syphilophobes give the answer! This gentleman, a professor of pathology
in one of the most important medical schools of the Middle West, yearly
lectures over the length and breadth of the land on the venereal
peril. He begins his expostulation with reduction of his audiences to
a state of terror by a lantern-slide display of the more loathsome
manifestations of the disease. He does not state that modern treatment
makes these more and more rare. He insists upon the utter impossibility
of its cure, a fact by no means established. He advocates early
marriage to a non-syphilitic maiden as the best means of prevention,
and failing that, advises that chastity is both possible and
salubrious. Then follows a master stroke of advice by innuendo--_the
current belief that masturbation causes insanity is probably untrue_.
Finally he denies the value of venereal prophylaxis, which was first
experimentally demonstrated by Metchnikoff and Roux, and which the
medical department of the Army and Navy know to be of almost perfect
efficacy when applied early and thoroughly.
Lack of space prevents the display of further examples of the new
phenomenon of the entrance of religion and morals into medicine. It is
not my intention for a moment to adopt a nihilistic attitude toward the
achievement of preventive medicine. But it is necessary to point out
that its contamination by moralism, Puritanism, proselytism, in brief,
_by religion_, threatens to reduce it to absurdity, and to shake its
authority in instances where its functions are of unmistakable value to
our republic. At present the medical profession plays a minor rôle in
the more important functions of this branch. These are performed in the
first place by bacteriologists who need not be doctors at all, and in
the second by sanitary engineers, whose splendid achievements in water
supply and sewage disposal lead those of all other nations.
It has been remarked above that one of the chief causes of the
unscientific nature of medicine and the anti-scientific character
of doctors lies in their innate credulity and inability to think
independently. This contention is supported by the report on the
intelligence of physicians recently published by the National Research
Council. They are found by more or less trustworthy psychologic tests
to be the lowest in intelligence of all of the professional men
excepting only dentists and horse doctors. Dentists and horse doctors
are ten per cent. less intelligent. But since the quantitative methods
employed certainly carry an experimental error of ten per cent. or even
higher, it is not certain that the members of the two more humble
professions have not equal or even greater intellectual ability. It is
significant that engineers head the list in intelligence.
In fact, they are rated sixty per cent. higher than doctors. This
wide disparity leads to a temptation to interesting psychological
probings. Is not the lamentable lack of intelligence of the doctor
due to lack of necessity for rigid intellectual discipline? Many
conditions conspire to make him an intellectual cheat. Fortunately
for us, most diseases are self-limiting. But it is natural for the
physician to turn this dispensation of nature to his advantage and
to intimate that _he_ has cured John Smith, when actually nature has
done the trick. On the contrary, should Smith die, the good doctor can
assume a pious expression and suggest that, despite his own incredible
skill and tremendous effort, it was God’s (or Nature’s) will that John
should pass beyond. Now the engineer is open to no such temptation. He
builds a bridge or erects a building, and disaster is sure to follow
any mis-step in calculation or fault in construction. Should such a
calamity occur, he is presently discredited and disappears from view.
Thus he is held up to a high mark of intellectual rigour and discipline
that is utterly unknown in the world the doctor inhabits.
A survey of the present condition of American medical education offers
little hope for a higher intellectual status of the medical profession
or of any fundamental tendency to turn medicine as a whole from a
_mélange_ of religious ritual, more or less accurate folk-lore, and
commercial cunning, toward the rarer heights of the applied sciences.
Such a reform depends absolutely upon the recognition that the
bodies of all the fauna of the earth (including _Homo sapiens_) are
essentially physico-chemical mechanisms; that disease is a derangement
of one sort or another of this mechanism; and that real progress
in knowledge of disease can only come from quantitatively exact
investigation of such derangements.
Up to the present, the number of professors in any branch of medicine
who are aware of this fact is pitifully few. The men, who, being
aware of it, have the training in physics and chemistry to put their
convictions into practice are less in number. So, it is vain to hope
that medical students are being educated from this point of view.
This casual glance at American medicine may be thought to be an unduly
pessimistic one. It has not been my intention to be pessimistic or to
be impertinently critical. Indeed, turning from the art of the practice
of medicine, and the religion and folk-lore of sanitation, to the
science of the study of disease, we have much of which to be proud.
American biochemists of the type of Van Slyke and Folin are actually in
the lead of their European brothers. Their precise quantitative methods
furnish invaluable tools in the exact study of the ills that afflict us.
Finally, the greatest figure of all, Jacques Loeb, working in
an institution that declares its purpose to be the dubious one
of _medical_ research, has in the last three years published
investigations which throw a flood of light upon the dark problems
of the chemistry of proteins. His work is of most fundamental
significance, will have far-reaching results, and is measurably in
advance of that of any European in the same field. Loeb, like all men
of the first rank, has no spirit of propaganda or proselytism. His
exact quantitative experiments rob biology of much of its confused
romantic glamour. The comprehension of his researches demands thorough
knowledge of physical chemistry. However, it is encouraging to note
that among a few younger investigators his point of view is being
accepted with fervour and enthusiasm. But it is time to stop. We are
straying from our subject which was, if I remember, American medicine.
ANONYMOUS
SPORT AND PLAY
Bartlett does not tell us who pulled the one about all work and no
play, but it probably was the man who said that the longest way round
was the shortest way home. There is as much sense in one remark as in
the other.
Give me an even start with George M. Cohan, who lives in Great Neck,
where I also live, without his suspecting it--give us an even start in
the Pennsylvania Station and route me on a Long Island train through
Flushing and Bayside while he travels via San Francisco and Yokohama,
and I shall undertake to beat him home, even in a blizzard. So much for
“the longest way round.” Now for the other. If it were your ambition to
spend an evening with a dull boy, whom would you choose, H. G. Wells,
whose output indicates that he doesn’t even take time off to sleep, or
the man that closes his desk at two o’clock every afternoon and goes to
the ball-game?
You may argue that watching ball-games is not play. It is the American
idea of play, which amounts to the same thing, and seventy-five per
cent, of the three hundred thousand citizens who do it daily, in
season, will tell you seriously that it is all the recreation they get;
moreover, that deprived of it, their brain would crack under the strain
of “business,” that, on account of it, they are able to do more work in
the forenoon, and do it better, than would be possible in two or three
full days of close sticking on the job. If you believe them, inveterate
baseball fans can, in a single morning, dictate as many as four or five
twenty-word letters to customers or salesmen, and finish as fresh as a
daisy; whereas the non-fan, the grind, is logy and torpid by the time
he reaches the second “In reply to same.”
But if you won’t concede, in the face of the fans’ own statement, that
it is recreation to look on at baseball or any other sport, then let
me ask you to invite to your home some evening, not a mere spectator,
but an active participant in any of our popular games--say a champion
or near-champion golfer, or a first string pitcher on a big league
baseball club. The golfer, let us say, sells insurance half the year
and golfs the rest. The pitcher plays eight months of the year and
loafs the other four. Bar conversation about their specialty, and
you won’t find two duller boys than those outside the motion-picture
studios.
No, brothers, the bright minds of this or any other country are owned
by the men who leave off work only to eat or go to bed. The doodles are
the boys who divide their time fifty-fifty between work and play, or
who play all the time and don’t even pretend to work. Proper exercise
undoubtedly promotes good health, but the theory that good health
and an active brain are inseparable can be shot full of holes by the
mention of two names--Stanislaus Zbyzsk and Robert Louis Stevenson.
It is silly, then, to propound that sport is of mental benefit. Its
true, basic function is the cultivation of bodily vigour, with a view
to longevity. And longevity, despite the fact that we profess belief
in a post-mortem existence that makes this one look sick, is a thing
we poignantly desire. Bonehead and wise guy, believer and sceptic--all
of us want to postpone as long as possible the promised joy-ride to
the Great Beyond. If to participate in sport helps us to do that, then
there is good reason to participate in sport.
Well, how many “grown-ups” (normal human beings of twenty-two and under
need not be considered; they get all the exercise they require, and
then some) in this country, a country that boasts champions in nearly
every branch of athletics, derive from play the physical benefit there
is in it? What percentage take an active part in what the sporting
editors call “the five major sports”--baseball, football, boxing,
horse racing, and golf? Let us take them one by one and figure it out,
beginning with “the national pastime.”
_Baseball._ Twenty or twenty-one play. Three hundred to forty thousand
look on. The latter are, for two hours, “out in the open air,” and
this, when the air is not so open as to give them pneumonia and when
they don’t catch something as bad or worse in the street-car or subway
train that takes them and brings them back, is a physical benefit.
Moreover, the habitual attendant at ball-games is not likely to die of
brain fever. But otherwise, the only ones whose health is appreciably
promoted are the twenty or twenty-one who play. And they are not doing
it for their health.
_Football._ Thirty play. Thirty thousand look on. One or two of the
thirty may be killed or suffer a broken bone, but the general health
of the other twenty-nine or twenty-eight is improved by the exercise.
As for the thirty thousand, all they get is the open air--usually a
little too much of it--and, unless they are hardened to the present-day
cheer-leader, a slight feeling of nausea.
_Boxing._ Eight to ten play. Five thousand to sixty thousand look
on. Those of the participants who are masters of defence may profit
physically by the training, though the rigorous methods sometimes
employed to make an unnatural weight are certainly inimical to health.
The ones not expert in defensive boxing, the ones who succeed in the
game through their ability to “take punishment” (a trait that usually
goes with a low mentality) die, as a rule, before reaching old age,
as a result of the “gameness” that made them “successful.” There is a
limit to the number of punches one can “take” and retain one’s health.
The five or sixty thousand cannot boast that they even get the air. All
but a few of the shows are given indoors, in an atmosphere as fresh and
clean as that of the Gopher Prairie day-coach.
_Horse Racing._ Fifty horses and twenty-five jockeys play. Ten thousand
people look on. I can’t speak for the horses, but if a jockey wants to
remain a jockey, he must, as a rule, eat a great deal less than his
little stomach craves, and I don’t know of any doctor who prescribes
constant underfeeding as conducive to good health in a growing boy.
Racing fans, of course, are out for financial, not physical, gain.
They, like the jockeys, are likely to starve to death while still young.
_Golf._ Here is a pastime in which the players far outnumber the
lookers-on. It is a game, if it is a game, that not only takes you out
in the open air, but makes you walk, and walking, the doctors say, is
all the exercise you need, if you walk five miles or more a day. Golf,
then, is really beneficial, and it costs you about $25.00 a week the
year round.
So much for our “five major sports.” We look on at four of them, and if
we can support the family, and pay taxes and insurance, on $1250 a year
less than we earn, we take part in the fifth.
The minor sports, as the editor will tell you, are tennis, boating,
polo, track athletics, trap-shooting, archery, hockey, soccer, and so
on. Not to mention games like poker, bridge, bowling, billiards, and
pool (now officially known as “pocket billiards” because the Ladies’
Guild thought “pool” must have something to do with betting), which we
may dismiss as being of doubtful physical benefit, since they are all
played indoors and in a fog of Camel smoke.
Of the outdoor “minors,” tennis is unquestionably the most popular. And
it is one whale of a game--if you can stand it. But what percentage
of grown-ups play it? I have no statistics at hand, and must guess.
The number of adult persons with whom I am acquainted, intimately or
casually, is possibly two thousand. I can think of ten who play as many
as five sets of tennis a year.
How many of the two thousand play polo or have ever played polo? One.
How many are trap-shooters? Two. How many have boats? Six or seven. How
many run footraces or jump? None. How many are archers? None. How many
play hockey, soccer, la crosse? None.
If I felt like indulging in a game of cricket, which God forbid, whom
should I call up and invite to join me?
Now, how many of my two thousand acquaintances are occasional or
habitual spectators at baseball games, football games, boxing matches,
or horse races? All but three or four. The people I know (I do not
include ball-players, boxers, and wrestlers, who make their living
from sport) are average people; they are the people you know. And the
overwhelming majority of them don’t play.
Why not? If regular participation in a more or less interesting outdoor
game is going to lengthen our lives, why don’t we participate? Is it
because we haven’t time? It takes just as much time to look on, and we
do that. Is it because we can’t afford it? We can play tennis for as
little as it costs to go to the bail-game and infinitely less than it
costs to go to the races.
We don’t play because (1) we lack imagination, and because (2) we are a
nation of hero-worshippers.
When we were kids, the nurse and the minister taught us that, if we
weren’t good, our next stop would be hell. But, to us, there was no
chance of the train’s starting for seventy years. And we couldn’t
visualize an infernal excursion that far off. It was too vague to be
scary. We kept right on swiping the old man’s cigars and giggling in
the choir. If they had said that misdemeanours such as those would
spell death and eternal fire, not when we were old, but to-morrow, most
of us would have respected father’s property rights and sat through
the service with a sour pan. If the family doctor were to tell us now
that unless we got outdoors and exercised every afternoon this week,
we should die next Tuesday before lunch, you can bet we should get
outdoors and exercise every afternoon this week. But when he tells us
that, without healthful outdoor sport, we shall die in 1945 instead of
1949, why, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a chimera, a myth, like the
next war.
But hero-worship is the national disease that does most to keep the
grandstands full and the playgrounds empty. To hell with those four
extra years of life, if they are going to cut in on our afternoon at
the Polo Grounds, where, in blissful asininity, we may feast our eyes
on the swarthy Champion of Swat, shouting now and then in an excess
of anile idolatry, “Come on, you Babe. Come on, you Baby Doll!” And
if an hour of tennis is going to make us late at the Garden, perhaps
keep us out of our ringside seats, so close to Dempsey’s corner that
(O bounteous God!) a drop of the divine perspiration may splash our
undeserving snout--Hang up, liver! You’re on a busy wire!
RING W. LARDNER
HUMOUR
With the aid of a competent bibliographer for about five days I believe
I could supply the proof to any unreflecting person in need of it that
there is no such thing as an American gift of humorous expression, that
the sense of humour does not exist among our upper classes, especially
our upper literary class, that in many respects almost every other
civilized country in the world has more of it, that quiet New England
humour is exceedingly loud and does not belong to New England, that
British incomprehension of our jokes is as a rule commendable, the
sense of humour generally beginning where our jokes leave off. And
while you can prove anything about a race or about all races with the
aid of a bibliographer for five days, as contemporary sociologists are
now showing, I believe these things are true. Belief in American humour
is a superstition that seldom outlasts youth in persons who have been
exposed to American practice, and hardly ever if they know anything
of the practice elsewhere. Of course I am not speaking of the sad
formalism of the usual thing as we see it in newspapers and on movie
screens or of the ritual of magazines wholly or in part sanctified to
our solemn god of fun. I mean the best of it.
In the books and passages collated by my bibliographer the American
gift of humour would be distributed over areas of time so vast and
among peoples so numerous, remote, or savage, that no American
would have the heart to press his claim. The quaintness, dryness,
ultra-solemnity with or without the wink, exaggeration, surprise,
contrast, assumption of common misunderstanding, hyperbolical
innocence, quiet chuckle, upsetting of dignity, _éclat_ of spontaneity
with appeals to the everlasting, dislocation of elegance or
familiarity, imperturbability, and twinkle--whatever the qualities
may be as enumerated by the bacteriologists who alone have ever
written on the subject, the most American of them would be shown in
my bibliographer’s report to be to a far greater degree un-American.
Patriotic exultation in their ownership is like patriotic exultation
in the possession of the parts of speech. Humour is no more altered
by local reference than grammar is altered by being spoken through
the nose. And if the bibliography is an ideal one it will not only
present American humour at all times and places but will produce almost
verbatim long passages of American humorous text dated at any time and
place, and will show how by a few simple changes in local terms they
may be made wholly verbatim and American. It will show that American
humorous writing did in fact begin everywhere but only at certain
periods was permitted to continue and that these periods were by no
means the happiest in history. I have time to mention here only the
laborious section that it will probably devote to Mark Twain in the Age
of Pericles, though for the more active reader the one on Mr. Cobb,
Mr. Butler, and others around the walls of Troy might be of greater
contemporary interest.
Mark Twain, according to the citations in this section, would seem
actually to have begun all of his longer stories, including “Pudd’nhead
Wilson,” and most of the shorter ones, essays, and other papers, at
Athens or thereabouts during this period, but not to have finished a
single one, not even the briefest of them. He started, gave a clear
hint as to how the thing would naturally run, and then he stopped.
The reason for this was that owing to the trained imagination of the
people for whom he wrote, the beginning and the hint were sufficient,
and from that point on they could amuse themselves along the line
that Mark Twain indicated better than he would have amused them, had
he continued. Mark Twain finally saw this and that is why he stopped,
realizing that there was no need of his keeping the ball rolling when
to their imaginative intelligence the ball would roll of itself. He did
at first try to keep on, and being lively and observant and voluble
even for a Greek he held large crowds on street-corners by the sheer
repetition of a single gesture of the mind throughout long narratives
of varied circumstance. In good society this was not tolerated even
after supper, and there was never the slightest chance of publication.
But the streets of Athens were full of the suppressed writings of Mark
Twain.
Every man of taste in Athens loved Mark Twain for the first push of his
fancy but none could endure the unmitigated constancy of his pushing
of it, and as Mark Twain went everywhere and was most persistent,
the compression of his narrative flow within the limits of the good
breeding of the period was an embarrassing problem to hosts, unwilling
to be downright rude to him. Finally he was snubbed in public by his
friends and a few of the more intimate explained to him afterwards the
reason why.
The gist of their explanation was evidently this: The hypothesis of
the best society in town nowadays is that the prolongation of a single
posture of the mind is intolerable, no matter how variegated the
substance in which the mind reposes. That sort of thing belongs to an
earlier day than ours, although, as you have found, it is still much
relished in the streets. If all the slaves were writers; if readers
bred like rabbits so that the pleasing of them assured great wealth;
if the banausic element in our life should absorb all the rest of it
and if, lost in the external labour process, with the mechanism of it
running in our minds, we turned only a sleepy eye to pleasure; then
we might need the single thought strung with adventures, passions,
incidents and need only that--infinitudes of detail easily guessed but
inexorably recounted; long lists of sentiments with human countenances
doing this and that; physiological acts in millions of pages and
unchanging phrase; volumes of imaginary events without a thought among
them; invented public documents equalling the real; enormous anecdotes;
and all in a strange reiterated gesture, caught from machines,
disposing the mind to nod itself to sleep repeating the names of what
it saw while awake. But the bedside writer for the men in bed is not
desired at the present moment in our best society.
All these things are now carried in ellipsis to the reader’s head,
if the reader’s head desires them; they are implied in dots at ends
of sentences. We guess long narratives merely from a comma; we do
not write them out. In this space left free by us with deliberate
aposiopesis, a literature of countless simplicities may some day
arise. At present we do not feel the need of it. And in respect to
humour the rule of the present day is this: never do for another what
he can do for himself. A simple process of the fancy as in contrast,
incongruity, exaggeration, impossibility, must be confined in public
to one or two displays. Let us take the simplest of illustrations--a
cow in the dining-room, for example--and proceed with it as simply as
we can. If by a happy stroke of fancy a cow in the dining-room is made
pleasing to the mind, never argue that the pleasure is doubled by the
successive portrayal of two cows in two dining-rooms, assuming that the
stroke of fancy remains the same. Realize rather that it diminishes,
and that with the presentation of nine cows in nine dining-rooms it has
changed to pain. Now if for cows in dining-rooms be substituted gods in
tailor shops, tailors in the houses of gods, cobblers at king’s courts,
Thebans before masterpieces, one class against another, one age against
another, and so on through incalculable details, however bizarre, all
in simple combination, all easily gathered, without a shift of thought
or wider imagery, the fancy mechanistically placing the objects side
by side, picked from the world as from a catalogue--even then the
situation to our present thinking is not improved.