the body suffer. Instead of simple foods various
artificial stimulants are employed--such as alcohol, spices, and the
like--to provoke appetite, often with serious consequences for the
digestive organs. The will to be well includes the willing of the
means proper to that purpose, and particularly regular exercise,
several hours a day in the air, good simple food taken in sufficient
quantity at three regular intervals and the avoidance of such sources
of worry as will disturb physical functions.
{112}
CHAPTER VIII
PAIN AND THE WILL
"That the will is infinite and the execution confined."
_Troilus and Cressida_.
The symptom of disease that humanity dreads the most is pain.
Fortunately, it is also the symptom which is most under the control of
the will, and which can be greatly relieved by being bravely faced
and, to as great an extent as possible, ignored. It requires courage
and usually persistent training to succeed in the relief of severe
pain in this way, but men have done it, and women too, and men and
women _can_ do it, if they really want to, though unfortunately all of
the trend of modern life has been in the opposite direction, of
avoiding pain at whatever cost instead of bravely facing it. The
American Indian, trained from his youth to stand severe pain, scoffed
at even the almost ingeniously diabolical tortures of his enemy
captors. After they had pushed slivers beneath his nails or {113}
slowly crushed the end of a finger, or put salt in long, superficial
wounds that had bared a whole series of sensitive cutaneous nerves, he
has been known to laugh at them, and ask them proudly, without giving
a sign of the pain that he was enduring, whether that was all that
they could do. It was just a question of the human will overcoming
even the worst sensations that the body could send up to the brain and
deliberately refusing to permit any reactions that would reveal the
reflex torment that was actually taking place.
The war has done much to bring back the recognition of that
diminution--to a great extent at least--or even almost entire
suppression of pain which may occur, indeed almost constantly does
occur, as a consequence of a man facing it bravely. We have been
accustomed to think of the early martyrs as probably divinely helped
in their power to withstand pain. Whatever of celestial aid they had,
we know that martyrs for all sorts of causes, some of them certainly
not divine, have exhibited some degree of this same steadfastness.
Their behavior makes it reasonably clear that as the result of making
up their minds to stand the pain involved, they have actually suffered
so little that it was not {114} difficult to suppress external
manifestations of their sufferings. It is not merely a suppression of
the reflexes that has occurred but a minimizing to a very striking
degree of the actual sensations felt. We have many stories of the
older time before the modern use of anaesthetics, which tell how
bravely men endured pain and at the same time retained their power to
do things. Indeed, some of them accomplished purposes in the midst of
what would seem like supreme agony which made it very clear that pain
alone has nothing like the prostrating effect that it is often
supposed to have.
For we have well authenticated tales of physicians performing
amputations on themselves at times when no other assistance was
available, and accomplishing the task so well that they recovered
without complications. A blacksmith in the distant West, whose leg had
been crushed by the fall of a huge beam, actually had himself carried
into his shop and amputated his own limb above the knee, searing the
blood vessels with hot irons as he proceeded. Such a manifestation of
will power is, of course, exceptional to a degree, and yet it
illustrates what men can do in the face of conditions that are usually
supposed {115} to be overwhelming. Many a man in lumber camps or in
distant island fisheries or on board fishing vessels, far beyond the
hope of reaching a physician in time for him to be of service, has
done things of this kind. We can be quite sure that the will to
accomplish for himself what seemed necessary to save his life lessened
his pain, made it ever so much more bearable and generally proved the
power of the human will over even these physical manifestations in the
body that are commonly supposed to be quite beyond any interference
from the psychical part of nature. The spirit can still dominate the
flesh, even in matters of pain, and dictate how much it shall be
affected. It is a hard lesson to learn, but it is one that can be
learned by proper persistence.
In the early part of the war particularly many a young man had to face
even serious operations without an anaesthetic. The awful carnage of
the first six weeks of the war had not been anticipated and therefore
there were not sufficient stores of anaesthetics available to permit
of their use in every case. Besides, many operations had to be
performed so close to the front and under such circumstances that
there could not be anaesthetics for all of them; and it was a
never-ending source of {116} surprise to those who witnessed the
details to see how bravely and uncomplainingly the young men took
their enforced suffering. Many a one, when his turn came to be
operated on, quietly asked for a cigarette and then bore unflinchingly
painful manipulations that the surgeon was extremely sorry to have to
inflict. Over and over again, when there was question of the regular
succession of patients, young soldiers in severe pain suggested that
some one else who seemed in worse condition than they, or who perhaps
was not quite so well able to stand pain and control himself, should
be attended to before they were. There is no doubt at all that this
very power of self-control lessened their pain and made it ever so
much easier to bear and less of a torment than it would have been
otherwise.
Any great diversion of mind that turns the attention completely to
something else will lessen even severe pain so much as to make it
quite negligible for the moment. Headaches disappear promptly when
there is an alarm of fire, and toothaches have been known to vanish,
for the time at least, as the result of a burglar scare. Much less
than this is needed, however, and there are many familiar examples
{117} which illustrate the fact that the turning of the attention to
something else will greatly diminish or even abolish pain.
The well known story of the French surgeon about to set a dislocation
is a typical demonstration. His patient was a woman of the nobility,
her dislocation was of the shoulder and it was necessary for him to
inflict very severe pain in order to replace it. Besides, as the
result of the reflex of that pain, he was certain to meet with great
resistance from spasm in the surrounding muscles. It was before the
days of anaesthetics, which relieve all of these inconveniences, and
above all, relax the muscles. The surgeon got ready to do the ultimate
manipulation that would replace the joint in its proper relation, and
necessarily inflicted no little pain in his preparations. The lady
complained very much, so he turned on her angrily, told her that she
must stand it, slapped her in the face, and before she had recovered
from the shock, the dislocation had been restored to the normal
condition. It was rather heroic treatment, and it is to be hoped that
she understood it, but it is easy to understand how much the procedure
lessened her physical pain.
When the mind is very much preoccupied {118} and the will intent on
accomplishing some immediate purpose, even severe pain will not be
felt at all. Instances of this are not rare, and men who are advancing
in a charge on a battlefield will often be wounded rather severely,
and yet continue to advance without knowing anything about their
wounds until a friend calls attention to their bleeding, or they
themselves notice it; or perhaps even loss of blood may make them
faint. The late President Roosevelt furnished a magnificent
illustration of this principle when he was wounded some years ago in
the midst of a political campaign. A crank shot at him, in one of the
Western cities, and though the bullet penetrated four inches of muscle
on his chest wall, and then flattened itself against a rib, he did not
know that he was wounded. The flattening of the bullet must have
represented at least as much force as would be exerted by a heavy blow
on the chest, and yet the Colonel never felt it. His friends
congratulated him on his escape from injury until it was noted that
blood was oozing through a hole that had been made in his coat. The
intense will activity of the President simply kept him from noticing
either the shock or the pain.
{119}
Not long before the war a striking example was given of how a man may
stand suffering in spite of long years of the refining influences of a
sedentary scholarly life, most of it spent indoors. The second last
General of the Jesuits developed a sarcoma on his upper arm and was
advised to submit to an amputation of the arm at the shoulder joint.
He was a man well on in the sixties and the operation presented an
extremely serious problem. The surgeons suggested that he should be
ready for the anaesthetic at a given hour the next morning and then
they would proceed to operate. He replied that he would be ready for
the operation at the time suggested, but that he would not take an
anaesthetic. They argued with him that it would be quite impossible
for him to stand unanaesthetized the extensive cutting and dissection
necessary to complete an operation of this kind in an extremely
important part of the body, where large nerves and arteries would have
to be cut through and where the slightest disturbance on the part of
the patient might easily lead to serious or even fatal results. Above
all, he could not hope to stand it in tissues that had been rendered
more sensitive than before by the enlarged circulation to the part,
due to {120} the growth of the tumor, and the consequent hyperaemic
condition of most of the tissues through which the cutting would have
to be done and which were thus hypersensitized.
He insisted, however, that he would not take an anaesthetic, for
surely here seemed a chance to welcome suffering voluntarily as his
Lord and Master had done. I believe that the head surgeon said at
first that he would not operate. He felt sure that the operation would
have to be interrupted after it had been begun, because the patient
would not be able to stand the pain and there would then be the danger
from bleeding as well as from infection which might occur. The General
of the Jesuits, however, was so calm and firm that at last it was
determined to permit him to try at least to stand it, though most of
the surgeons were sure that he would probably have to give up and
allow himself to be anaesthetized before they were through.
The event then was most interesting. The patient not only underwent
the operation without a murmur, but absolutely without wincing. The
surgeon who performed the operation said afterwards, "It was like
cutting wax and not human flesh, so far as any reaction was concerned,
though of course it bled."
{121}
The story carries its lesson of the power of a brave man to face even
such awful pain as this and probably actually overcome it to such an
extent that he scarcely felt it, simply because he willed that he
would do so and occupied himself with other thoughts during the
process.
Such an example as that of this General of the Jesuits will seem to
most people a reversion to that mystical attitude of mind of the
medieval period, when somehow or other people were able to stand ever
so much more pain than any one in our time could possibly think of
enduring. We hear of saints of the Middle Ages who inflicted what now
seem hideous self-tortures on themselves and not only bore them
bravely but went about life smiling and doing good to others while
they were under the influence of them. It would seem quite impossible,
however, for people of the modern time to get into any such state of
mind. Our discoveries for the prevention of pain have made it
unnecessary to stand much suffering, and as a result mankind would
seem to have lost some if not most of the faculty of standing pain. So
little of truth is there in any such thought that any number of the
young men of the present generation between {122} twenty and thirty,
that is, during the very years when mankind most resents pain and
therefore reacts most to it, and by the same token feels it the most,
have shown during this war that they possessed all the old-fashioned
faculty of standing pain without a whimper and thinking of others
while they did it.
Lack of advertence always lessens pain and may even nullify it until
it becomes exceedingly severe. In his little volume, "A Journey around
My Room", Xavier de Maistre dwells particularly on the fact that his
body, when his spirit was wandering, would occasionally pick up the
fire tongs and burn itself before his _alter ego_ could rescue it.
Concentration of attention on some subject that attracts may
neutralize pain and make it utterly unnoticed until physical
consequences develop. Undoubtedly dwelling on pain, anticipating it,
noting the first sensations that occur, multiplies the painful
feeling. The physical reasons for this are to be found in the
increased blood supply consequent upon conscious attention to any
part, which sensitizes the nerves of the area and the added number of
nerve fibers that are at once put into association with the area by
the act of concentration of the attention. These serve to render
sensation {123} much more acute than it would otherwise be. It might
seem impossible to control the attention, but this has been done over
and over again, even in the midst of severe pain, until there is no
doubt that it is quite possible. As for the increase of pain by
deliberate attention, that is so familiar an experience that
practically every one has had it at some time.
The reason for it has become very clear as the result of our
generation's investigations into the constitution of the nervous
system. The central nervous system, instead of being a _continuum_, or
series of nerve elements which are directly connected with each other,
consists of a very large number of separate individual cells which
only make contacts with each other, the nerve impulses flowing over
across the contact. The demonstration of these we owe originally to
Ramon y Cajal, the distinguished Spanish brain anatomist, to whom was
awarded some years ago the Nobel Prize as well as the Prize of the
City of Paris for his researches.
In connection with his surprising discoveries as to the neurons which
make up the brain, he suggested the Law of Avalanche, which would
serve to explain the supersensitiveness of parts to which concentrated
attention is paid. {124} According to this law, pain felt in any small
area of the body may be multiplied very greatly if the sensation from
it is distributed over a considerable part of the brain, as happens
when attention is centered upon it. A pain message that comes from a
localized area of the body disturbs under normal conditions at most a
few thousand cells in the brain, because the area is directly
represented only by these cells. They are connected however by
dendrites and cell branches of various kinds with a great many other
cells in different parts of the brain. A pain message that comes up
will ordinarily produce only disturbance of the directly connected
cells, but it may be transmitted and diffused over a great many of the
cells of the cortex of the brain if the attention is focused strongly
on it. The area at first affected, but a few thousand cells, may
spread to many millions or perhaps even some hundreds of millions of
them, if the centering of attention causes them to be "connected up",
as the electricians say, with the originally affected small group of
cells.
It is just what happens in high mountains when a few stones loosened
somewhere near the top by the wind or by melting processes begin their
course down the mountain side. {125} On the way they disturb ever more
and more of the loose pieces of ice and the shifting snows as well as
the rocks near them, until, gathering force, what was at the beginning
only a minor movement of small particles becomes a dreaded avalanche,
capable not only of sweeping away men in its path but even of
obliterating houses and sometimes of changing the whole face of a
mountain area. Hence the expression suggested by Ramon y Cajal of the
Law of Avalanche for this wide diffusion of sensation, which spreads
from a few thousand to millions or billions of cells, and from a
rather bearable pain becomes intolerable torture, as a consequence of
the brain's complete occupation with it.
Now it is possible for most people, indeed for all who have not some
organic morbid condition, to control this spread of pain beyond its
original connections, provided only they will to do so, refuse to be
ruled by their dreads and proceed to divert attention from the painful
condition to other subjects. Here is why the man who bravely faces
pain actually lessens the amount that he has to bear. There is no pain
in the part affected. That we know, because any interruption of the
nerve tract leading from the affected part to the brain {126}
eliminates the pain. In the same way, the obtunding of the nerve cells
in the cortex by anaesthetics or of the conducting nerve apparatus on
the way to the brain by local anaesthesia, will have a like effect.
Anything then that will interfere with the further conduction of the
pain sensation and the cortical cells directly affected will lessen
the sense of pain, and this is what happens when a man settles himself
firmly to the thought that he will not allow himself to be affected
beyond what is the actual reaction of the nerve tissues to the part.
As a matter of fact, the anticipation of pain due to the dread of it
predisposes the part to be much more sensitive than it was before. We
can all of us readily make experiments which show this very clearly.
Ordinarily we have a stream of sensations flowing up from the surface
of the body to the brain, consequent upon the fact that the skin
surface is touched by garments over most of the body, and that our
nerves of touch respond to their usually rather rough surface. We have
learned to pay no attention to these because we have grown accustomed
to them, though any one who thinks that they are negligible should
witness the writhings of a poor Indian under the stress {127} of being
civilized when he is required to wear a starched shirt for the first
time. Ordinarily Indians have learned to suppress their feelings, but
the shirt with its myriad points of contact, all of them starchily
scraping, usually proves too much for his equanimity, and he wiggles
and twists to such an extent as shows very clearly that he is
extremely uncomfortable. Most people have something of the same
feeling the first day that they change into woolen underclothes after
they have been wearing cotton for months, and the sensation is by no
means easy to bear with equanimity.
Ordinarily from custom and habit in the suppression of feelings we
notice none of these contact sensations with their almost inevitable
itchy and ticklish feelings, though they are constantly there, but we
can reveal them to ourselves by thinking definitely about any part of
the body. Such concentration of attention at once brings that part of
the body above the threshold of consciousness, and we have distinct
feelings there that we did not notice before. If for instance we think
about the big toe on the left foot, immediately our attention is
turned to it and we note sensations in it that were quite unnoticed
before. We can feel the stocking touching any part of it {128} that we
think of. Not only that, but if we concentrate attention on a part
most uncomfortable sensations develop. If anything calls our attention
even to the middle of our backs, we find at once that there is a
distinct sensation there, and this may become so insistent as to
demand relief.
It is well understood now what happens in these cases. As we have
said, the attention given to a part leads to a widening of the minute
blood vessels located there so that the nerve endings to the part are
supplied with more blood and therefore become more sensitive. We know
from experience in cold windy weather that when the cheek is
hyperaemic the drawing of a leaf or even of a piece of paper across it
may produce a very acute painful sensation. Hyperaemia always makes
parts of the body much more sensitive than before. Attention has just
this effect over all the surface of the body, as we can demonstrate to
ourselves. We can actually, though only gradually, make our feet warm
by thinking about them, because the active attention to them sends
more blood to them. The dread of pain then, by concentrating attention
on the part beforehand, actually increases the pain that has to be
suffered and makes the subject {129} ever so much more sensitive.
Sensitiveness is of course dependent on other factors, as for instance
lack of outdoor air and of oxygenization, which actually seems to
hypersensitize people so that even very slight pain becomes extremely
difficult to bear, but the question of attention, which is after all
almost entirely a voluntary matter, has more to do with making pain
harder to bear than anything else.
In the preanaesthetic days, men have been known to sit and watch
calmly an amputation of one of their limbs without wincing and
apparently without undergoing very much pain. Many are the incidents
in history of a favorite general who showed his men how to bear pain
by calmly smoking a cigar while a surgeon amputated an arm or a leg or
performed some other rather important surgery. Pain is after all like
the sense of danger and may be suppressed practically to as great a
degree. Once during the present war, when long columns of soldiers
going to the front had to pass by the open market place of a town that
was being shelled by the Germans, there was danger of the troops
losing something of their morale at this point and of confusion
ensuing. It would have been disturbing both to discipline and the
{130} ordered movement of the troops to divert them by narrower
streets, and the shells, though dangerous, were not falling frequently
and not working serious havoc. Every one knew, however, that the
German gunners had the range, and a shell might land square in the
market place at any time; thus there was a feeling of uneasiness and a
tendency to nervous lack of self-control, with the inevitable
confusion of movement afterwards. One of the French generals ordered
an armchair to be brought out of one of the houses near by, took a
position in the center of the square, with a little wand in his hand,
and calmly joked with the soldiers as they went by about the
temperature of the day mentioning occasionally something about a shell
that happened to strike not far away. According to the story he was an
immense man weighing nearly three hundred pounds, and so provided a
very good-sized target for shells, but he was never touched and,
almost needless to say, the line of soldiers never wavered while their
general sat there joking at the danger.
It is sometimes thought that men in the older, less refined times
could stand pain and suffering generally much better than our
generation which is supposed to have {131} degenerated in that
respect. We have found, however, during the war that the soldiers who
could stand supreme suffering the best were very often those who came
from better-to-do families, who had been subjected to the most highly
refining influences of civilization, but also to that discipline of
the repression of the emotions which is recognized as an important
phase of civilization. Strange as it may seem, the city boys stood the
hardships and the trials of trench life better than the country boys
and not only withstood the physical trials but were calmer under fire
and ever so much less complaining under injury. After all it is what
might be expected, once serious thought is given to the subject, and
yet somehow it comes as a surprise, as if the country boy ought to be
less sensitive,--as indeed he probably is; but he lacks that training
in self-control which enables the city boy to stand suffering.
All our feeling that human nature has degenerated in physical
constitution has been completely contradicted by the reaction of our
young soldiers to camp and trench life. They have gone back to the
lack of comforts and conveniences of the pioneer days and have had to
submit to the outdoor life and the {132} hardships that their pioneer
grandfathers went through and have not failed under them. The boys
have come out of it all demonstrating not only that their courage was
capable of supporting them, but with their physical being bettered by
the conditions and their power to stand suffering revealed in a way
that would scarcely have been believed possible beforehand.
{133}
CHAPTER IX
THE WILL AND AIR AND EXERCISE
"And wishes fall out as they are willed."
_Pericles_
Very probably the most important function of the will in its relation
to health is that which concerns its power to control the habits of
mankind as regards air and exercise. It is surprising to what an
extent people neglect both of these essentials of healthy living in
the midst of our modern sophisticated life, unless the will power is
consciously used for the purpose of forming and then maintaining
habits with regard to these requisites for health. It is a very
fortunate thing that instinct urges the child, particularly the
infant, to almost constant movement during its waking hours. Children
that are healthy and that are growing rapidly, boys somewhat more than
girls, are so constantly in movement that one would almost think that
they must be on springs. Whenever they discover that they can make a
{134} new movement, they proceed to make it over and over again until
they can do it with facility. There is no lolling around for them; as
soon as they wake, they want to be up and doing, no matter what the
habits of the household may be. They are constantly on the move. We
know that this is absolutely essential for growth as well as for the
proper training of their muscles, but it is a very fortunate thing
that children do it for themselves, for if their mothers were
compelled to train them, the task would be indeed difficult. All
mother has to do is to control them to some extent and keep them from
venturing too far, lest they should hurt themselves.
When the control of instinct over life is gradually replaced by
reason, this tendency to exercise gradually diminishes until it is
often surprising to find how little people are taking. As it is mainly
the need for exercise that forces people out into the air, indoor life
comes to be the main portion of existence. This is all contrary to
nature, and so it is not surprising that _disease_, in its original
etymological sense of discomfort, develops rather readily. The lack of
exercise in the air permits a great many people to drift into all
sorts of morbid conditions in which they are quite miserable. This
{135} is, of course, particularly true as regards nervous ailments of
various kinds; only under the term nervous ailments should be included
not alone direct affections of the nervous system or functional
disturbances of nerves, but also a number of other conditions. Nervous
indigestion, insomnia, neurotic constipation and many of the
symptomatic affections associated with these conditions, tired
feelings that interfere with activities, headache, various feelings of
discomfort in the muscles and around the joints, inability to control
the emotions and other such common complaints--if that is the proper
word for them--all these are fostered by a sedentary life indoors.
They frequently make not only the patient himself--or oftener
herself--miserable, but also all those who come in contact with her.
Above all, it must not be forgotten that lack of exercise in the open
air has a very definite tendency to make people extremely sensitive to
discomforts of all kinds, mental as well as physical. Many a man or
woman whose life seems full of worries, sometimes without any adequate
cause at all, who goes from one dread to another, who wakes in the
morning with a sense of depression, find that most of these feelings
and sometimes all of them, {136} disappear promptly when they begin to
exercise more in the open.
Nothing dispels the gloom and depressions consequent upon an
accumulation of cares and worries of various kinds like a few weeks in
the woods, where every moment is passed in the fresh outdoor air,
which actually seems to blow the cobwebs of ill feelings away and
leaves the individual with a freedom of mind and a comfort of body
that he almost expected never to enjoy again.
Undoubtedly the most important factor for the preservation of health
is an abundance of fresh air. At certain seasons of the year this is
not only easy and agreeable, but to do anything else imposes hardship.
In our climate, however, there are about six months of the year in
which it requires some exercise of will power to secure as much open
air life as is required for health. There are weeks when it is too
hot, there are many weeks when it is too cold. The cold air
particularly is important, because it produces a stimulating vital
reaction than which nothing is more precious for health. We have no
tonic among all the drugs of the pharmacopeia that is equal to the
effect of a brisk walk in the bracing air of a dry cold day. After a
long morning and {137} perhaps a whole day in the house, even half an
hour outdoors will enable us to throw off the sluggishness consequent
upon confinement to the indoor air and the lack of appetite and the
general feeling of physical lassitude which has followed living in an
absolutely equable temperature for twenty-four hours. Sometimes it
requires no little effort of the will to secure this, and to continue
it day after day without missing it or letting it be crowded out by
claims that are partly real and partly excuses, because we do not care
to make the special effort required.
What humanity needs is regular exercise in the open air every day. As
it is, between the trolley car and the automobile, very few people get
what they need. Any one who has to go a mile takes a car or some other
conveyance and between waiting for the car and certain inevitable
delays it will probably take ten minutes or more to go the mile. In
five minutes more one could walk that distance and secure precious
exercise besides such diversion of mind as inevitably comes from
walking on busy city streets and which makes an excellent recreation
in the midst of one's work. For it is quite impossible in our day to
walk along city streets absorbed in abstract mental {138} occupations.
One of the objections to walking is that after a while it can be
accomplished as a matter of routine without necessarily taking one's
mind away from subjects in which it has been absorbed. It is quite
impossible for this to happen, however, on modern city streets. "The
outside of a horse", it used to be said, "is good for the inside of a
man." The main reason for this was because it is impossible for a man
to ride horseback, unless his mount is a veritable old Dobbin, without
paying strict attention to the animal. The same thing is true as
regards city pedestrianism, especially since the coming of the auto
has made it necessary to watch our steps and look where we go.
A great many people would be ever so much better in health if they
walked to business or to school every morning instead of riding, for
the young need it even more than the older people. Especially is this
true for all those who follow sedentary occupations. Clerks in
lawyers' offices, typewriters and stenographers, secretaries--all
those who have to sit down much during the day--need the brisk walking
and need it not merely of a Sunday or a Saturday afternoon, but every
day in the year. Many of them, if they walked two and three miles to
{139} the office, would probably require only fifteen minutes, at most
half an hour, more than if they took a train or trolley, but they
would have secured a good hour of exercise in the open air.
On the other hand the unfortunate crowding of trolley and elevated and
subway trains in the busy hours when people go to and from their work
makes an extremely uncomfortable and often rather depressing
commencement and completion of the day's work. I know of nothing that
makes a worse beginning for the day than to have to stand for half an
hour or longer in a swaying, bumping car, hanging to a strap, crushed
and crowded by people getting in and out. The effect of coming home
under such circumstances after a reasonably long day's work is even
more serious, and any little sacrifice that will enable people to
avoid it will do them a great deal of good. Fifteen or twenty minutes
of extra time morning and evening would often suffice for this and
would at the same time add a bracing walk in the open air to the day's
routine.
When first begun, such a practice would make one tired and sore, but
that condition would pass in the course of a few days and be replaced
by a healthy feeling of satisfaction {140} that would be well worth
all the effort required. We should need ever so much less medicine for
appetite and for constipation if this were true. A great many people
who stand during the day would probably deem it quite out of the
question for them to walk three miles or more to and from their
business, for their feet get so tired that they feel that they could
not endure it. What they need more than anything else, however, is
exercise that will bring about a stimulation of the circulation in
their feet. Standing is very depressing to the circulation. It leads
to compression of the veins and hence interference with the return
circulation, with lowered nutrition which often predisposes to flat
foot or yielding arch and tends to create corns and callouses: walking
in reasonably well fitting shoes on the contrary tends to make the
feet ever so much less sensitive Our soldiers have had that experience
and have learned some very precious lessons with regard to the care of
their feet, the principal one being that the best possible remedy for
foot troubles is to exercise the feet vigorously in walking and
running, provided the shoes permit proper foot use.
I have often known clerks and floorwalkers {141} who have to stand all
day or move but a few steps at intervals, who were so tired at night
that they felt the one thing they could do was to sit down for a while
after dinner and then go to bed, but who came to feel ever so much
better after a brisk walk home. It was rather hard to persuade them
that, exhausted as they felt, they would actually get rested and not
more tired from vigorous walking, but once they tried it, they knew
the exercise was what they needed. The air in stores is often dry and
uncomfortable for those who are in them all day. It is usually and
quite properly regulated for the customers who come in from the
streets expecting to get warm without delay. In dry, cold weather
particularly, an evening walk home sets the blood in circulation until
it gets thoroughly oxidized and the whole body feels better. Such a
brisk walk will often prevent the development of flat foot, especially
if care is taken to spring properly from the ball of the foot, in the
good, old-fashioned heel and toe method of walking. Once flat foot has
developed, walking probably is more difficult, but even then, with
properly fitting shoes, the patients will be the better for a good
walk after their work is over. It requires some will power to acquire
the {142} habit, but once formed, the benefit and pleasure derived
make it easy to keep up the practice.
Those who walk thus regularly will often find that their evening
tiredness is not so marked, and they will feel much more like going
out for some diversion than they otherwise would. Probably nothing is
more dispiriting in the course of time than to come home merely to eat
dinner, sit down after dinner and grow sleepy on one's chair until one
feels quite miserable, and then go to bed. There should be always,
unless in very inclement weather, an outing before bedtime, and this
should be looked forward to. It will often forestall the feeling that
the day is over after dinner and so keep the individual from settling
down into the dozy discomfort of an after-dinner nap as the closing
scene of the day. Good habits in this matter require an effort of the
will to form; bad habits almost seem to form of themselves and then
require a special effort to break.
It is surprising how many of the dreads and anxiety neuroses and
psycho-neurotic solicitudes and neurasthenic disquietudes and other
more or less morbid mental states disappear under the influence of a
brisk walk for three or {143} four miles or more every day. I have
tried this prescription on all sorts of people, including particularly
myself, and I know for certain that when troubles are accumulating the
thing to do is to get outdoors more, especially for walking; then the
incubus begins to lift. Clergymen, university professors, members of
religious orders, school teachers, as well as bankers, clerks and
business people of various kinds, have been subjected to the influence
of this prescription with decided benefit. Some of them assert that
they never felt so well as since they have formed the habit of walking
every day. It must, however, be _every_ day, and it must not merely be
a mile or so but it must be at least three miles. That means for a
good many people about an hour spent in actual walking, but it is well
worth the time and effort. Above all, it repays not only in health and
in better feelings but in the increased amount of work that can be
done on the day itself. A whole day passed indoors will often contain
many wasted hours, while if a walk of a couple of miles is planned for
the morning and one for a couple of miles more in the afternoon, very
satisfactory study or other work can be done in the intervals. Almost
needless to say, a brisk walk in the {144} cooler weather will create
an appetite where it did not exist before. Women often need counsel in
this matter more than men, and regular walking for them is indeed a
counsel of health. Very few women in these modern times walk much, and
to walk more than a mile seems to them a hardship. This is responsible
for more of the supersensitiveness and nervous complaints of all kinds
to which women are liable than anything else that I know of. It is
also one important factor in the production of the constipation to
which women are so much more liable than men. We see many
advertisements with regard to the jolts to which the body is subjected
every time the heel is put down and of the means that should be taken
to prevent them, but it must not be forgotten that men and women were
meant by nature to walk erect and that this recurring jolt has a very
definite effect in stimulating peristalsis and favoring the movement
of the contents of the intestines. Besides, if the walking is brisk,
the breathing is deeper and there is some massage of the liver, as
also of the other abdominal viscera, while other organs are affected
favorably. Walking for women--regular, everyday walking--would be
indeed a precious habit, but now {145} that women have occupations
more and more outside of the house, this is one of the things they
must make up their minds to do, if they are to maintain health,
remembering that making up the mind is really making up the will.
Over and over again I have seen a great many of the troubles of the
menopause or change of life in women disappear or become ever so much
less bothersome as the result of the formation of regular habits of
walking out of doors every day. Unfortunately, there is a definite
tendency about this time for women to withdraw more and more from
public appearances and to live to a considerable extent in retirement
at home. Nothing could be much worse for them. They need, above all,
to get out and to have a number of interests, and if these interests
can only be so arranged as to demand rather prolonged walks, so much
the better. This is more particularly true for the unmarried woman who
is going through this critical time, and the question of walking
regularly every day for three or four miles must be proposed to her.
It will require a considerable effort of the will. More than two miles
at the beginning will probably be too tiring, but the amount can be
gradually increased {146} until at least four miles on the average is
covered every day. Above all, for the feelings of discomfort in the
cardiac region so often noticed at this time, regular walking is the
best remedy in most cases, always of course presupposing that there is
no organic heart condition, for in that case only a physician can give
the proper direction for each case. By the exercise of the lungs that
it requires, it will probably save most people from colds and coughs
which they have had to endure every winter. Lastly be it said that
practically all men and women, though more particularly the men who
have lived well beyond the Psalmist's limit of threescore and ten,
have been regular daily walkers, or else they have taken exercise in
some form in the open air which is the equivalent of walking. One of
the most distinguished of English physicians, Sir Hermann Weber, who
died just after the end of the war in London, was in his ninety-fifth
year. He had practised medicine regularly until the age of eighty and
continued in excellent health and vigor until just before his death.
During the last year of life, he contributed an interesting article to
the _British Medical Journal_ on the "Influence of Muscular Exercise
on Longevity." He attributed his vigor at the age of {147} ninety-five
as well as the prolongation of his life to his practice of spending
every day two or three hours in the open air. He walked, as a rule,
forty to fifty miles a week. Even in the most inclement weather he
rarely did less than thirty miles a week. Many another octogenarian
and nonagenarian has attributed his good health and long life to the
habit of regular daily exercise in the open.
Instead of using up energy, the will so used brings out latent stores
of energy that would not otherwise be employed and thus adds to the
available amount of vitality for the individual. Doctor Thomas Addis
Emmet, only just dead, over ninety, in his younger years as a busy
medical practitioner never kept a horse. It would not be difficult to
cite many other examples among men who lived to advanced old age and
who considered that they owed their good health and long life to daily
habits of outdoor exercise.
{148}
CHAPTER X
THE WILL TO EAT
"If your will want not, time and place will be fruitfully added."
_King Lear_.
Eating is usually supposed to be entirely a matter of appetite which
instinct directs to the best possible advantage of the individual.
This is quite true for those who are living the outdoor life that is
normal or at least most healthy for men, and when they are getting an
abundance of exercise, and may I add also have not too great a variety
of food materials in tempting form presented to them. Under the
artificial not to say unnatural conditions which men have to a great
extent created for themselves in city life, confined at indoor
sedentary occupations, some of them--and they are much more numerous
than is usually imagined--eat too little, while a great many, owing to
stimulation of appetite in various ways, eat too much.
Eating therefore for health's sake has to be done through the will and
as a rule by the {149} formation of deliberate habits. It is easy to
form habits either of defect or excess in the matter of eating and
indeed a great deal of the ill health to which mankind is liable is
due to errors in either of these directions. Having disturbed nature's
instincts for food in modifying the mode of life to suit modern
conveniences, we have now to learn from experience and scientific
observations what we should eat and then make up our minds to eat such
quantity and variety as is necessary to maintain health and strength
in the particular circumstances in which we are placed.
While the greatest emphasis has been placed on the dangers to health
in overeating, the number of people who, for one reason or another,
eat too little is, as has been said, quite surprising. A very large
proportion of those under normal weight are so merely because they
have wrong habits of eating. Indeed, it may be laid down as a
practical rule of health that wherever there is no organic disease the
condition of being underweight is a symptom of undereating. A great
many thin people insist that the reason why they are underweight is
that it is a family trait and that father and mother, or at least one
of them, and some of their grandparents exhibited this {150}
peculiarity; and thus it is not surprising that they should have it. A
careful analysis of the family eating in such cases has shown me in a
large number of instances, indeed almost without exception, that what
my patients had inherited was not a constitutional tendency to
thinness, but a family habit of undereating. This accrued to them not
from nature but from nurture, and was acquired in their bringing up.
Most of them were eating one quite abundant meal a day and perhaps a
pretty good second meal, but practically all of them were skimping at
least one meal very much. In some way or other, a family habit of
eating very little at this meal had become established and was now an
almost inviolable custom.
A great many thin individuals, that is persons who are somewhat more
than ten per cent. under the average normal weight for their height,
either do not eat breakfast at all or eat a very small one. It is not
unusual for the physician analyzing their day's dietary to be told
that the meal consists of a cup of coffee and a piece of bread.
Sometimes there is a roll, but more often only part of a roll, though
occasionally in recent years there may be some fruit and some cereal;
the fruit will usually be a half of one of the citrus fruits {151}
which contains practically no nutrition and is only a pleasant
appetizer, while more often than not the cereal will be one of the
dry, ready-to-eat varieties which, apart from the milk or cream that
may be served with them, contain in the usual small helpings very
little nutriment. Such breakfasts are particularly the rule among
women who are under weight. Sometimes lunch is comparatively light so
that there are two daily apologies for meals. To make up for these,
the third meal may be very hearty. City folk often eat at dinner more
than is good for them. This may produce a sense of uncomfortable
distention and overfulness followed by sleepiness which may be set
down as due to indigestion, though it is just a question of overeating
for the nonce.
It would be much more conducive to health to distribute the eating
over the three meals of the day, but it requires a special effort of
the will to break the unfortunate habits that have been formed.
Particularly it seems hard for many people to eat a substantial
breakfast and a determined effort is required to secure this. It would
seem almost as though their wills had not yet waked up and that it was
harder for them to do things at this time of day. It is especially
important for working {152} women, that is, those who have such
regular occupations as school-teacher, secretary, clerk and the like,
to eat a hearty breakfast. They can get a warm properly chosen meal at
home at this hour, while very often in the middle of the day they have
to eat a lunch that is not nearly so suitable. As a consequence of
neglecting breakfast then, it is twenty-four hours between their warm,
hearty meals. Even when they eat a rather good lunch, some eighteen
hours elapse since the last hearty meal was taken, and one half the
day's work has to be done on the gradually decreasing energy secured
from the evening meal of the day before. With this unfortunate habit
of eating, most of that was used up during the night in repairing the
tissue losses of the day before, so that the morning's work has to be
done largely "on the will" rather than on the normal store of bodily
energy.
It is surprising how many patients who are admitted to tuberculosis
sanatoria have been underweight for years as a consequence of
unfortunate habits of eating. Not infrequently it is found that they
have a number of prejudices with regard to the simple and most
nutritious foods that mankind is accustomed to. Not a few of the
younger ones who {153} develop tuberculosis have been laboring under
the impression that they could not digest milk or eggs or in some way
they had acquired a distaste for them and so had eliminated them from
their diet; some of them had also stopped eating butter or used it
very sparingly. At the sanatoria, as a rule, very little attention is
paid to the supposed difficulty of digestion of milk and eggs and
perhaps butter. The patients are at once put on the regular diet
containing these articles and the nurse sees that they take them even
between meals, and unless there is actual vomiting or some very
definite objective--not merely subjective--sign of indigestion, the
patients are required to continue the diet.
It is almost an invariable rule for the patients of such institutions
to come to the physician in charge after a couple of weeks and ask how
it was that they could have thought that these simple articles of food
disagreed with them. They have begun to like them now and are
surprised at their former refusal to take them, which they begin to
suspect, as the physician very well knows, to have been the principal
reason for the development of their tuberculosis.
There are people who are up to weight or {154} slightly above it who
develop tuberculosis, but they do not represent one in five of the
patients who suffer from the affection. In probably three fourths of
all the cases of tuberculosis the predisposing factor which allowed
the tubercle bacillus to grow in the tissues was the loss of weight or
the being underweight. There is a good biological reason for this, for
there are certain elements in the make-up of the tubercle bacillus
which favor its growth at a time when fat is being lost from the
tissues rather than deposited, for at that time more fat for the
growth of the tubercle bacillus is available in the lungs than at
other times. Often among the poor the loss in weight is due to lack of
food because of poverty, or failure to eat because of alcoholism, but
not infrequently among all classes it is just a question of certain
bad habits of eating that might readily have been corrected by the
will. It is surprising how many people who complain of various nervous
symptoms--meaning by that term symptoms for which no definite physical
basis can be found, or for which only that extremely indefinite basis
of a vague reflex, real or supposed, from the abdominal organs--are
underweight and will be found to be eating much less than the average
of {155} humanity. These nervous symptoms include above all
discomforts of various kinds in the abdominal region; sense of
gone-ness; at times a feeling of fullness because of the presence of
gas; grumblings, acid eructations, bitter taste in the mouth, and
above all, constipation. As is said in the chapter on "The Will and
the Intestinal Functions," the most potent and frequent cause of
constipation is insufficient eating, either in quantity or in variety.
It is especially in the digestive tract of those who do not eat as
much as they should that gas accumulates. This gas is usually thought
to be due to fermentation, but as fermentation is a very slow gas
producer and nervous patients not infrequently belch up large
quantities, it is evident that another source for it must be sought.
Any one who has seen a number of hysterical patients with gaseous
distention of the abdomen and attacks of belching in which immense
quantities of gas are eructated, will be forced to the conclusion that
in such nervous crises gas leaks out of the blood vessels of the walls
of the digestive tract and that this is the principal source of the
gas noted. What is true in the severe nervous attacks is also true in
nervous symptoms of other kinds, and neurotic indigestion so called
{156} is always accompanied by the presence of gas.
Apparently the old maxim of the physicist of past centuries has an
application here. "Nature abhors a vacuum" and as the stomach and
intestines are not as full as they ought to be, nor given as much work
to do as they should have, nature proceeds to occupy them with gas
which finds its way in from the very vascular gastrointestinal walls.
This is of course an explanation that would not have been popular a
few years ago when the chemistry of digestion seemed so extremely
important, but in recent years, medical science has brought us back
rather to the physics of digestion, and I think that most physicians
who have seen many functional nervous patients would now agree with
these suggestions as to the origin of gaseous disturbance in the
gastrointestinal tract in a great many of these cases.
Besides the physical symptoms, there are a whole series of psychic or
psycho-neurotic symptoms, the basis of which undoubtedly lies in the
condition of underweight as a consequence of undereating. Over and
over again I have seen the feeling of inability to do things which had
come over men, and {157} particularly women, disappear by adding to
and regulating the diet until an increase in weight came. Extreme
tiredness is a frequent symptom in those under weight, and this often
leads to their having no recreation after their work because they have
not enough energy for it; as every human being needs diversion, a
vicious circle of influence which adds to their nervous tired
condition is formed. I have seen in so many cases the eating of a good
breakfast and a good lunch supply working people with the energy
hitherto lacking that enabled them to go out of an evening to the
theater or to entertainments of one kind or another, that it has
become a routine practice to treat these people by adding to their
dietary unless there are direct contra-indications.
Dreads are much more common among people who are underweight than
among those who eat enough to keep themselves in proper physical
condition. I have had a series of cases, unfortunately only a small
one in number, in which the craving for alcoholic liquor disappeared
before an increase in diet and a gain in weight. I shall never forget
the first case in which this happened. The patient was a man of nearly
sixty years of age who held a {158} rather important political office
in a small neighboring town. He was on the point of losing it because
periodical sprees were becoming more frequent and it was impossible
for him to maintain his position. He was over six feet in height and
he weighed less than a hundred and fifty pounds. I had tried to get
him to gain in weight by advice and suggestion without avail. Finally,
I had to make a last effort to use whatever influence I had to save
his political position for him, and then I succeeded in making him
understand that he would have to do as I told him in the matter of
eating, or else I would have nothing more to do with him.
It was not without some misgivings that I thus undertook to make a man
of nearly sixty change his lifelong habits of eating. That is
something which I consider no physician has a right to do unless there
is some very imperative reason for it. Here was, however, a desperate
case. It was in the late afternoon particularly that this patient
craved drink so much that he could not deny himself. As he ate but
very little breakfast and had a hasty scanty lunch, he was at the very
bottom of his physical resources at that time, and at the end of a
rather demanding day's work. We had {159} to break up his other habits
in the hope of getting at the craving. He had taken coffee and a roll
for breakfast. I dictated a cereal, two eggs and several rashers of
bacon and several rolls. I insisted on fifteen minutes in the open
before lunch and then a hearty lunch with some substantial dessert at
the end of it. This man proceeded to gain at the rate of a little more
than three pounds a week. By the end of two months, he weighed about
one hundred and eighty pounds and had not touched a drop of liquor in
that time and felt that he had no craving for it. That is some ten
years ago, and there has been no trouble with his alcoholic cravings
since. He has maintained his weight; he says that he never felt so
well and that above all he now has no more of that intense tiredness
that used to come to him at the end of the day. Every now and then he
says to me in musing mood,--"And to think that I had never learned to
eat enough!"
For these very tired feelings so often complained of by nervous
patients, once it has been decided that there is no organic
trouble--for of course kidney or heart or blood pressure affections
may readily cause them--there are just two things to be considered:
These are {160} flat-foot or yielding arch, and undereating. When
there is a combination of these two, then tiredness may well seem
excessive and yet be readily amenable to treatment. Persons with
occupations which require standing are especially liable to suffer in
this way.
Undereating in the evening is especially important for many nervous
people and is often the source of wakefulness. It is the cause of
insomnia, not so much at the beginning of the night, as a rule, as in
the early morning. Many a person who wakes at four or five and cannot
go to sleep again is hungry. There is a sense of gone-ness in the
stomach region in these cases, which the patients are prone to
attribute to their nerves in general, or some of them who have had
unfortunate suggestions from their physicians may talk of their
abdominal brain; but it is surprising how often their feelings are due
simply to emptiness. Any thin person particularly who has his last
meal before seven and does not go to bed until after eleven should
always take something to eat before retiring. A glass of milk or a cup
of cocoa and some crackers or a piece of simple cake may be
sufficient, but it is important to eat enough. Animals and men
naturally get sleepy after eating and do not sleep well if their {161}
stomachs are empty. Children are the typical examples. We are all only
children of a larger growth in this regard.
When the last meal is taken before seven and people do not go to bed
until nearly twelve, as is frequently the case in large cities, the
custom of having something to eat just before bed is excellent for
sleep. I have known the establishment of this habit to afford marked
relief in cases of insomnia that had extended over years. The people
in my experience who sleep the worst are those who, having taken a
little cambric tea and some toast and preserves with perhaps a piece
of cake for supper, think that this virtuous self-control in eating
ought to assure them good rest. It has just the opposite effect.
Disturbed sleep, full of dreams and waking moments, is oftener due to
insufficient eating than to overeating. The people whom I know who
sleep the best and from whom there are no complaints of insomnia, are
those who, having eaten so heartily at dinner that they get to the
theater a little late, attend the Follies or some late show for a
while and then go round to one of the Broadway restaurants and chase a
Welsh rarebit or some lobster a la Newburg, with a biscuit Tortoni or
a Peche Melba down {162} to their stomachs and then go home to sleep
the sleep of the just.
Just as there are bad habits of eating too little that are dangerous
and must be corrected by the will so there are bad habits of eating
too much that can only be corrected in the same way. While it is
dangerous to be under weight in the early years of life, it is at
least as dangerous to be overweight in middle life. With the variety
and abundance of food now supplied at a great many tables, it is
comparatively easy for people in our time to eat too much. The result
is that among the better-to-do classes a great many people suffer from
obesity, sometimes to such an extent that life is made a burden to
them. There is only one way to correct this and that is to eat less
and of course to exercise more. Reduction in diet means the breaking
of a long established habit and that of course is often hard. The
whole family may have to set a good example of abstinence from too
great a variety of food and especially from the richer foods, in order
that a parent may be helped to prevent further development of obesity
and to lose gently and gradually some of the overweight that is being
put on, and which now, by conserving heat and slowing up metabolism
{163} generally within the body, makes it so easy for even reduced
quantities of food to maintain the former habit of adding weight.
In this matter of obesity, however, just exactly as in the case of
tuberculosis for those who are underweight, prevention is much better
than cure. The people who know that they inherit such tendencies
should be particularly careful not to form habits of eating that will
add considerably to their weight. After all, it is not nearly so
difficult a matter as is often imagined. There is no need, unless in
very excepti
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