Produced by Don Kostuch
[Transcriber's Notes]
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred
in the original book.
This book is derived from a copy on the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012175505
Obvious spelling or typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistent spelling of names and inventive and alternative
spelling is left as printed.
Extended quotations and citations are indented such as reports,
letters and interviews.
[End Transcriber's Notes]
HEALTH THROUGH WILL POWER
BY
JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D., Etc.
MEDICAL DIRECTOR OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY;
PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
AT CATHEDRAL COLLEGE; LECTURER ON PSYCHOLOGY,
MARYWOOD COLLEGE, ETC.
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1919
_Copyright, 1919,_
By Little, Brown, and Company.
_All rights reserve_
Published, November, 1919
_Norwood Press_
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.,
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
_To_
J. H. W.
EX ANIMO ET CORDE
J. J. W.
{vii}
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.
{viii}
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.
{ix}
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface vii
CHAPTER
I The Will in Life 1
II Dreads 19
III Habits 42
IV Sympathy 57
V Self-Pity 69
VI Avoidance of Conscious Use of the Will 80
VII What the Will Can Do 102
VIII Pain and the Will 112
IX The Will and Air and Exercise 133
X The Will to Eat 148
XI The Place of the Will in Tuberculosis 167
XII The Will in Pneumonia 187
XIII Coughs and Colds 196
XIV Neurotic Asthma and the Will 207
XV The Will in Intestinal Function 215
XVI The Will and the Heart 227
XVII The Will in So-Called Chronic Rheumatism 240
XVII Psycho-Neuroses 258
XIX Feminine Ills and the Will 270
Index 285
{1}
HEALTH THROUGH WILL POWER
CHAPTER I
THE WILL IN LIFE
"What he will he does and does so much
That 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 their _maximum_ of accomplishment or their _optimum_ of 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 the _Century_ 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}