Even with the best of our philosophy we who are well are
unable to command at will the feelings of those who are ill. We lie on a
bed, racked with the pains of some passing affliction, and the chasm
which separates us from the hale and hearty seems prodigious. We are led
down the stairs, out into the sunlight. The very rays themselves sit
heavily upon our shoulders, and nearly crush us to the earth. With those
vivid impressions of the terrors of illness, we feel that our brains
will remain steeped in memories such as will enable us to appreciate our
health if we ever get it again, yea, though we have hardly a crust of
bread to spare. But lo! behold us once well again, and we have forgotten
our good fortune; at the slightest turn in our personal affairs we
bemoan our fate as sharply as though the whole night had been rolling in
upon us through some fever, or all the blasts of the arctic world had
crept through our bones in some frigid chill. There is no boon so great
as health. Of course everybody _admits_ that. But why can we not attach
meaning to it? If a man rise in a public gathering and say "I will give
a hundred dollars!" he knows exactly what he is saying, and so do his
hearers know. But if he rise behind a pulpit or on a rostrum and say
"PRESERVE YOUR HEALTH
at all hazards!" no significance so deep attaches, though the one
statement is a thousand times as important as the other. I cannot
understand why we are so oblivious to the sufferings of illness while we
are well unless it be a provision of nature to keep us from that
suffering through sympathy which we would surely undergo if we really
had any vivid feeling for the sick. On this earth each one has to do his
own suffering--the King in the palace of the royal family and the baby
in the hut of the miner. All who are well go their way rejoicing, even
having no momentary realization of the state of mind of the disabled
associate. It may be that this has not always been so, for we inherit a
salutation among our other traits which implies a desire to be informed
as to the physical condition of the body of the person addressed. Two
men of affairs meet. One says:
"HOW ARE YE?"
The other responds: "How are ye? Are you going to be at the meeting
to-night?" etc., the conversation being now under full headway. The
words indicate that, at one time, they carried a meaning which they have
lost. Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not
exceeded in the milk of human kindness. It may be that the old form was
such a cumbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it
off in disgust. Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more
astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick
man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and
bear it all without any very great affliction falling to the lot of
those who stand at the bedside.