Wear and Tear Part 1

Wear and Tear.

by Silas Weir Mitch.e.l.l.

PREFACE.

The rate of change in this country in education, in dress, and in diet and habits of daily life surprises even the most watchful American observer. It is now but fifteen years since this little book was written as a warning to a restless nation possessed of an energy tempted to its largest uses by unsurpa.s.sed opportunities. There is still need to repeat and reinforce my former remonstrance, but I am glad to add that since I first wrote on these subjects they have not only grown into importance as questions of public hygiene, but vast changes for the better have come about in many of our ways of living, and everywhere common sense is beginning to rule in matters of dress, diet, and education.

The American of the Eastern States and of the comfortable cla.s.ses[1] is becoming notably more ruddy and more stout. The alteration in women as to these conditions is most striking, and, if I am not mistaken, in England there is a lessening tendency towards that excess of adipose matter which is still a surprise to the American visiting England for the first time.

I should scarcely venture to a.s.sert so positively that Americans had obviously taken on flesh within a generation if what I see had not been observed by many others. It would, I think, be interesting to enter at length upon a study of these remarkable changes, but that were scarcely within the scope of this little book.

[Footnote 1: Happily, a large cla.s.s with us.]

WEAR AND TEAR.

OR

HINTS FOR THE OVERWORKED.

Many years ago[1] I found occasion to set before the readers of _Lippincott's Magazine_ certain thoughts concerning work in America, and its results. Somewhat to my surprise, the article attracted more notice than usually falls to the share of such papers, and since then, from numerous sources, I have had the pleasure to learn that my words of warning have been of good service to many thoughtless sinners against the laws of labor and of rest. I have found, also, that the views then set forth as to the peculiar difficulties of mental and physical work in this country are in strict accordance with the personal experience of foreign scholars who have cast their lots among us; while some of our best teachers have thanked me for stating, from a doctor's stand-point, the evils which their own experience had taught them to see in our present mode of tasking the brains of the younger girls.

[Footnote 1: In 1871.]

I hope, therefore, that I am justified in the belief that in its new and larger form my little tract may again claim attention from such as need its lessons. Since it was meant only for these, I need not excuse myself to physicians for its simplicity; while I trust that certain of my brethren may find in it enough of original thought to justify its reappearance, as its statistics were taken from ma.n.u.script notes and have been printed in no scientific journal.

I have called these Hints WEAR and TEAR, because this t.i.tle clearly and briefly points out my meaning. _Wear_ is a natural and legitimate result of lawful use, and is what we all have to put up with as the result of years of activity of brain and body. _Tear_ is another matter: it comes of hard or evil usage of body or engine, of putting things to wrong purposes, using a chisel for a screw-driver, a penknife for a gimlet.

Long strain, or the sudden demand of strength from weakness, causes tear. Wear comes of use; tear, of abuse.

The sermon of which these words are the text has been preached many times in many ways to congregations for whom the Dollar Devil had always a more winning eloquence. Like many another man who has talked wearily to his fellows with an honest sense of what they truly need, I feel how vain it is to hope for many earnest listeners. Yet here and there may be men and women, ignorantly sinning against the laws by which they should live or should guide the lives of others, who will perhaps be willing to heed what one unbiased thinker has to say in regard to the dangers of the way they are treading with so little knowledge as to where it is leading.

The man who lives an out-door life--who sleeps with the stars visible above him--who wins his bodily subsistence at first hand from the earth and waters--is a being who defies rain and sun, has a strange sense of elastic strength, may drink if he likes, and may smoke all day long, and feel none the worse for it. Some such return to the earth for the means of life is what gives vigor and developing power to the colonist of an older race cast on a land like ours. A few generations of men living in such fashion store up a capital of vitality which accounts largely for the prodigal activity displayed by their descendants, and made possible only by the st.u.r.dy contest with Nature which their ancestors have waged.

That such a life is still led by mult.i.tudes of our countrymen is what alone serves to keep up our pristine force and energy. Are we not merely using the interest on these acc.u.mulations of power, but also wastefully spending the capital? From a few we have grown to millions, and already in many ways the people of the Atlantic coast present the peculiarities of an old nation. Have we lived too fast? The settlers here, as elsewhere, had ample room, and lived st.u.r.dily by their own hands, little troubled for the most part with those intense compet.i.tions which make it hard to live nowadays and embitter the daily bread of life. Neither had they the thousand intricate problems to solve which perplex those who struggle to-day in our teeming city hives. Above all, educational wants were limited in kind and in degree, and the physical man and woman were what the growing state most needed.

How much and what kind of good came of the gradual change in all these matters we well enough know. That in one and another way the cruel compet.i.tion for the dollar, the new and exacting habits of business, the racing speed which the telegraph and railway have introduced into commercial life, the new value which great fortunes have come to possess as means towards social advancement, and the overeducation and overstraining of our young people, have brought about some great and growing evils, is what is now beginning to be distinctly felt. I should like, therefore, at the risk of being tedious, to re-examine this question--to see if it be true that the nervous system of certain cla.s.ses of Americans is being sorely overtaxed--and to ascertain how much our habits, our modes of work, and, haply, climatic peculiarities, may have to do with this state of things. But before venturing anew upon a subject which may possibly excite controversy and indignant comment, let me premise that I am talking chiefly of the crowded portions of our country, of our great towns, and especially of their upper cla.s.ses, and am dealing with those higher questions of mental hygiene of which in general we hear but too little. If the strictures I have to make applied as fully throughout the land--to Oregon as to New England, to the farmer as to the business man, to the women of the artisan cla.s.s as to those socially above them--then indeed I should cry, G.o.d help us and those that are to come after us! Owing to causes which are obvious enough, the physical worker is being better and better paid and less and less hardly tasked, while just the reverse obtains in increasing ratios for those who live by the lower form of brain-work; so that the bribe to use the hand is growing daily, and pure mechanical labor, as opposed to that of the clerk, is being "levelled upward" with fortunate celerity.

Before attempting to indicate certain ways in which we as a people are overtaxing and misusing the organs of thought, I should be glad to have the privilege of explaining the terms which it is necessary to use, and of pointing out some of the conditions under which mental labor is performed.

The human body carries on several kinds of manufacture, two of which--the evolution of muscular force or motion, and intellection with all moral activities--alone concern us here. We are somewhat apt to antagonize these two sets of functions, and to look upon the latter, or brain-labor, as alone involving the use or abuse of the nervous system.

But every blow on the anvil is as distinctly an act of the nerve centres as are the highest mental processes. If this be so, how or why is it that excessive muscular exertion--I mean such as is violent and continued--does not cause the same appalling effects as may be occasioned by a like abuse of the nerve-organs in mental actions of various kinds? This is not an invariable rule, for, as I may point out in the way of ill.u.s.tration hereafter, the centres which originate or evolve muscular power do sometimes suffer from undue taxation; but it is certainly true that when this happens, the evil result is rarely as severe or as lasting as when it is the organs of mental power that have suffered.

In either form of work, physical or mental, the will acts to start the needed processes, and afterwards is chiefly regulative. In the case of bodily labor, the spinal nerve-centres are most largely called into action. Where mental or moral processes are involved, the active organs lie within the cranium. As I said just now, when we talk of an overtaxed nervous system it is usually the brain we refer to, and not the spine; and the question therefore arises, Why is it that an excess of physical labor is better borne than a like excess of mental labor? The simple answer is, that mental overwork is harder, because as a rule it is closet or counting-room or at least in-door work--sedentary, in a word.

The man who is intensely using his brain is not collaterally employing any other organs, and the more intense his application the less locomotive does he become. On the other hand, however a man abuses his powers of motion in the way of work, he is at all events encouraging that collateral functional activity which mental labor discourages: he is quickening the heart, driving the blood through unused channels, hastening the breathing and increasing the secretions of the skin--all excellent results, and, even if excessive, better than a too incomplete use of these functions.

But there is more than this in the question. We do not know as yet what is the cost in expended material of mental acts as compared with motor manifestations, and here, therefore, are at fault; because, although it seems so much slighter a thing to think a little than to hit out with the power of an athlete, it may prove that the expenditure of nerve material is in the former case greater than in the latter.

When a man uses his muscles, after a time comes the feeling called fatigue--a sensation always referred to the muscles, and due most probably to the deposit in the tissues of certain substances formed during motor activity. Warned by this weariness, the man takes rest--may indeed be forced to do so; but, unless I am mistaken, he who is intensely using the brain does not feel in the common use of it any sensation referable to the organ itself which warns him that he has taxed it enough. It is apt, like a well-bred creature, to get into a sort of exalted state under the stimulus of need, so that its owner feels amazed at the ease of its processes and at the sense of _wide-awakefulness_ and power that accompanies them. It is only after very long misuse that the brain begins to have means of saying, "I have done enough;" and at this stage the warning comes too often in the shape of some one of the many symptoms which indicate that the organ is already talking with the tongue of disease.

I do not know how these views will be generally received, but I am sure that the personal experience of many scholars will decide them to be correct; and they serve to make clear why it is that men may not know they are abusing the organ of thought until it is already suffering deeply, and also wherefore the mind may not be as ruthlessly overworked as the legs or arms.

Whenever I have closely questioned patients or men of studious habits as to this matter, I have found that most of them, when in health, recognized no such thing as fatigue in mental action, or else I learned that what they took for this was merely that physical sense of being tired, which arises from prolonged writing or constrained positions. The more, I fancy, any healthy student reflects on this matter the more clearly will he recognize this fact, that very often when his brain is at its clearest, he pauses only because his back is weary, his eyes aching, or his fingers tired.

This most important question, as to how a man shall know when he has sufficiently tasked his brain, demands a longer answer than I can give it here; and, unfortunately, there is no popular book since Ray's clever and useful "Mental Hygiene," and Feuchtersleben's "Dietetics of the Soul," both out of print, which deals in a readable fashion with this or kindred topics.[1] Many men are warned by some sense of want of clearness or ease in their intellectual processes. Others are checked by a feeling of surfeit or disgust, which they obey or not as they are wise or unwise. Here, for example, is in substance the evidence of a very attentive student of his own mental mechanism, whom we have to thank for many charming products of his brain. Like most scholars, he can scarcely say that he ever has a sense of "brain-tire," because cold hands and feet and a certain restlessness of the muscular system drive him to take exercise. Especially when working at night, he gets after a time a sense of disgust at the work he is doing. "But sometimes," he adds, "my brain gets going, and is to be stopped by none of the common plans of counting, repeating French verbs, or the like." A well-known poet describes to me the curious condition of excitement into which his brain is cast by the act of composing verse, and thinks that the happy accomplishment of his task is followed by a feeling of relief, which shows that there has been high tension.

[Footnote 1: See, now, "Brain-Work and Overwork," by H.C. Wood, M.D.; also, "Mental Overwork and Premature Disease among Public and Professional Men," by Ch. K. Mills, M.D.; also, "Overwork and Sanitation in Public Schools, with Remarks on the Production of Nervous Disease and Insanity," by Ch. K. Mills, M.D.,--_Annals of Hygiene_, September, 1886.]

One of our ablest medical scholars reports himself to me as having never been aware of any sensation in the head, by which he could tell that he had worked enough, up to a late period of his college career, when, having overtaxed his brain, he was restricted by his advisers to two or three hours of daily study. He thus learned to study hard, and ever since has been accustomed to execute all mental tasks at high pressure under intense strain and among the cares of a great practice. All his mind-work is, however, forced labor, and it always results in a distinct sense of cerebral fatigue,--a feeling of pressure, which is eased by clasping his hands over his head; and also there is desire to lie down and rest.

"I am not aware," writes a physician of distinction, "that, until a few years ago, I ever felt any sense of fatigue from brain-work which I could refer to the organ employed. The longer I worked the clearer and easier my mental processes seemed to be, until, during a time of great sorrow and anxiety, I pushed my thinking organs rather too hard. As a result, I began to have headache after every period of intellectual exertion. Then I lost power to sleep. Although I have partially recovered, I am now always warned when I have done enough, by lessening ease in my work, and by a sense of fulness and tension in the head."

The indications of brain-tire, therefore, differ in different people, and are more and more apt to be referred to the thinking organ as it departs more and more from a condition of health. Surely a fuller record of the conditions under which men of note are using their mental machinery would be everyway worthy of attention.

Another reason why too prolonged use of the brain is so mischievous is seen in a peculiarity, which is of itself a proof of the auto-activity of the vital acts of the various organs concerned in intellection. We sternly concentrate attention on our task, whatever it be; we do this too long, or under circ.u.mstances which make labor difficult, such as during digestion or when weighted by anxiety. At last we stop and propose to find rest in bed. Not so, says the ill-used brain, now morbidly wide awake; and whether we will or not, the mind keeps turning over and over the work of the day, the business or legal problem, or mumbling, so to speak, some wearisome question in a fashion made useless by the denial of full attention. Or else the imagination soars away with the unrestful energy of a demon, conjuring up an endless procession of broken images and disconnected thoughts, so that sleep is utterly banished.

I have chosen here as examples men whose brains are engaged constantly in the higher forms of mental labor; but the difficulty of arresting at will the overtasked brain belongs more or less to every man who overuses this organ, and is the well-known initial symptom of numerous morbid states. I have instanced scholars and men of science chiefly, because they, more than others, are apt to study the conditions under which their thinking organs prosper or falter in their work, and because from them have we had the clearest accounts of this embarra.s.sing condition of automatic activity of the cerebral organs. Few thinkers have failed, I fancy, to suffer in this way at some time, and with many the annoyance is only too common. I do not think the subject has received the attention it deserves, even from such thorough believers in unconscious cerebration as Maudsley. As this state of brain is fatal to sleep, and therefore to needful repose of brain, every sufferer has a remedy which he finds more or less available. This usually consists in some form of effort to throw the thoughts off the track upon which they are moving.

Almost every literary biography has some instance of this difficulty, and some hint as to the sufferer's method of freeing his brain from the despotism of a ruling idea or a chain of thought.

Many years ago I heard Mr. Thackeray say that he was sometimes haunted, when his work was over, by the creatures he himself had summoned into being, and that it was a good corrective to turn over the pages of a dictionary. Sir Walter Scott is said to have been troubled in a similar way. A great lawyer, whom I questioned lately as to this matter, told me that his cure was a chapter or two of a novel, with a cold bath before going to bed; for, said he, quaintly, "You never take out of a cold bath the thoughts you take into it." It would be easy to multiply such examples.

Looking broadly at the question of the influence of excessive and prolonged use of the brain upon the health of the nervous system, we learn, first, that cases of cerebral exhaustion in people who live wisely are rare. Eat regularly and exercise freely, and there is scarce a limit to the work you may get out of the thinking organs. But if into the life of a man whose powers are fully taxed we bring the elements of great anxiety or worry, or excessive haste, the whole machinery begins at once to work, as it were, with a dangerous amount of friction. Add to this such constant fatigue of body as some forms of business bring about, and you have all the means needed to ruin the man's power of useful labor.

I have been careful here to state that combined overwork of mind and body is doubly mischievous, because nothing is now more sure in hygienic science than that a proper alternation of physical and mental labor is best fitted to insure a lifetime of wholesome and vigorous intellectual exertion. This is probably due to several causes, but princ.i.p.ally to the fact that during active exertion of the body the brain cannot be employed intensely, and therefore has secured to it a state of repose which even sleep is not always competent to supply. There is a Turkish proverb which occurs to me here, like most proverbs, more or less true: "Dreaming goes afoot, but who can think on horseback?" Perhaps, too, there is concerned a physiological law, which, though somewhat mysterious, I may again have to summon to my aid in the way of explanation. It is known as the law of Trevira.n.u.s, its discoverer, and may thus be briefly stated: Each organ is to every other as an excreting organ. In other words, to insure perfect health, every tissue, bone, nerve, tendon, or muscle should take from the blood certain materials and return to it certain others. To do this every organ must or ought to have its period of activity and of rest, so as to keep the vital fluid in a proper state to nourish every other part. This process in perfect health is a system of mutual a.s.surance, and is probably essential to a condition of entire vigor of both mind and body.

It has long been believed that maladies of the nervous system are increasing rapidly in the more crowded portions of the United States; but I am not aware that any one has studied the death-records to make sure of the accuracy of this opinion. There can be no doubt, I think, that the palsy of children becomes more frequent in cities just in proportion to their growth in population. I mention it here because, as it is a disease which does not kill but only cripples, it has no place in the mortuary tables. Neuralgia is another malady which has no record there, but is, I suspect, increasing at a rapid rate wherever our people are crowded together in towns. Perhaps no other form of sickness is so sure an indication of the development of the nervous temperament, or that condition in which there are both feebleness and irritability of the nervous system. But the most unquestionable proof of the increase of nervous disease is to be looked for in the death statistics of cities.

There, if anywhere, we shall find evidence of the fact, because there we find in exaggerated shapes all the evils I have been defining. The best mode of testing the matter is to take the statistics of some large city which has grown from a country town to a vast business hive within a very few years. Chicago fulfils these conditions precisely. In 1852 it numbered 49,407 souls. At the close of 1868 it had reached to 252,054.

Within these years it has become the keenest and most wide-awake business centre in America. I owe to the kindness of Dr. J.H. Rauch, Sanitary Superintendent of Chicago, ma.n.u.script records, hitherto unpublished, of its deaths from nervous disease, as well as the statement of each year's total mortality; so that I have it in my power to show the increase of deaths from nerve disorders relatively to the annual loss of life from all causes. I possess similar details as to Philadelphia, which seem to admit of the same conclusions as those drawn from the figures I have used. But here the evil has increased more slowly. Let us see what story these figures will tell us for the Western city. Unluckily, they are rather dry tale-tellers.

The honest use of the mortuary statistics of a large town is no easy matter, and I must therefore ask that I may be supposed to have taken every possible precaution in order not to exaggerate the reality of a great evil. Certain diseases, such as apoplexy, palsy, epilepsy, St.

Vitus's dance, and lockjaw or teta.n.u.s, we all agree to consider as nervous maladies; convulsions, and the vast number of cases known in the death-lists as dropsy of the brain, effusion on the brain, etc., are to be looked upon with more doubt. The former, as every doctor knows, are, in a vast proportion of instances, due to direct disease of the nerve-centres; or, if not to this, then to such a condition of irritability of these parts as makes them too ready to originate spasms in response to causes which disturb the extremities of the nerves, such as teething and the like. This tendency seems to be fostered by the air and habits of great towns, and by all the agencies which in these places depress the health of a community. The other cla.s.s of diseases, as dropsy of the brain or effusion, probably includes a number of maladies, due some of them to scrofula, and to the predisposing causes of that disease; others, to the kind of influences which seem to favor convulsive disorders. Less surely than the former cla.s.s can these be looked upon as true nervous diseases; so that in speaking of them I am careful to make separate mention of their increase, while thinking it right on the whole to include in the general summary of this growth of nerve disorders this partially doubtful cla.s.s.

Taking the years 1852 to 1868, inclusive, it will be found that the population of Chicago has increased 5.1 times and the deaths from all causes 3.7 times; while the nerve deaths, including the doubtful cla.s.s labelled in the reports as dropsy of the brain and convulsions, have risen to 20.4 times what they were in 1852. Thus in 1852, '53, and '55, leaving out the cholera year '54, the deaths from nerve disorders were respectively to the whole population as 1 in 1149, 1 in 953, and 1 in 941; whilst in 1866, '67, and '68, they were 1 in 505, 1 in 415.7, and 1 in 287.8. Still omitting 1854, the average proportion of neural deaths to the total mortality was, in the five years beginning with 1852, 1 in 26.1. In the five latter years studied--that is, from 1864 to 1868, inclusive--the proportion was 1 nerve death to every 9.9 of all deaths.

I have alluded above to a cla.s.s of deaths included in my tables, but containing, no doubt, instances of mortality due to other causes than disease of the nerve-organs. Thus many which are stated to have been owing to convulsions ought to be placed to the credit of tubercular disease of the brain or to heart maladies; but even in the practice of medicine the distinction as to cause cannot always be made; and as a large proportion of this loss of life is really owing to brain affections, I have thought best to include the whole cla.s.s in my statement.

A glance at the individual diseases which are indubitably nervous is more instructive and less perplexing. For example, taking the extreme years, the recent increase in apoplexy is remarkable, even when we remember that it is a malady of middle and later life, and that Chicago, a new city, is therefore ent.i.tled to a yearly increasing quant.i.ty of this form of death. In 1868 the number was 8.6 times greater than in 1852. Convulsions as a death cause had in 1868 risen to 22 times as many as in the year 1852. Epilepsy, one of the most marked of all nervous maladies, is more free from the difficulties which belong to the last-mentioned cla.s.s. In 1852 and '53 there were but two deaths from this disease; in the next four years there were none. From 1858 to '64, inclusive, there were in all 6 epileptic deaths: then we have in the following years, 5, 3, 11; and in 1868 the number had increased to 17.

Pa.s.sing over palsy, which, like apoplexy, increases in 1868,--8.6 times as compared with 1852; and 26 times as compared with the four years following 1852,--we come to lockjaw, an unmistakable nerve malady. Six years out of the first eleven give us no death from this painful disease; the others, up to 1864, offer each one only, and the last-mentioned year has but two. Then the number rises to 3 each year, to 5 in 1867, and to 12 in 1868. At first sight, this record of mortality from lockjaw would seem to be conclusive, yet it is perhaps, of all the maladies mentioned, the most deceptive as a means of determining the growth of neural diseases. To make this clear to the general reader, he need only be told that teta.n.u.s is nearly always caused by mechanical injuries, and that the natural increase of these in a place like Chicago may account for a large part of the increase. Yet, taking the record as a whole, and viewing it only with a calm desire to get at the truth, it is not possible to avoid seeing that the growth of nerve maladies has been inordinate.

The industry and energy which have built this great city on a mora.s.s, and made it a vast centre of insatiate commerce, are now at work to undermine the nervous systems of its restless and eager people,[1] with what result I have here tried to point out, chiefly because it is an ill.u.s.tration in the most concentrated form of causes which are at work elsewhere throughout the land.

[Footnote 1: I asked two citizens of this uneasy town--on the same day--what was their business. Both replied tranquilly that they were speculators!]

The facts I have given establish the disproportionate increase in one great city of those diseases which are largely produced by the strain on the nervous system resulting from the toils and compet.i.tions of a community growing rapidly and stimulated to its utmost capacity.

Probably the same rule would be found to apply to other large towns, but I have not had time to study the statistics of any of them fully; and, for reasons already given, Chicago may be taken as a typical ill.u.s.tration.

It were interesting to-day to question the later statistics of this great business-centre; to see if the answers would weaken or reinforce the conclusions drawn in 1871. I have seen it anew of late with its population of 700,000 souls. It is a place to-day to excite wonder, and pity, and fear. All the tides of its life move with bustling swiftness.