Health Through Will Power

Health Through Will Power
James Walsh

James J. Walsh

Health Through Will Power

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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."

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, 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. 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. 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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."[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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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.