Messages to mothers, a protest against artificial methods

Preface

THIS work is the combined utilitarian results of a series of vital human-nature studies, as pursued by a regular physician in the course of twenty -three years of practice. The work is offered as a contribution to the common stock of hygienic learning.

It is addressed primarily to mothers, because it concerns them chiefly, and because the writer therefore regards them as the most impartial judges of the findings presented, and because through women lies the line of least resistance to these particular steps in the progress of hygienic learning. If my work passes woman's trial and judgment, it will receive the serious attention of the medical profession all the sooner for having been first submitted to women.

I do not encourage the domestic practice of medicine, and, with one harmless exception, have not mentioned a drug or a medicine.

I recognize a subconscious intelligence, otherwise referred to as nature or instinct, the promptings of which are called intuitions.

iii

Preface

These intuitions I have sought to understand and have learned to trust unreservedly, and in all matters of food selection and rejection I do so trust them and am by the results fully justified in so doing.

Accordingly, in the dietary details of the treatment of disease, I must differ radically from the prevailing practice of the medical profession generally.

The prevailing scheme of practice, for example, in the great group of digestive disorders, especially of young children, does not succeed, and I have no doubt about the propriety of assailing it, especially since I have an extremely simple, successful and perfectly natural scheme to offer in its stead.

H. P.

Berkeley, California.

IV

Contents

Page

Preface Hi

Chapter

Chapter I And in All Organization, Growth and Work

A LL PERSONS who are successfully en- /% gaged in affairs mechanical agree that

/ — % perpetual motion is a fallacy, that JL Jk. nothing mechanical can be done without power to do it. But all sorts of authorities ignore the idea of power being involved in physiological functions. One whose word has weight has even declared to me that no power, or at any rate no appreciable amount of power, was involved in the organization, development and growth of a fetus.

It will only be necessary to present a series of familiar and interesting facts, and the conclusion becomes apparent and evident that power is involved in all forms of organization, development and growth. This conclusion is almost the entire foundation of my book, and I must necessarily devote considerable space to the very interesting grounds upon which it is based.

We cannot successfully employ at the same time, for distinctly different purposes, a combination of muscles and a combination of mental faculties. The superintendent in a factory stopped a foreman who was about to lend a hand at some heavy lifting. Said the superintendent to the foreman: "I don't want you to work, I want you to think; and I do n't want these men to think, I want them to work," alluding to the laborers.

Much reading and knowing are very likely to involve the habit of thinking automatically and not to the purpose of the work in hand and thus spoil a person for a good occupation without qualifying him for any other. The illiterate servant who knows his business is better and more efficient than the scholarly one who knows much else; this is apparent in the comparison of Chinese and Japanese, whether as servants or otherwise. The best farmers I ever knew were illiterate men, but by no means ignorant in regard to the essentials of their work and their business. The best business men are also comparatively illiterate, but they know and do business better than the men who know and think a good deal besides.

Recently I was much interested in what proved to be better and cheaper than an experiment for my purpose. I observed the doings of two men, a gardener and his employer, on the grounds of the latter for one week, — the gardener working at somewhat skilled labor all the more attentively because the employer was constantly present, and the employer steadily talking all day and compelling the gardener to pay attention and talk also. The gardener was a good, natural, unsophisticated character, not disposed to strike nor even to display any sign of the agony within him. The employer did not know that a gardener has not power enough to operate his muscular instrumentalities and his mental instrumentalities at the same time for different and unrelated purposes. At the conclusion of the six days' service the gardener found himself thinner, weaker, irritable, dyspeptic, tired and almost prostrated. Now ordinarily a man is supposed to keep strong and well at gardening, and mere talking is not suspected of prostrating anybody, but it was the thinking in addition to the working that used up more power than his food supplied him and caused him to draw upon his power-storage battery of fat and burn that out to the extent of making his shrinkage as plainly apparent to others as his fatigue and distress were to himself.

The brain and muscles are instruments of labor. They are under ordinary circumstances not injured during periods of action more than what is easily restored during periods of rest. But an instrument can never do anything anywhere on its own account, it must always require power to operate it; it is the power that does the work.

It requires much more power to operate the brain in the processes of voluntary and designed thinking than it does to operate any combination of muscles at the hardest manual labor during the same length of time. From any comparison of the maximum number of hours at mental labor and at manual labor, respectively, that men can endure per day and retain their normal weight with good digestion, sleep and good temper, it is deducible that an hour of purely original mental work costs even more power than two and one-half hours of hard manual labor.

Ignorance of this fact has cost a great many thinkers a great deal of illness and it has even cost the lives of many at the very commencement of their careers. The only two essentials involved in labor of any kind are the instrument and the power. Of course there is a directing intelligence which also involves an instrumentality and also requires power.

When a man works beyond the point of fatigue he becomes disabled, however slight his disability may be. This disability means that he has either exhausted his supply of power for the present, or that he has disabled his instrument. No doubt many cases of disabled brains occur and result from overtime mental work. Cases of this kind occur every year in any community where strenuous intellectual pursuits prevail; a few at least being reported, more must occur than the public becomes aware of. Often the obituary of a young man emphasizes his unusual ability, and it seems as if the strenuous efforts of the prodigy, encouraged by parents and teachers to improve on the natural gifts possessed, involved the use of mental faculties to an extent that ruined them, with illness and death as the final result. In the persistent effort to make more of what is already a youthful musical prodigy, he is deprived of his natural and necessary childish play and associations, confined indoors, exhibited in the lime-light at untimely hours and worked excessively on matters that are hard and difficult enough for mature mental instrumentalities. His career is brilliant but short; excessive and prolonged strain serves as cause of a break in the instrumentality, and the career ends, often in death.

An editor told me of two brilliant young men, assistants to his position, who committed suicide. In addition to their prescribed work of six hours daily, six days a week, both these men did much extra work of the purely original mental kind with a view to improving their qualifications for advancement. I am told that editorial writers are allotted six hours a day, six days a week, for work, and that they break down at about forty years of age, the weaker ones sooner, while the stronger ones last longer. The aspiring young man in such a position who, in spite of feeling to the contrary, insists on spending some remaining hours at hard mental work is, of course, in danger of being wrecked long before forty and, perhaps, fatally. There are lessons in these cases of illness, insanity, suicide and sometimes murder, but the utility of them is not much appropriated.

Cases in which the disability, or illness, is due to exhaustion of power, in which the brain as an instrumentality remains inta6l, are numerous and conspicuous; the subjects of such cases live with sound minds to a good old age generally and, though quite miserable and almost constantly sick, they generally recover their health spontaneously during old age. The reason for their recovery is that they have retired from work and now, power being no longer excessively drawn upon for overtime work, they have enough power for digestion and bodily maintenance in general. These almost life-long invalids of body, but sound of mind, with their recovery of good health on retirement, prove that the brain as an instrument of labor in their cases was not damaged by the habitual overtime work which kept them sick for years. That they recovered on retirement proves that their dyspepsia was due to their appropriation of so much power for their work that not enough was left for digestion.

Dyspepsia was the salvation of such men as Schiller, Darwin, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer and many others. For, had not the sufferings of one day compelled them to rest the next and given nature a chance for at least a partial restoration, they would have ruined their instruments so early in life as not to have been heard of beyond the small circle in which the misfortune had occurred. Had they had the power to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, they would have tried to use their instruments of mental labor that long. It was power that failed them; they must have felt and, I suppose, to some vague extent must have understood this, but they did not understand that their digestion in particular and their physical maintenance in general failed because the power for these purposes was diverted to operate the brain.

As early as 1859, and more plainly in 1874,* the late Professor Joseph Le Conte showed and explained that all the forces of Nature are correlated and transmutable, that all the different forces of Nature are only different forms of the same energy. In accordance with these most

*"The Conservation of Energy." — Stewart.

useful fa6ts, first taught by Le Conte, we may as well admit — we can almost see in ourselves that we must admit — that all the different energies in the animal body are correlated and transmutable. In our bodies, the heat, motion, electricity, and digestive, growing, healing and mental energies, and the chemical energies of our foods and our fat, are all only different forms of the same force.

As I am only considering energy or force as an agent which, through some instrumentality, accomplishes some work in the body, I use the same word that is employed in factories and shops. Force applied to work in a shop is called power. The fundamental proposition in this discussion is, that it requires power to operate every function of every organ and of every cell in the body. We shall see that mental work, muscular work, digestive work and the work of physical maintenance of the body in good order, are all performed by the same power in different forms.

Normally we all take in fuel enough to give us a large surplus of power beyond what is required for bodily functions and maintenance. This surplus is available for what we call work. The body that is maintained in good order has also a power-storage battery, which is simply stored fuel in the form of fat, which will supply power to maintain the bodily functions and even to do work when, on account of sickness, we cannot take food and when, owing to such misfortunes as are happening somewhere any time, we cannot get it.

Our fat is our power-storage battery. When not otherwise useful it may at least be ornamental. To the migratory bird, the hybernating bear, the ship-wrecked mariner, the besieged soldier and sick patient, the storage battery, when there is one, supplies the power to bridge the interval between meals. This interval may be, for the migrating bird long enough for him to fly two thousand miles, for a hybernating animal a whole winter season, for a patient the duration of his illness, for a ship-wrecked mariner or a besieged soldier, this interval between meals may be endured until either has, for the sake of power, burned up his timbers to an extent, according to " Yeo's Physiology," as follows:

Fat.

-

97 per cent

Muscle

-

- 30 " "

Liver

_

56 " "

Spleen

_

- 63 " "

Blood -

-

17 " "

In such cases the nervous structures not only remain inta6l but in good order, and all the materials appropriated for the emergency are so completely restored, on the return to normal conditions, that in the end one is none the worse for having been so situated.

Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey of Meadville, Pennsylvania, resorts to fasting as a means of curing his patients. He reports enough cases to demonstrate that fasting is a safe therapeutic means when administered knowingly. He reports Miss Kuenzel of Philadelphia as having fasted forty-five days at a loss of twenty pounds and with complete restoration from a serious illness in which her mind was involved and on which account she was taken to an asylum where she did not improve. This was in 1899. Miss Kuenzel was a refined woman, twenty-two years of age and weighed one hundred and forty pounds at the start and one hundred and twenty pounds at the conclusion of her forty-five days' easy fast without any trouble to herself or any one else. She took no drugs and there was nothing but nature to which credit was due for recovery. Credit was also due Dr. Dewey and the friends for trusting this " nature of the animal " to perform this restoration.

Nothing is done without power, and in this case the power which it cost to restore order in the body of this patient and to keep all her bodily functions, excepting those of the digestive apparatus, in a6lion, was represented by the twenty pounds of fat which disappeared. The average daily quantity of power required was represented by four-ninths, or less than half a pound of fat. The patient was up and around, went to entertainments and took long walks, a seven-mile tramp on the thirty-seventh day.

The amount of power that some men and women require to do mental work per day is represented by the amount of fat per day which they gain in weight when they stop work, otherwise making no change. This daily gain, for a week or two, is in many cases a pound. This matter is, of course, generally observed only in cases of persons who have been reduced in weight by overtime work. The power which a hog in the pen gets from its food is stored in the form of fat, because there is nothing for the hog to do by which it could pay out the power. In 1866 I saw the grass getting scarcer, thinner and shorter as we moved at the rate of a hundred miles a week westward from Omaha, while our oxen, drawing heavy loads, were also as gradually getting thinner. The grass was their only food and must have been far from being sufficient to supply the power that drew the loads. The fat of the oxen was used up to furnish the power.

Power is required for self-control, for self-government. "He that ruleth himself is mightier than he that taketh a city." Not much power is required for this purpose; self-control does not make one tired, does not exhaust one's power, but it requires always the presence of a high measure of power; high pressure, the steam engineer would call it, or high voltage, the electrician would say. Successful self-governors are strong men and women. Children are, and some invalids ought to be, governed by parents or guardians. It does not seem to require much power to make up one's mind, or to come to a decision or conclusion; but this seems easy only to the strong, while the same action seems about impossible to those who are powerless. To be short of physical power means to be short of mental power. For much that children and other subordinates do, they are spared the trouble and do not require the power to make up their minds; their parents and superiors do that for them and only the action is left to be fulfilled. To this extent one may be controlled by the mind of another. That a thing is easy to do, if you only make up your mind, is true; but it is harder to make up one's mind to do a thing, if he is weak and powerless, than it is to do the thing.

An hysterical woman is simply one who is powerless, owing to digestive disorder or overtime work, and her self-control is not easy for the further reason that it is not habitual. She cries or laughs automatically when there is provocation to that effect. It requires little or no power to laugh or cry, but it requires power not to laugh and especially not to cry, and it requires still more power to make up her mind not to cry or to stop crying. Of course, she stops crying in time, because crying occurs in self-limited periods.

It sometimes happens that nothing can be done for a patient because there is no guardianship. There are insubmissive and lone men and women, sixty years of age, more or less, with affairs to which they have given their attention and their power to the last unit of their storage batteries. Now they are weak and sick and have not power to make up their minds to resign affairs wholly or partly to others. Bodily functions fail for want of power; they call for help, but when help arrives they occupy the whole time with their own automatic talk; they never listen, never understand, never succeed in grasping the proffered helping idea. A child would not, either. They need a guardian. One such person was given the ominous suggestion to wind up his business. He did so, expecting Death as the next comer. But power being released from business, it became available for bodily functions; restoration took place and he made a complete spontaneous recovery.

Talking and compulsory listening cost much power; either one alone can exhaust the power of a person to the point of prostration. That such prostration is called " nervous prostration " or "nervous exhaustion" shows the state of the prevailing misunderstanding of this matter. People seem to think the nerves are out of order. " It 's your nerves," repeats the doctor to the patient, and no wonder he fails to do any good for her. Power has not been taken into reckoning. If the electrician did not take power into reckoning, he might also repeat, when your electrical apparatus failed to work, "It's the wires." The nerves are all right; I doubt that they are ever out of working order; I am sure the blame is misplaced. The nervous system seems to be self-repairing and self-maintaining, and is not even impaired by the extreme exhaustion of starvation. The subconscious mind cares for the nervous system and preserves it from all harm except that of poisons. Wires may get out of order, but the nerves, I believe, never; it is the power which operates the nerves that fails.

What mind is, we do not know; we know to some extent what it does. We know it operates through instrumentalities, and that the cells, or groups of cells, of the well-known gray nervous matter, mostly within the skull but much of it elsewhere in the body, are the instrumentalities. There are circumstances enough which tend to prove that mind is helpless without power to operate its instrumentalities. Whatever the human brain may achieve, it is the fuel foods, chiefly the starches, sugars and fats, that supply the power to accomplish the achievement. The same power might otherwise operate a pick and shovel, or the same fuel might be burned in a furnace and yield power to run a machine, or a dynamo and produce electricity. Mind should be reckoned as including all that intelligence within us that governs all the activities of every organ, including the brain, and of every cell. We are conscious of some mind and unconscious of what I believe to be the greater part of it.

We have then conscious mind and we have subconscious mind, which we often refer to as nature, "nature of the animal," with the small initial letter to distinguish it from the Universal Intelligence, spoken of and written as Nature with the capital initial. Mind attends to voluntary actions of the body; the subconscious mind attends to the involuntary functions and to all organs and cells of the body, governing and maintaining each organ and its function and keeping them all in coordinate action. Even a faint idea of what is going on in the body, and the coordinate character of it all, must give us a very exalted notion of the subconscious part of our minds.

The subconscious mind does much more than conduct the mere animal functions; it contributes very largely to the mental work of solving problems, developing inventions, organizing and formulating arguments, essays, books, musical compositions and so on. The subconscious mind originates ideas and delivers them to mind like prepaid parcels, as O. W. Holmes said. The organization and growth of mental untertakings, like the production of a book, go on much unconsciously, and, though under direction of mind, they are the work of subconscious mind rather more than of the conscious.

It can be shown that the work of the subconscious mind is done at the expense of power. Many of the best writers have been ill with digestive disorders coincidently with the progress of organization and growth of a piece of work. While the time they spent voluntarily working at their tasks may not have been excessive, their attention was on their work at all other hours of the day and night. Ideas merged into consciousness at off times, even during sleep, causing them to awaken, showing that organization and growth of the work were going on at such times and at all times until the work was complete and ready for delivery through pen on paper. At all times, then, so long as one or more subjects were the objects of paramount attention, was the subconscious mind busy and using power for the organization and growth of the new intellectual structures, and the more complicated the organization and greater the structure, the more power it required.

So much power, indeed, has many a work cost its author, that in sacrificing what was necessary for digestion, protracted illness has been the result because not enough power was reserved for the maintenance of that physical integrity called health. We may say truly and in all sincerity that Thomas Carlyle, for example, suffered from the sickness of pregnancy. He never wrote but one book without being miserably sick before it was organized and completely developed and ready for commitment to paper. This sickness, we will take more pains to show, was due to failure of the digestive functions, because power, that was present and available for digestion, was diverted to the work of organization of the book. The principles are just the same when, as in the case of pregnancy as ordinarily understood, it is the organization and growth of a fetus, with only this difference, — that in the case of a book the whole affair is largely subject to control by the conscious mind, whereas in fetal pregnancy the conscious mind has nothing to do with the case, as we shall see later.

It may be required to know what are the means of avoiding this sickness of mental pregnancy? I should say, and base my saying on theory confirmed by experience: limit your voluntary work at your undertaking to a short sitting in the forenoon and afternoon, or to forenoon or afternoon only; sit only so long as you can do good work, and no longer; rest absolutely from such work at least one day in seven; do not work on the subjects nor on any other mental work during the evening. If you are irritable, sleepless and dyspeptic under this plan which allows the subconscious mind to continue work between sittings and at all other times of day and night and Sundays, then divert your attention sometime daily to some other occupation or pastime which does not require more than the simplest mental effort and only the least power. This will interrupt the work of the subconscious mind, stop its appropriation of power and allow you enough power for bodily functions and normal maintenance. Rest from voluntary mental work at least one hour after each meal so that your digestive apparatus may have the benefit of all your might for digestion. Do not watch the clock for the expiration of this hour of rest after each meal, rather watch your feelings for the moment when power becomes available for operating the brain.

Since it is true that each one can do his own work best in his own way, let these instructions be disregarded and work as you please so far as your health will permit. If you need these instructions, but think their adoption involves a waste of much time and a long delay of the end of your work, remember that those who were sick a great deal, as Darwin, Carlyle and Herbert Spencer were, lost a great deal of time owing to illness, and, even when well enough to work, could only sit a short while. Spencer worked one to two hours daily; Darwin, three to three and a quarter hours daily; Carlyle tried to work all day and half the night, seven days a week, but, of course, was on many days too ill to work at all. These statements are not true for the entire working careers of Darwin and Spencer. Before settling down to these limits they worked overtime and became ill and their ills forced them to the limits mentioned. It must be remembered, for it is one of my premises, that a unit of mental energy is worth at least two and a half units of muscular energy; in other words, an hour of original mental work costs as much power as two and a half hours of hard manual labor.

The sickness of fetal pregnancy, though often very distressing and sometimes unnecessarily fatal, is a simple matter and can now be explained in a simple way, which in turn leads to natural, simple and easy means of prevention and cure without drugs. Power, the part it performs in the case, is the principal thing to be considered and understood in the premises. Every constructive process of matter and mind requires power. In Nature there are two kinds of constructive processes: one is growth simply, the other is organization, and the two are always carried on in the same structure but not always at the same time. Power is indispensable to the organization and growth of every plant and every animal and every detail of the same. Power is required for the healing or restoration of any part destroyed or injured.

Organization requires more power than mere growth. The hardest and most fatiguing part of constructing a book, a plan, or any mental composition, is its organization. The bird does not grow in the egg, it is only organized there. The fat of the egg is the stored power which is employed in the organization. This fat is in the yolk and, in the case of the hen's egg, is equal to half the weight of the egg minus the shell and water. Leaving water out of the reckoning, the fuel material is by weight equal to the material used in the structure.

The caterpillar accumulates and stores material very similar to the yolk of the hen's egg, says Professor Woodworth, entomologist. This material supplies the power which effects its change of organization, or reorganization, to that of the butterfly. This is a great change, and the relatively great loss of weight by the time the process is complete indicates what a large share of the caterpillar's own material has disappeared, — burned up to furnish power for the reorganization. " The weight of the emerging butterfly is in many cases not one-tenth that of the caterpillar," said Professor Joseph Le Conte. In the case of the hen's egg there must be a similar loss of weight. A promised determination of the amount of this loss has up to the last moment failed to reach me. I suggest, at any rate, that the weight of the newly hatched chick will be found to be a surprisingly small fraction of the weight of the fresh-laid egg, the loss representing the fuel that supplied the power that effected the organization of the bird. The same must be true for every egg in which organization takes place outside the parent body.

It happens regularly with many plants and animals that an extraordinary amount of power is needed at times and under circumstances when none at all is obtainable, or when its requirement can only be supplied in part. Under these circumstances the power is stored in the tissues in the form of fuel material ready for the emergency when that arrives. Thus plants store fuel as well as building material for use during the organization and growth of flowers, fruits and seeds. While most plants can accumulate these materials fast enough to produce fruit or seed annually, others require more than one year. The century plant is said to require from ten to seventy years, according to soil and climate, to accumulate the large quantity of starch in its great thick leaves with which to produce its great flower stalk and its enormous crop of flowers, and then seeds, for which purpose it finally gives up all its power, even that vital power called life —