Health, strength and happiness : a book of practical advice

Preface

This book is written for the young man, the man of middle age, and the elderly — not least for the prematurely elderly. Any attempt to include the hygiene of childhood would have been ridiculous, for it is my purpose to regard the mind as the foremost thing in man at all ages, and a proper discussion of childhood would therefore involve the treatment of what we call education. The child is not merely a peculiar animal, as many seem to think, nor yet a discarnate mind of small size, as the old pedagogy thought, but a being composed of mental and physical factors all characteristic and yet protean. It is the most fascinating subject in the world, and I propose to devote a separate volume to it.

Similarly as regards woman. The greater part of the characters of men and women are not male and female, but simply human. The principles of hygiene are fundamentally the same for both. The needs of the human being as regards air and food and clothing and exercise are almost identical, if not absolutely so, for the two sexes. There is included in these pages the discussion of all these sexless questions, which are at least as urgent for women as for men, and of greater racial importance in their case. The hair, for instance, is sexless >

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PREFACE and the principles of its care — to which we shall condescend to allude, condescension though it certainly be — are the same for both sexes. In this particular case man may learn a great deal from the practice of woman, which is obviously much more successful than his own.

There will remain, however, a number of momentous questions which concern woman alone directly — though all coming ages through her. It has to be asked how far “ Woman in Transition ” is woman in transition from womanhood to something which is not manhood and for which no word exists. The fact that some women are now earning their living as steeplejacks, or whatever it may be, must not deter us from asking (totally ivithout reference to what our grandmothers would have thought) whether the hygiene of womanhood is really compatible in the highest degree with any profession but one — and that one supreme ; and an effort should be made to put a period to the unwisdom of which the bitter fruit is so much hysteria, neurasthenia, and chronic illness of all sorts amongst women. To this whole subject , which seems to me to have the gravest social consequences, I also propose to devote a special volume. Meanwhile the whole of the present volume is relevant to the needs of women considered simply as human beings, possessed of such souls and appetites and physical needs as men possess, and of at least equal importance in the scale of being.

Contents

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I. Introduction i

II. The New Asceticism 7

Introduction

Such books as this might be are amongst the chief makers of hypochondriacs — people who make themselves ill by trying to keep well. Of all the absurd uses to which to put one’s mind this is chief — to make a nuisance of the body. In order to preserve the health of the liver, for instance, the first necessity is to forget that one possesses a liver. Probably one does, but many people make themselves ill by concern about organs which, as like as not, they do not possess. The case of that nightmare, the stomach, is quite similar, and my foremost piece of advice on the subject of food should be, I almost believe, to take no one’s advice on this subject. We think far too much about our bodies nowadays, and doctors are not without their share of blame in this respect. The body is a necessary evil, and like other necessary evils should be ignored as far as possible, just as the existence of unnecessary evils should be shouted from the house-tops in season and out of season. Thus, if I allude to anatomy in the following pages, I shall do so in a quite casual and incidental fashion. It is possible for every one but the surgeon to know too much anatomy. Not one pain in a thousand in the appendix region has anything to do with appendicitis, and you are preserved from faulty diagnosis in this respect if you do not know where your appendix is. As a matter of fact, no one can tell where his appendix is until an operation is performed, for its site is most variable.

My object is to enable the reader to reduce to a minimum the conscious attention demanded by his body, whether in health or in disease. To this end we shall have to discuss many precise details, to issue warnings, and to indict many prevalent habits. This knowledge, however, will not fetter but liberate. To know what to fear is to know what not to fear. To acquire sensible habits is not necessarily more difficult than to acquire senseless habits ; and once a habit is formed, the conscious mind can turn its attention elsewhere. No one thinks less about his body than I do, and this is the chief reason why I have so little occasion to think about it. If I happen to know the usual rate of my pulse, that is only because this is sometimes a convenient means, as Galileo knew, of measuring time when a watch is not at hand or when the observation is not desired to be obtrusive. I have not seen my tongue for years — and have not missed much, I am sure. Unlike children, tongues should be heard but not seen.

Almost the only certain fact of dietetics is that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, just as one man's fresh air is another man’s draught. We are assured

INTRODUCTION 3

that the amylolytic stage of gastric digestion occupies about twenty minutes to half-an-hour. It is heartily welcome : but the primeval savage who cooked his hare when he could catch it, and starved when he could not, has the laugh of the dyspeptic physiologist. To say, “ Stomach, be thou my cross " is as foolish as to say, “ Stomach, be thou my god : " the only wise thing to say is, “ Stomach, mind thy business, and I will mind mine." There is going to be no truckling to stomachs or livers in these pages.

I belong to no special school of medical or dietetic thought, except that which believes in the healing power of Nature, the vis medicatrix Natures, and in the power of the mind over the body. I am not a Fletcherite nor a vegetarian, nor a fruitarian, nor a Christian scientist. I do not worship at the shrine of muscle, and I consume many uric-acid yielding articles of diet. The most amazing and almost the most significant thing about man the animal to me is the illimitable variety and diversity of the practices which are compatible with his health. I see athletic records broken, and admirable mental energy exhibited by rigid vegetarians (so-called), but am sure that they do not enjoy better health or turn out more work than others, who eat what they like when they like and because they like it, omit a meal or take two for one as convenience dictates, and find themselves just as well when they take no exercise as when they play two games of cricket or hockey a week. This adaptability of man, which doubtless exceeds that of any other living creature, animal or vegetable, is a capital fact in history and has helped to make him the lord of the earth, and the most widely distributed creature upon its surface. It makes supremely silly all the systems and doctrines which ignore it and declare that this way alone lie health and happiness. Our purpose will be, whilst insisting upon this extraordinary adaptability of man, to point out its limits and the probable price to be paid for exceeding them. Man lives in the Tropics and in the Polar regions, and no other animal can compare with him in this respect ; but doubtless he has an optimum temperature, at which he thrives best, just as microbes have. It will be our business to indicate these best average conditions for human life, whilst recognising and welcoming the existence of many persons who thrive and have thrived upon their defiance.

One thing, however, with all his powers of adaptation, man will not stand, and that is the constant and solicitous contemplation of his own person. With all its quackery and nonsense, Christian Science has recognised this truth as no religious or medical corporation has recognised it hitherto : and this it is which suffices to explain its success. The common medical attitude, in Great Britain, at any rate, is to regard Christian Science as pure humbug, and to load it with abuse. This is not found convincing by the man whom Christian Science has served ; and it seems very foolish to those who have any acquaintance with the subject of therapeutic suggestion and its application in the hypnotic state, a great healing power which conservatism and prejudice have long ignored and still ignore in this country. The reasonable attitude for the man who has any notion of what is meant by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, is to ask what are the factors which give this thing its survival-value. To answer, self-deception, is to beg the question. If a man thinks he has no

INTRODUCTION pain, he has no pain ; and this is the most that you can say for yourself at any time. Christian Science has achieved the exploitation of a great truth— doubtless only a half or three-quarter truth, but still true so far — and it is this that has given it its success. Furthermore, its philosophy is sound as a working hypothesis, at least.

If I were in medical practice the first question I should feel inclined to ask of half my patients would be, Are you a body or a soul ? The question is philosophically illegitimate, we know ; but it is practically valid and momentous. Evolutionist though I be, I confess myself somewhat weary of the glorious truth that man is an animal. “The question,” said Disraeli, “is whether man is an ape or an angel, and I am on the side of the angels.” The truth is, of course, that he is both, and that a house divided against itself cannot stand. For practical purposes, a man has to decide whether he is a soul or a body, or, if both, which shall be master. The body is a good servant but a bad master. The difference between man and a microbe or a monkey is that such rudimentary souls as the latter possess are the servants of the body, whilst the body of man is his servant. This is the truth which Christian Science recognises in its exaggerated way. We shall here assume that we discuss not a more or less sensitive and conscious piece of machinery but an Ego or a Self, possessed of such machinery and dependent upon it as upon an indispensable servant. We shall attempt to define the conditions of bodily health, not as an end in itself, but as a necessary condition of mental health, which is a necessary condition of mental happiness, which is, legitimately construed, the legitimate end of human existence. Thus we shall seek to state not how to have a healthy stomach, but how not to know you have a stomach — which comes to the same thing. The maintenance of health depends not upon continuous attention to bodily needs — which will wreck the health of the strongest — but on the formation of healthy habits ; and the value of such habits is that, once formed, they can be left to the sub-conscious mind, whilst the conscious self, instead of feeling itself for ever chained to the body of this death, can dance in its fetters.

II

The cardinal principle of all asceticism, new or old, is surely that the mind or soul or psyche is the all-important part of man, and that his body Man is a has no place or purpose or warrant but mmd to serve it. This is a supremely great and noble conception, of which there is need in every age, and certainly not least need to-day. It is to our discredit, indeed, that at the present time, when the psychical factors more completely outweigh the physical factors than ever before in the struggle for individual, national, and racial existence, we should yet have to learn this lesson of the ancients, amongst whom such physical factors as muscular strength and endurance were indeed of far greater relative value for life — as they are, of course, amongst the lower animals. If, then, it be the principle of all asceticism that there is nothing great in man but mind — mind, indeed, being the only important matter — none of us can hesitate to respect it. Our contempt, or disdain, or disregard of asceticism, as it has been practised before our time, cannot possibly be based upon any question of the truth of the underlying idea. He who, at whatever cost or under whatever delusions, seeks to treat his body in such a fashion as will make for the dignity and worth of his mind, has a high ideal of personal duty, and is noble and reverend, however lamentable the result or ludicrous the method.

The old asceticism believed that a whole truth and not a half truth was expressed by the doctrine of The old the antagonism between the interests of asceticism mind and body. So far as the supreme interests of soul were concerned, the body was simply an enemy and a nuisance. Everything that it desired, or that encouraged it, was necessarily an affront to its irreconcilable enemy, the soul. Only by consistently thwarting, starving, repressing the body, could a man do his duty to his higher part ; and there was no discharge in that war.

Now, before we consider how modern knowledge modifies this ancient view of the relation between The body a the physical and psychical parts of man, burden— let us remind ourselves that the burden of the body is a tyranny and a nuisance to-day.

Even the case of a man who enjoys perfect health suffices to point the argument. To begin with, there is the need of sleep, upon which the nervous system insists. About one-third of our lives is thus vegetably spent. A problem of the future will be to dispose of this necessity, which so seriously reduces the sum of our brief consciousness. In this respect, natural selection, which now acts mainly on such factors, will doubtless help to evolve a race that is not compelled to sleep one-third of its life away, but sleeps deeply , i.e. quickly. Still within the limits of perfect health, consider the necessity for clothing, which compels us to devote much of our lives to dressing and undressing. Then this body of ours is incessantly soiling itself and becoming soiled from without, and we have to wait upon its need for cleanliness daily. And there are our nails, which we cannot even prevent, once and for all, from continuing to grow, and which will not keep clean for an hour at a time. Considered sub specie ceternitatis, what can well be more utterly beneath the dignity of a thinking being, than the necessity to devote part of his brief span of life to waiting upon the nails which his body inherits from the days when claws were necessary implements of life ? Then again, our hair : the need for brushing the hair is a daily annoyance to which custom never inures at least one man, and never will — until, perchance, it departs and gives him the liberty from bodily tyranny which, in this respect, the bald man enjoys. Shaving, I take it, is wholly incompatible with the principles of the new asceticism, except for the surgeon and the dentist ; but my hopes that the Rontgen rays would prove to be a safe depilatory, and so liberate my sex from the tyranny of the chin, have been unrealised. Alas, that a man should be shaving his chin or trimming his beard when he might be doing any of the thousand things worthy of the state of man, and inexhaustible did he live for ever 1 And all this, and endless eating and drinking, and not one of these things can be done once for all and be done with ! Yet this is nothing to the burden of the body when it is not well. Perhaps we should realise the weight of this burden of ours if, instead of our own bodies, it were some one else’s upon which we had to wait incessantly, feeding and scrubbing, and clipping and paring, and dressing and undressing it day after day, and never a single holiday in our lives. Thus reflecting, one may be excused for the wish that it were

IO HEALTH, STRENGTH, & HAPPINESS

possible to be rid of the body altogether — say by taking it out and dropping it in the gutter some dark night.

However, we know nowadays that the body and the mind are intimately related in such wise that but a good injury to the one is injury to the other; servant— and this fact it is which must differentiate the new from the old asceticism, the new from the old idea of the luhole duty of health. The body is a servant which, however troublesome and vexatious, and even humiliating, in its reminders of the brute, is yet indispensable to our welfare. Even apart from the consideration that this is a very old servant of the family, we find that it pays us to treat him well. But the principle of the new asceticism is that our treatment of this troublesome retainer and our discharge of our duty to him must never be such that he becomes the master. His welfare is never an end in itself. If the eye or the hand or the foot offends us, it were well to pluck them from us or cut them off and maintain the integrity and dignity of the psyche, even though the maiming of the body be the price we have to pay. The new asceticism must assert the value and the duty of exercise, but it has only contempt for the ludicrous cult of muscle which is one of the follies of the age. The body, as we were taught nearly two thousand years ago, is indeed the temple of something immeasurably higher than itself, and that something we rightly worship, for the psyche of man is the highest thing we know ; but whilst the worship of that which the temple enshrines is truly religious, the worship of the temple itself is nothing but idolatry. It may well be that the modern recognition and publication of the facts and

THE NEW ASCETICISM n

laws of physiology, the wide interest in questions of health and disease, involve the very real risk that the body may become the god of our idolatry. To the worshippers of muscle may be quoted the verse of the psalmist, who reminds us that the Lord “ taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man. The Lord taketh pleasure in those that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy." It is part of the business of the new asceticism to inquire into this matter of the legs of a man, and ask how they should be treated — but on the definite assumption that their well-being and strength is not an end in itself, but merely to be sought in so far as it serves the man himself.

Apart from its insane and morbid form, the asceticism of the past concerned itself essentially with the avoidance of excess. Logically, perhaps, an(j needs the only complete expression of the old good treatasceticism should have been suicide. But ment~ it did not carry its belief in the antagonism between body and soul so far, though it often involved physical mutilation — which, upon my word, would be a very good thing for many of us in many directions. But in practice it was recognised that a certain minimum well-being of the body was indispensable for the maintenance of its connection with the soul ; whilst anything beyond that minimum must constitute an affront and an injury to the soul. The new asceticism, with its totally different conception of the relation between our two components, cannot agree that the psyche is at its best when the body is at its worst or lowest compatible with life. We know the contrary. Nevertheless, such are our present habits that the new asceticism is bound to lay the major stress upon our habits of physical excess and only the minor stress upon our habits of physical defect. Except, perhaps, in the matter of sleep, it is not a defect in meeting the requirements of the body that prevents most or all of us from reaching our full height as intellectual and spiritual beings, or, if you so prefer, from enjoying life to the utmost possible.

On the other hand, that physical excess against which the old asceticism was a protest is perhaps short of more markedly exemplified in ourselves pampering than ever in the past. Take the case of diet, for instance. It has now been quite definitely proved, by rigid experiment as contrasted with previous haphazard observation, that practically all well-to-do people are guilty of excess in the matter of food and drink. Here, in accordance with our principles, the word excess is used with definite relation to the mind. It is not merely that we eat more than we need, it is not that most of us carry more fat about with us than is required for the warmth or the protection or the reserve needs of the body ; it is that we eat and drink more than is good for our minds. I refer both to quality and quantity of mind, and to quantity especially in relation to age. The lamp of genius, said Schiller, burns quicker than the lamp of life, and alas that it should be so. Quite apart from the fact of premature death, and that there is not one death in many thousands that is not more or less premature, what of the premature extinction of the mind and especially of the lamp of genius which expires, whilst the bodily frame continues to use its useless life ? History is full of such cases, and they are to be seen all around us. The new asceticism will totally deny the inherent i3 truth of Schiller’s saying. There is no reason why the lamp of genius should burn quicker than the lamp of life. There are octogenarians in society to-day whose names are known and honoured wherever men love the light and the givers of light.

Some of these men, though deaf or muscularly frail, lame, blind, physically decrepit and senile, are doing as ^ good and as original and as fertile work now as they did in their thirties. Their case and many historic ones may be cited against those to which Schiller alluded. In these men the physical life has nearly burnt itself out, but the lamp of their genius burns as brightly as ever it did. Now, whatever others may care to suppose, the instructed few are very sure that the difference between the two sets of cases does not depend upon the mind in question, but upon the body and its treatment. If a man has good and fine mental qualities, and if he does his duty to his body, he may be assured that they will certainly not leave him. For this purpose we have to distinguish between the nervous system or the brain and the rest of the body. The brains of these old men to whom I allude, are still young brains, as the results prove. They have not been subjected to systematic food poisoning, or drink poisoning, or drug poisoning. They have always been their owners’ first care ; and so the legs of a man may grow lame, or the lens of his eye grow dim, or the joints of the little bones in his ear grow stiff, or he may lose a foot or a hand, or what not, but as long as his brain is supplied by soft arteries with pure blood, the man himself, as we wisely say, will be all there.

Hence it is possible to define the principles and practice of the new asceticism in terms which involve no unproved or unscientific theory of the The brain is mind, but are as concrete and practical the man as can fog. We may say^ simply, that the essential part of man is his nervous system. Historically, the nervous system was evolved as a servant of the body, intended to co-ordinate its parts and expedite its activities. The relation is now reversed, and we may conceive of liver and lungs and muscles and stomach as existing simply in order to serve the nervous system. Of this the chief part is the brain, and thus the new asceticism is entirely one with the doctrine of Professor Forel, the great psychologist of Zurich, that “ the brain is the man.” 1 Here is a true and simple phrase which may be accepted as a proximate truth by every one, and which commits us to no theory of the soul or the relation between mind and body. We shall not concern ourselves here with the question of the relation between the brain and the mind, for the sufficient reason that this question is superfluous for our discussion. Our purpose is to study the personal conditions of health and happiness, and here we need no deeper nor more precise dogma upon which to build and to which constantly to refer than “The brain is the man.” The “ average sensual man,” then, is one who uses his brain to serve his body, to find attractive food for his stomach or diversion for the centres concerned with racial purposes in his spinal cord. The new ascetic, on the other hand, is

1 “ With human beings the brain is the organ of the mind, and there is far more justification in what we know, nowadays, for saying, ‘ The brain is the man,’ than Buffon had in his time for saying, ‘The style is the

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he who uses his body to serve his brain, which is the substantial man.

Instead of a metaphysical problem, then, as to brain and mind, all the answers to which are merely “ words, words, words,” we have before us a physiological problem, practical, soluble and, in essentials, already solved — the problem of the relation between the brain and the body (or the rest of the body). The chief question which these chapters attempt to answer is, “ How ought I to treat my body so as best and longest to preserve the health, the vigour, and, therefore, the happiness of my brain — which, for practical purposes, is myself ? ” This is a true asceticism, vastly though it differs from the asceticism of the past ; and it will determine the proportions of our study, and the amount of attention devoted to, let us say, diet on the one hand, and the care of the hair on the other.

Now at this very point it is necessary to realise, very clearly and memorably, the exceeding intimacy of the relations which do subsist between .• the brain and the body. We shall dis- than braincover that these are all-embracing, so that deep our doctrine that the brain is the man by no means lessens, but merely directs, the amount of care and interest which we must rightly devote to the body in general — not for its own good as an end in itself, but for the good of the brain.

This intimacy and interdependence may be illustrated by wholesale borrowing from the last chapter of Herbert Spencer's Autobiography, in which he advances the doctrine that “the mind is as deep as the viscera ” — that is to say, the internal organs. The brain is the man, certainly, but this requires qualification by the fact that the rest of the body influences it so profoundly, not only in respect of blood-supply and food, as to warrant the saying : “Mind is not as deep as the brain only, but is, in a sense, as deep as the viscera.”

Spencer discusses the mental effects of bodily deformity or excellence, of beauty and ugliness ; and after referring to certain well-known facts of physiology, concludes that “ Men’s characters must be in part determined by their visceral structures : ” “ an unusually active digestion may, other things equal, be a factor in unusual mental energy:” “the brain, depending for its action on a due supply of blood duly purified, must be affected in its efficiency by every variation in the development of this or that excreting organ:” “not the quantity of mind only, but the quality of mind also, is in part determined by these psycho-physical connections : ” “ A, who is constitutionally active, takes trouble in doing things for others' gratifications, and is credited as essentially altruistic ; while B, though his absence of effort for others is due to constitutional inactivity, and not to want of sympathy with them, is thought essentially egoistic :” “one of the absurdities current among both cultured and uncultured is that it is as easy for one man to be active as for another.” “So, too, in active life the visceral derangements produced by over-work and anxiety are often followed by ill-temper. Even the recognised differences between irritability before dinner and equanimity (sometimes joined with generosity) after dinner, suffice to show that when flagging pulsation and impoverished blood are exchanged for vigorous pulsation and enriched blood, there results the change in the balance of the emotions which constitutes a moral change.”