Health Through Will Power
Health Through Will PowerPREFACECHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXCHAPTER XCHAPTER XICHAPTER XIICHAPTER XIIICHAPTER XIVCHAPTER XVCHAPTER XVICHAPTER XVIICHAPTER XVIIICHAPTER XIXCopyright
Health Through Will Power
James J. Walsh
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 muchThat proof is called impossibility."Troilus and Cressida.The place of the will in its influence upon health and
vitality has long been recognized, not only by psychologists and
those who pay special attention to problems of mental healing, but
also, as a rule, by physicians and even by the general public. It
is, for instance, a well-established practice, when two older folk,
near relatives, are ill at the same time, or even when two younger
persons are injured together and one of them dies, or perhaps has a
serious turn for the worse, carefully to keep all knowledge of it
from the other one. The reason is a very definite conviction that
in the revulsion of feeling caused by learning of the fatality, or
as {2} a result of the solicitude consequent upon hearing that
there has been a turn for the worse, the other patient's chances
for recovery would probably be seriously impaired. The will to get
better, even to live on, is weakened, with grave consequences. This
is no mere popular impression due to an exaggeration of sympathetic
feeling for the patient. It has been noted over and over again, so
often that it evidently represents some rule of life, that whenever
by inadvertence the serious condition or death of the other was
made known, there was an immediate unfavorable development in the
case which sometimes ended fatally, though all had been going well
up to that time. This was due not merely to the shock, but largely
to the "giving up", as it is called, which left the surviving
patient without that stimulus from the will to get well which means
so much.It is surprising to what an extent the will may affect the
body, even under circumstances where it would seem impossible that
physical factors could any longer have any serious influence. We
often hear it said that certain people are "living on their wills",
and when they are of the kind who take comparatively little food
and yet succeed in accomplishing {3} a great deal of work, the
truth of the expression comes home to us rather strikingly. The
expression is usually considered, however, to be scarcely more than
a formula of words elaborated in order to explain certain of these
exceptional cases that seem to need some special explanation. The
possibility of the human will of itself actually prolonging
existence beyond the time when, according to all reason founded on
physical grounds, life should end, would seem to most people to be
quite out of the question. And yet there are a number of striking
cases on record in which the only explanation of the continuance of
life would seem to be that the will to live has been so strongly
aroused that life was prolonged beyond even expert expectation.
That the will was the survival factor in the case is clear from the
fact that as soon as this active willing process ceased, because
the reason that had aroused it no longer existed, the individuals
in question proceeded to reach the end of life rapidly from the
physical factors already at work and which seemed to portend
inevitably an earlier dissolution than that which happened.
Probably a great many physicians know of striking examples of
patients who have lived beyond the time when ordinarily death would
{4} be expected, because they were awaiting the arrival of a friend
from a distance who was known to be coming and whom the patient
wanted very much to see. Dying mothers have lived on to get a last
embrace of a son or daughter, and wives have survived to see their
husbands for a last parting—though it seemed impossible that they
should do so, so far as their physical condition was concerned—and
then expired within a short time. Of course there are any number of
examples in which this has not been true, but then that is only a
proof of the fact that the great majority of mankind do not use
their wills, or perhaps, having appealed to them for help during
life never or but slightly, are not prepared to make a definite
serious call on them toward the end. I am quite sure, however, that
a great many country physicians particularly can tell stories of
incidents that to them were proofs that the will can resist even
the approach of death for some time, though just as soon as the
patients give up, death comes to them.Professor Stokes, the great Irish clinician of the nineteenth
century, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the diseases of
the heart and lungs, and whose name is enshrined in terms commonly
used in medicine in {5} connection with these diseases, has told a
striking story of his experiences in a Dublin hospital that
illustrates this very well. An old Irishman, who had been a soldier
in his younger years and had been wounded many times, was in the
hospital ill and manifestly dying. Professor Stokes, after a
careful investigation of his condition, declared that he could not
live a week, though at the end of that time the old soldier was
still hanging on to life, ever visibly sinking. Stokes assured the
students who were making the rounds of his wards with him that the
old man had at most a day or two more to live, and yet at the end
of some days he was still there to greet them on their morning
visits. After the way of medical students the world over, though
without any of that hard-heartedness that would be supposed
ordinarily to go with such a procedure, for they were interested in
the case as a medical problem, the students began to bet how long
the old man would live.Finally, one day the old man said to Stokes in his broadest
brogue: "Docther, you must keep me alive until the first of the
month, because me pension for the quarther is then due, and unless
the folks have it, shure they won't have anything to bury me
with."{6}The first of the month was some ten days away. Stokes said to
his students, though of course not in the hearing of the patient,
that there was not a chance in the world, considering the old
soldier's physical condition, that he would live until the first of
the month. Every morning, in spite of this, when they came in, the
old man was still alive and there was even no sign of the curtains
being drawn around his bed as if the end were approaching. Finally
on the morning of the first of the month, when Stokes came in, the
old pensioner said to him feebly, "Docther, the papers are there.
Sign them! Then they'll get the pension. I am glad you kept me
alive, for now they'll surely have the money to bury me." And then
the old man, having seen the signature affixed, composed himself
for death and was dead in the course of a few hours. He had kept
himself alive on his will because he had a purpose in it, and once
that purpose was fulfilled, death was welcome and it came without
any further delay.There is a story which comes to us from one of the French
prisons about the middle of the nineteenth century which
illustrates forcibly the same power of the will to maintain life
after it seemed sure, beyond peradventure, {7} that death must
come. It was the custom to bury in quicklime in the prison yard the
bodies of all the prisoners who died while in custody. The custom
still survives, or did but twenty years ago, even in English
prisons, for those who were executed, as readers of Oscar Wilde's
"Ballad of Reading Gaol" will recall. Irish prisons still keep up
the barbarism, and one of the reasons for the bitterness of the
Irish after the insurrection of 1916 in Dublin was the burial of
the executed in quicklime in the prison yard. The Celtic mind
particularly revolts at the idea, and it happened that one of the
prisoners in a certain French prison, a Breton, a Celt of the
Celts, was deeply affected by the thought that something like this
might happen to him. He was suffering from tuberculosis at a time
when very little attention was paid to such ailments in prisoners,
for the sooner the end came, the less bother there was with them;
but he was horrified at the thought that if he died in prison his
body would disappear in the merciless fire of the
quicklime.So far as the prison physician could foresee, the course of
his disease would inevitably reach its fatal termination long
before the end of his sentence. In spite of its advance. {8}
however, the prisoner himself declared that he would never permit
himself to die in prison and have his body face such a fate. His
declaration was dismissed by the physician with a shrug and the
feeling that after all it would not make very much difference to
the man, since he would not be there to see or feel it. When,
however, he continued to live, manifestly in the last throes of
consumption, for weeks and even months after death seemed
inevitable, some attention was paid to his declaration in the
matter and the doctors began to give special attention to his case.
He lived for many months after the time when, according to all
ordinary medical knowledge, it would seem he must surely have died.
He actually outlived the end of his sentence, had arrangements made
to move him to a house just beyond the prison gate as soon as his
sentence had expired, and according to the story, was dead within
twenty-four hours after the time he got out of prison and thus
assured his Breton soul of the fact that his body would be given,
like that of any Christian, to the bosom of mother
earth.But there are other and even more important phases of the
prolongation of life by the will that still better illustrates its
power. {9} It has often been noted that men who have had extremely
busy lives, working long hours every day, often sleeping only a few
hours at night, turning from one thing to another and accomplishing
so much that it seemed almost impossible that one man could do all
they did, have lived very long lives. Men like Alexander Humboldt,
for instance, distinguished in science in his younger life, a
traveler for many years in that hell-hole of the tropics, the
region around Panama and Central America, a great writer whose
books deeply influenced his generation in middle age. Prime
Minister of Prussia as an older man, lived to be past ninety,
though he once confessed that in his forties he often slept but two
or three hours a night and sometimes took even that little rest on
a sofa instead of a bed. Leo XIII at the end of the nineteenth
century was just such another man. Frail of body, elected Pope at
sixty-four, it was thought that there would soon be occasion for
another election; he did an immense amount of work, assumed
successfully the heaviest responsibilities, and outlived the years
of Peter in the Papal chair, breaking all the prophecies in that
regard and not dying till he was ninety-three.Many other examples might be cited. {10} Gladstone, always at
work, probably the greatest statesman of the nineteenth century in
the better sense of that word, was a scholar almost without a peer
in the breadth of his scholarly attainments, a most interesting
writer on multitudinous topics, keen of interest for everything
human and always active, and yet he lived well on into the
eighties. Bismarck and Von Moltke, who assumed heavier
responsibilities than almost any other men of the nineteenth
century, saw their fourscore years pass over them a good while
before the end came. Bismarck remarked on his eighty-first birthday
that he used to think all the good things of life were confined to
the first eighty years of life, but now he knew that there were a
great many good things reserved for the second eighty years. I
shall never forget sitting beside Thomas Dunn English, the American
poet, at a banquet of the Alumni of the University of Pennsylvania,
when he repeated this expression for us; at the time he himself was
well past eighty. He too had been a busy man and yet rejoiced to be
with the younger alumni at the dinner.My dear old teacher, Virchow, of whom they said when he died
that four men died, for he was distinguished not only as a
pathologist, {11} which was the great life-work for which he was
known, but as an anthropologist, a historian of medicine and a
sanitarian, was at seventy-five actively accomplishing the work of
two or three men. He died at eighty-one, as the result of a trolley
injury, or I could easily imagine him alive even yet. Von Ranke,
the great historian of the popes, began a universal history at the
age of ninety which was planned to be complete in twelve volumes,
one volume a year to be issued. I believe that he lived to finish
half a dozen of them. I have some dear friends among the medical
profession in America who are in their eighties and nineties, and
all of them were extremely busy men in their middle years and
always lived intensely active lives. Stephen Smith and Thomas Addis
Emmet, John W. Gouley, William Hanna Thompson, not long dead, and
S. Weir Mitchell, who lived to be past eighty-five, are typical
examples of extremely busy men, yet of extremely long
lives.All of these men had the will power to keep themselves busily
at work, and their exercise of that will power, far from wearing
them out, actually seemed to enable them to tap reservoirs of
energy that might have remained {12} latent in them. The very
intensiveness of their will to do seemed to exert an extensive
influence over their lives, and so they not only accomplished more
but actually lived longer. Hard work, far from exhausting, has just
the opposite effect. We often hear of hard work killing people, but
as a physician I have carefully looked into a number of these cases
and have never found one which satisfied me as representing
exhaustion due to hard work. Insidious kidney disease, rheumatic
heart disease, the infections of which pneumonia is a typical
example, all these have been the causes of death and not hard work,
and they may come to any of us. They are just as much accidents as
any other of the mischances of life, for it is as dangerous to be
run into by a microbe as by a trolley car. Using the will in life
to do all the work possible only gives life and gives it more
abundantly, and people may rust out, that is be hurt by rest, much
sooner than they will wear out.Here, then, is a wellspring of vitality that checks for a
time at least even lethal changes in the body and undoubtedly is
one of the most important factors for the prolongation of life. It
represents the greatest force for health and power of
accomplishment that we have. {13} Unfortunately, in recent years,
it has been neglected to a great extent for a number of reasons.
One of these has been the discussions as to the freedom of the will
and the very common teaching of determinism which seemed to
eliminate the will as an independent faculty in life. While this
affected only the educated classes who had received the higher
education, their example undoubtedly was pervasive and influenced a
great many other people. Besides, newspaper and magazine writers
emphasized for popular dissemination the ideas as to absence of the
freedom of the will which created at least an unfortunate attitude
of mind as regards the use of the will at its best and tended to
produce the feeling that we are the creatures of circumstances
rather than the makers of our destiny in any way, or above all, the
rulers of ourselves, including even to a great extent our bodily
energies.Even more significant than this intellectual factor, in
sapping will power has been the comfortable living of the modern
time with its tendency to eliminate from life everything that
required any exercise of the will. The progress which our
generation is so prone to boast of concerns mainly this making of
people {14} more comfortable than they were before. The luxuries of
life of a few centuries ago have now become practically the
necessities of life of to-day. We are not asked to stand cold to
any extent, we do not have to tire ourselves walking, and bodily
labor is reserved for a certain number of people whom we apparently
think of as scarcely counting in the scheme of humanity. Making
ourselves comfortable has included particularly the removal of
nearly all necessity for special exertion, and therefore of any
serious exercise of the will. We have saved ourselves the necessity
for expending energy, apparently with the idea that thus it would
accumulate and be available for higher and better
purposes.The curious thing with regard to animal energy, however, is
that it does not accumulate in the body beyond a certain limited
extent, and all energy that is manufactured beyond that seems to
have a definite tendency to dissipate itself throughout the body,
producing discomfort of various kinds instead of doing useful work.
The process is very like what is called short-circuiting in
electrical machinery, and this enables us to understand how much
harm may be done. Making ourselves comfortable, therefore, may in
the {15} end have just exactly the opposite effect, and often does.
This is not noted at first, and may escape notice entirely unless
there is an analysis of the mode of life which is directed
particularly to finding out the amount of exertion of will and
energy that there is in the daily round of existence.The will, like so many other faculties of the human organism,
grows in power not by resting but by use and exercise. There have
been very few calls for serious exercise of the will left in modern
life and so it is no wonder that it has dwindled in power. As a
consequence, a good deal of the significance of the will in life
has been lost sight of. This is unfortunate, for the will can
enable us to tap sources of energy that might otherwise remain
concealed from us. Professor William James particularly called
attention to the fact, in his well-known essay on "The Energies of
Men", that very few people live up to theirmaximumof
accomplishment or theiroptimumof conduct,
and that indeed "as a rule men habitually
use only a small part of the powers which they actually possess and
which they might use under appropriate
conditions."It is with the idea of pointing out how much the will can
accomplish in changing things for {16} the better that this volume
is written. Professor James quoted with approval Prince
Pueckler-Muskau's expression, "I find something very satisfactory
in the thought that man has the power of framing such props and
weapons out of the most trivial materials, indeed out of nothing,
merely by the force of his will, which thereby truly deserves the
name of omnipotent." [Footnote 1][Footnote 1: "Tour in England, Ireland and
France."]It is this power, thus daringly called omnipotent, that men
have not been using to the best advantage to maintain health and
even to help in the cure of disease, which needs to be recalled
emphatically to attention. The war has shown us in the persons of
our young soldiers that the human will has not lost a single bit of
its pristine power to enable men to accomplish what might almost
have seemed impossible. One of the heritages from the war should be
the continuance of that fine use of the will which military
discipline and war's demands so well brought into play. Men can do
and stand ever so much more than they realize, and in the very
doing and standing find a satisfaction that surpasses all the
softer pleasant feelings that come from mere comfort and lack of
necessity for physical and {17} psychical exertion. Their exercise
of tolerance and their strenuous exertion, instead of exhausting,
only makes them more capable and adds to instead of detracting from
their powers.How much this discipline and training of the will meant for
our young American soldiers, some of whom were raised in the lap of
luxury and almost without the necessity of ever having had to do or
stand hard things previously in their lives, is very well
illustrated by a letter quoted by Miss Agnes Repplier in theCentury for
December. It is by no means unique or even exceptional. There were
literally thousands of such letters written by young officers
similarly circumstanced, and it is only because it is typical and
characteristic of the spirit of all of these young men that I quote
it here. Miss Repplier says that it came from "a young American
lieutenant for whom the world had been from infancy a perilously
pleasant place." He wrote home in the early spring of
1918:"It has rained and rained and rained. I am as much at home in
a mud puddle as any frog in France, and I have clean forgotten what
a dry bed is like. But I am as fit as a fiddle and as hard as
nails. I can eat scrap iron and sleep standing. Aren't there things
{18} called umbrellas, which you pampered civilians carry about in
showers?" If we can secure the continuance of this will exertion,
life will be ever so much heartier and healthier and happier than
it was before, so that the war shall have its
compensations.{19}
CHAPTER II
DREADS
"O, know he is the bridle of your will.There's none but asses will be bridled so."
A Comedy of Errors.
It must be a surprise to most people, after the demonstration
of the power of the will in the preceding chapter, that so many
fail to make use of it. Indeed, the majority of mankind are quite
unable to realize the store of energy for their health and strength
and well-being which is thus readily available, though so often
unused or called upon but feebly. The reason why the will is not
used more is comparatively easy to understand, however, once its
activity in ordinary conditions of humanity is analyzed a little
more carefully. The will is unfortunately seldom permitted to act
freely. Brakes are put on its energies by mental states of doubt
and hesitation, by contrary suggestion, and above all by the dreads
which humanity has allowed to fasten {20} themselves on us until
now a great many activities are hampered. There is the feeling that
many things cannot be done, or may be accomplished only at the cost
of so much effort and even hardship that it would be hopeless for
any but those who are gifted with extremely strong wills to attempt
them. People grow afraid to commit themselves to any purpose lest
they should not be able to carry it out. Many feel that they would
never be able to stand what others have stood without flinching and
are persuaded that if ever they were placed in the position where
they had to withstand some of the trials that they have heard of
they would inevitably break down under the strain.
Just as soon as a human being loses confidence that he or she
may be able to accomplish a certain thing, that of itself is enough
to make the will ever so much less active than it would otherwise
be. It is like breaking a piece of strong string: those who know
how wrap it around their fingers, then jerk confidently and the
string is broken. Those who fear that they may not be able to break
it hesitate lest they should hurt themselves and give a
half-hearted twitch which does not break the string; the only thing
they succeed {21} in doing is in hurting themselves ever so much
more than does the person who really breaks it. After that abortive
effort, they feel that they must be different from the others whose
fingers were strong enough to break the string, and they hesitate
about it and will probably refuse to make the attempt again.
It is a very old story,—this of dreads hampering the
activities of mankind with lack of confidence, and the fear of
failure keeping people from doing things. One of his disciples,
according to a very old tradition, once asked St. Anthony the
Hermit what had been the hardest obstacle that he found on the road
to sanctity. The story has all the more meaning for us here if we
recall that health and holiness are in etymology the same. St.
Anthony, whose temptations have made him famous, was over a hundred
at the time and had spent some seventy years in the desert, almost
always alone, and probably knew as much about the inner workings of
human nature from the opportunities for introspection which he had
thus enjoyed as any human being who ever lived. His young disciple,
like all young disciples, wanted a short cut on the pathway that
they were both traveling. The old man said to him, "Well, {22} I am
an old man and I have had many troubles, but most of them never
happened."
Many a nightmare of doubt and hesitation disappears at once
if the dread of it is overcome. The troubles that never happen, if
dwelt upon, paralyze the will until health and holiness become
extremely difficult of attainment.
There is the secret of the failure of a great many people in
life in a great many ways. They fear the worst, dread failure,
dampen their own confidence, and therefore fritter away their own
energy. Anything that will enable them to get rid of the dreads of
life will add greatly to their power to accomplish things inside as
well as outside their bodies. Well begun is half done, and tackling
a thing confidently means almost surely that it will be
accomplished. If the dread of failure, the dread of possible pain
in its performance, the dread of what may happen as a result of
activity,—if all these or any of them are allowed to obtrude
themselves, then energy is greatly lessened, the power to do things
hampered and success becomes almost impossible. This is as true in
matters of health and strength as it is with regard to various
external accomplishments. It takes a great {23} deal of experience
for mankind to learn the lesson that their dreads are often without
reality, and some men never learn it.
Usually when the word dreads is used, it is meant to signify
a series of psychic or psychoneurotic conditions from which
sensitive, nervous people suffer a great deal. There is, for
instance, the dread of dirt called learnedly misophobia, that
exaggerated fear that dirt may cling to the hands and prove in some
way deleterious which sends its victims to wash their hands from
twenty to forty times a day. Not infrequently they wash the skin
pretty well off or at least produce annoying skin irritation as the
result of their feeling. There are many other dreads of this kind.
Some of them seem ever so much more absurd even than this dread of
dirt. Most of us have a dread of heights, that is, we cannot stand
on the edge of a height and look down without trembling and having
such uncomfortable feelings that it is impossible for us to stay
there any length of time. Some people also are unable to sit in the
front row of the balcony of a theater or even to kneel in the front
row of a gallery at church without having the same dread of heights
that comes to others at the edge of a high precipice. I have among
my {24} patients some clergymen who find it extremely difficult to
stand up on a high altar, though, almost needless to say, the whole
height is at most five or six ordinary steps.
Then there are people who have an exaggerated dread of the
dark, so that it is quite impossible for them to sleep without a
light or to sleep alone. Sometimes such a dread is the result of
some terrifying incident, as the case in my notes in which the
treasurer of a university developed an intense dread of the dark
which made sleep impossible without a light, after he had been shot
at by a burglar who came into his room and who answered his demand,
"Who is that?" by a bullet which passed through the head of the
bed. Most of the skotophobists, the technical name for
dark-dreaders, have no such excuse as this one. Victims of nervous
dreads have as a rule developed their dread by permitting some
natural feeling of minor importance to grow to such an extent that
it makes them very miserable.
Some cannot abide a shut-in place. Philip Gilbert Hamerton,
the English writer and painter, often found a railroad compartment
in the English cars an impossible situation and had to break his
journey in order to get over {25} the growing feeling of
claustrophobia, the dread of shut-in places, which would steal over
him.
There are any number of these dreads and, almost needless to
say, all of them may interfere with health and the pursuit of
happiness. I have seen men and women thrown into a severe nervous
state with chilly feelings and cold sweat as the result of trying
to overcome one of these dreads. They make it impossible for their
victims to do a great many things that other people do readily, and
sadly hamper their wills. There is only one way to overcome these
dreads, and that is by a series of acts in the contrary direction
until a habit of self-control with regard to these haunting ideas
is secured. All mankind, almost without exception, has a dread of
heights, and yet many thousands of men have in recent years learned
to work on high buildings without very much inconvenience from the
dread. The wages are good, theywantto work this way,
and the result is they take themselves in hand and gradually
acquire self-control. I have had many of them tell me that at first
they were sure they would never be able to do it, but the gradual
ascent of the building as the work proceeded accustomed them to
height, {26} and after a while it became almost as natural to work
high up in the air as on the first or second story of a building or
even on the level ground.
The overcoming of these dreads is not easy unless some good
reason releases the will and sets it to exerting its full power.
When this is the case, however, the dread is overcome and the brake
lifted after some persistence, with absolute assurance. Men who
became brave soldiers have been known to have had a great dread of
blood in early life. Some of our best surgeons have had to leave
the first operation that they ever saw or they would have fainted,
and yet after repeated effort they have succeeded in overcoming
this sensitiveness. As a matter of fact, most people suffer so much
from dreads because they yielded to a minor dread and allowed a bad
habit to be formed. It is a question of breaking a bad habit by
contrary acts rather than of overcoming a natural disposition. Many
of those who are victims have the feeling that they cannot be
expected to conquer nature this way. As a result, they are so
discouraged at the very idea that success is dubious and
practically impossible from their very attitude of mind; but it is
only the {27} second nature of a habit that they have to overcome,
and this is quite another matter, for exactly contrary acts to
these which formed a habit will break it.