It was agreed to by all but one person – a woman, who proceeded to quarantine herself in the most remote room of the establishment. The young teacher got well, and no one was sick in the house but the self-quarantined woman, who took yellow fever from fear, but happily recovered.
By his great reputation and his strong magnetic power, Dr. Cartwright dissipated the fears of those around him, and prevented an epidemic. For this grand appreciation and successful application of a principle – the power of mind and thought over physical conditions, a power just dawning on the perception of the race – he deserves a nobler monument than any we have accorded to heroes and statesmen.
The sanitarians of the present day would think on the contrary that Dr. Cartwright was worthy of condemnation and imprisonment. Dr. Cartwright, however, honestly believed that yellow fever was not a contagious disease. At that time the non-contagionists were numerous, learned, experienced, and respectable. The contagionists, however, finally carried the day in the face of innumerable evidences of non-contagion, which, strangely enough, have now about ceased to exist. Whether they transformed a non-contagious into a contagious disease by repeated and violent asseverations, which played upon and hypnotized the professional and public mind, is a subtle point for psychological investigation, not likely to be made by the present generation of doctors.
Can a non-contagious disease become contagious by mental action? The power of fear to modify the currents of the blood and all the secretions, to whiten the hair, to paralyze the nervous system, and even to produce death is well known. Its power to impress organic changes upon the child in the womb through the mother's mind is well established. When yellow fever is reported about and believed to be imminent and contagious, fear, combined with a vivid imagination of the horrors and woes of the pest, can precipitate sickness which will take on the form and color present to the thought, and yellow fever may spread rapidly from person to person, all through the medium of the mind. "Everything," said a great philosopher, "was at first a thought."
We see a non-contagious disease in the very process of transformation into a contagious one in the case of pulmonary consumption. It was observed occasionally that one of the married partners who had nursed the other through the disease fell a victim after a while to the same malady. Doctors and people began to suggest contagion. The cases of one attack following the other were noticed more and more, and were reported in the medical journals. It was spoken of, thought of, brooded over. The confirmatory cases were all carefully noted; the failures to infect were all ignored, as they always are by people who are looking for contagion. The germ theory has given a great impetus to the idea of contagion. Dr. Loomis actually classifies tuberculosis among miasmatic contagious diseases. Fear will do the rest. In another generation the occasional fact will be a common fact, and in still another, a fixed fact; and the contagiousness of consumption will be enrolled among the concrete errors of the profession. Such has probably been the genesis of all contagious diseases in the remote past.
Fear being recognized as a powerful cause of disease, and a direct and great obstacle to recovery, a wise sanitation will exert itself to prevent or antidote its influences. To eradicate fear is to avert disease, to shorten its duration, diminish its virulence, and promote recovery. How shall we accomplish it? By educating the people up to a higher standard of life. By teaching them a sounder hygiene, a wiser philosophy, a more cheerful theology. By erasing a thousand errors, delusions, and superstitions from their minds, and giving instead the light, the beauty, and the loveliness of truth. There is a mental and moral sanitation ahead of us, which is far more valuable and desirable than all our quarantines, inventions, experimentations, and microscopic search for physical causes.
I will draw the picture of a sick room in charge of physicians and nurse, by whom this enlighted sanitation has been ignored or unheeded. It is a chamber of fear, soon, in all probability, to be the chamber of death. The room is darkened, for they are afraid of the light, that emblem of God's wisdom which should shine into all rooms, except when it is disagreeable to the patient. The ventilation is insufficient, for draughts, you must know, are very dangerous. The friends have doleful faces, moist eyes, sad voices, which reveal danger and doubt, and they converse in subdued whispers, which alarm and annoy the patient. The nurse and the doctor sometimes talk of their cases before the sick man, tell how very ill they were, how they suffered, how they got well miraculously, or how they died. The sympathetic visitor regales his hearers, the patient included, with his or her knowledge of similar cases, and their results, the great amount of sickness prevailing, and the success or ill success of this or that doctor.
They all agree that it is dangerous to change the patient's linen, dangerous to sponge the body, dangerous to give him cold water; milk is feverish, meat is too strong. A shadow of fear seems to hang over everybody. The pulse is counted, the temperature is taken. Nurse or nearest friend wants to know aloud the report of the watch and the thermometer. The doctor answers aloud, and all look grave. And so it goes on day after day, thoughts and images of pain and sickness and danger and death being impressed and reflected upon the mind of the patient, and the great, sound, glorious spirit within finds it impossible to break through this dense atmosphere of material superstitions, fear, ignorance, and folly, and restore its own body to health and happiness.
The true sanitarian will remember in his treatment the tremendous power of words and ideas upon the sick. He will never indicate by his language, his looks, or his conduct that he thinks the patient is very ill. He will cleanse his own mind of morbid fears and apprehensions, and reflect the stimulating light of hope on all around him. The suppression of anxiety, and even sometimes of sympathy, is necessary. His sickness should not be discussed before the patient, or any other case of sickness alluded to. The doctor's opinion of the case should never be asked, and never given within the patient's hearing. Erase, as far as possible, all thoughts of disease, danger, or death. The sick-room should not be darkened and made silent. It should be made cheerful and natural, as if no sickness existed. It should have fresh air, and cool water, and the fragrance of flowers, instead of the odor of drugs. Hope, and not fear, should be the presiding genius of the place.
The mind-curers and the Christian Scientists say that almost all acute diseases can be cured without medicine by the simple dissipation of fear from the mind of the patient, of his friends, and of his doctor. Whether this be true or not, it is very certain that when an epidemic is threatened or prevailing, the people who are constantly talking about and discussing the disease, the newspapers which daily report its progress and fatality, and the doctors and nurses who ventilate their experiences, who predict evil, speak ominously and enjoin all sorts of precautions, are themselves fomenters and carriers of the disease, infectious centers to the whole community.
Education can do much, but it is useless to expect the total eradication of fear without the aid and guidance of the religious principle. Fear is the cry of the wounded selfhood for something he has suffered or lost, or is about to lose. "Perfect love casteth out fear" – the perfect love of God and the neighbor. He who is in bondage to the senses has everything to dread. He alone is free from all apprehensions whose heart and mind are stayed upon the living God. He truly "sits under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to make him afraid."
APPENDIX B
MR. KENNAN'S APPRENTICESHIP IN COURAGE
Mr. George Kennan's great work in Russian exploration and in the investigation of Russian institutions has been due to certain qualities of character which impress every one who knows him well. Of these qualities, bravery and strength of will are not the least conspicuous. In his conversations with me, he has often spoken of certain things in connection with his own development and training, which are of much interest. Once when I spoke to him of his bravery and coolness under danger, he said: —
"Many things which have been significant and controlling in what I may call my psychological life are wholly unknown to my friends, and yet they might be made public, if you wish. For instance, as I look back to my boyhood, the cause of the only unhappiness that boyhood had for me was a secret but a deeply rooted suspicion that I was physically a coward. This gave me intense suffering. I do not know precisely at what time I first became conscious of it, but when I peered, one day, through the window of a surgeon's office to see an amputation I had proof of my fear. One of my playmates had caught his hand between two cog-wheels in a mill, and his arm had been badly crushed. When he was taken to the surgeon's office, I followed to see what was going to be done with him. While I was watching the amputation, with my face pressed to the glass of the window, the surgeon accidentally let slip from his forceps the end of one of the severed arteries, and a jet of blood spurted against the inside of the window-pane. The result upon me was a sensation that I had never had before in all my life, – a sensation of nausea, faintness, and overwhelming fear. I was twenty-four hours in recovering from the shock, and from that time I began to think about the nature of my emotions and the unsuspected weakness of my character.
"I had a nervous, imaginative temperament, and not long after this incident I began to be tortured by a vague suspicion that I was lacking in what we now call 'nerve,' that I was afraid of things that involved suffering or peril. I brooded over this suggestion of physical cowardice until I became almost convinced of its reality, and at last I came to be afraid of things that I had never before thought about. In less than a year I had lost much of my self-respect, and was as miserable as a boy could be. It all seems now very absurd and childish, but at that time, with my boyish visions of travel and exploration, it was a spiritual tragedy. 'Of what use is it to think of exploration and wild life in wild countries,' I used to ask myself, 'if the first time my courage or fortitude is put to the test I become faint and sick?'
"I began at last to experiment upon myself, – to do things that were dangerous merely to see whether I dared do them; but the result was only partially reassuring. I could not get into much danger in a sleepy little village like Norwalk, Ohio, and although I found I could force myself to walk around the six-inch stone coping of a bell-tower five stories from the ground (a most perilous and foolhardy exploit), and go and sit alone in a graveyard in the middle of dark, still nights, I failed to recover my own respect. My self-reproach continued for a year or two, during which I was as wretched as a boy can be who admires courage above all things and has a high ideal of intrepid manhood, but who secretly fears that he himself is hopelessly weak and nerveless. There was hardly a day that I did not say to myself, 'You'll never be able to do the things that you dream about; you haven't any self-reliance or nerve. Even as a little child you were afraid of the dark; you shrink now from fights and rows, and you turn faint at the mere sight of blood. You're nothing but a coward.'
"At last, when I was seventeen or eighteen years of age, I went to Cincinnati as a telegraph operator. I had become so morbid and miserable by that time that I said one day, 'I'm going to put an end to this state of affairs here and now. If I'm afraid of anything, I'll conquer my fear of it or die. If I'm a coward I might as well be dead, because I can never feel any self-respect or have any happiness in life; and I'd rather get killed trying to do something that I'm afraid to do than to live in this way.' I was at that time working at night, and had to go home from the office between midnight and four o'clock A. M. It was during the Civil War, and Cincinnati was a more lawless city than it has ever been since. Street robberies and murders were of daily occurrence, and all of the 'night men' in our office carried weapons as a matter of course. I bought a revolver, and commenced a course of experiments upon myself. When I finished my night work at the office, instead of going directly home through well-lighted and police-patrolled streets, I directed my steps to the slums and explored the worst haunts of vice and crime in the city. If there was a dark, narrow, cut-throat alley down by the river that I felt afraid to go through at that hour of the night, I clenched my teeth, cocked my revolver, and went through it, – sometimes twice in succession. If I read in the morning papers that a man had been robbed or murdered on a certain street, I went to that street the next night. I explored the dark river-banks, hung around low drinking-dives and the resorts of thieves and other criminals, and made it an invariable rule to do at all hazards the thing that I thought I might be afraid to do. Of course I had all sorts of experiences and adventures. One night I saw a man attacked by highwaymen and knocked down with a slung-shot, just across the street. I ran to his assistance, frightened away the robbers, and picked him up from the gutter in a state of unconsciousness. Another night, after two o'clock, I saw a man's throat cut, down by the river, – and a ghastly sight it was; but, although somewhat shaken, I did not become faint or sick. Every time I went through a street that I believed to be dangerous, or had any startling experience, I felt an accession of self-respect.
"In less than three months I had satisfied myself that while I did feel fear, I was not so much daunted by any undertaking but I could do it if I willed to do it, and then I began to feel better.
"Not long after this I went on my first expedition to Siberia, and there, in almost daily struggles with difficulties, dangers, and sufferings of all sorts, I finally lost the fear of being afraid which had poisoned the happiness of my boyhood. It has never troubled me, I think, since the fall of 1867, when I was blown out to sea one cold and pitch-dark night in a dismasted and sinking sailboat, in a heavy, offshore gale, without a swallow of water or a mouthful of food. I faced then for about four hours what seemed to be certain death, but I was steady, calm, and under perfect self-control."
– Kenyon West.
ADVERTISEMENT OF "MENTICULTURE."
"Menticulture" was first issued in a sufficiently modest way. It described a personal experience which has been of inestimable value to the author. The revelation to him of the possibility of the absolute elimination of the seeds of unhappiness has changed life from a period of constant struggle to a period of security and repose, and has insured delightful realities instead of uncertain possibilities. One hundred and fifty copies of the book were privately printed, and entitled "The A B C of True Living." It also carried within its pages the title of "Emancipation."
The suggestion met with such hearty appreciation on the part of personal friends in many various walks of life, that a public edition was proposed, and the name of "Menticulture," a name that had to be coined for the purpose, was chosen for it.
The aptness of the suggestion has been evidenced by the approval of the brotherhood at large by appreciative notices in many of the leading periodicals of the country, by the receipt of more than a thousand personal letters by the author, many of them attesting to greatest benefits growing out of the new point of view of life suggested by the book, and by very large sales.
One gentleman – altruist – whose name is W. J. Van Patten, found the suggestion contained in "Menticulture" so helpful to himself and friends that he purchased a special edition of two thousand copies of the book for distribution in his home city of Burlington, Vermont, one to each household, with the idea of accentuating the suggestion by widespread inter-discussion. The special Burlington edition has an inset page bearing Mr. Van Patten's raison d'être for the distribution, which reads as follows:
PERSONAL NOTE
Some time in the early part of the year 1896 a friend sent me a copy of "Menticulture." I read it with interest, and became convinced that I could apply its truths to my own life with profit. Experience confirmed my faith in the power of its principles to overcome many of the most annoying and damaging ills that are common to humanity.
I procured a number of copies from time to time and gave to friends who I felt would appreciate it. The universal testimony to the good which the little book did, and the new strength of purpose and will it gave to some who were sore beset with the cares and worries of life, increased my interest and my confidence in the truths set forth.
I formed the idea of making an experiment by giving the book a general distribution in our city, to see if it would not promote the general good and happiness of people.
I wrote to the author, Mr. Fletcher, and he entered into the plan very cordially, and had this special edition prepared for me. The object which we hope to gain is to turn the thoughts and purposes of those whom we reach to the old truths taught by Christ, and a determination to live above those evils which do so much to make our lives unhappy for ourselves and annoying to those about us.
I would ask, therefore, that you would kindly give the book careful and thoughtful reading, and, when you have opportunity, recommend it to your friends.
W. J. Van Patten.
PERSONAL NOTE
Mr. Van Patten is a prominent manufacturer of Vermont, and was recently Mayor of Burlington for two years. He is also prominent in the Christian Endeavorer movement, having been the first president of the United Society, and being at present one of its trustees, as well as the president of the Congregational Club of western Vermont.
"Menticulture" has found favor among physicians, and also with life-insurance companies, obviously because of the live-saving quality of the suggestions contained in it.
Explanation of The A. B. C. Life Series
THE ESSENTIALS AND SEQUENCE IN LIFE
It would seem a considerable departure from the study of menticulture as advised in the author's book, "Menticulture," to jump at once to an investigation of the physiology and psychology of nutrition of the body and then over to the department of infant and child care and education as pursued in the crêche and in the kindergarten; but as a matter of fact, if study of the causation of human disabilities and misfortunes is attempted at all, the quest leads naturally into all the departments of human interest, and first into these primary departments.
The object of this statement is to link up the different publications of the writer into a chain of consistent suggestions intended to make life a more simple and agreeable problem than many of us too indifferent or otherwise inefficient and bad fellow-citizens make of it.
It is not an altogether unselfish effort on the part of the author of the A. B. C. Life Series to publish his findings. In the consideration of his own mental and physical happiness it is impossible to leave out environment, and all the units of humanity who inhabit the world are part of his and of each other's environment.
It would be rank presumption for any person, even though gifted with the means to circulate his suggestions as widely as possible, and armed with the power to compel the reading of his publications, to think that any suggestions of his could influence any considerable number of his fellow-citizens of the world, or even of his own immediate neighbourhood, to accept or follow his advice relative to the management of their lives and of their communal and national affairs; but while the general and complete good of humanity should be aimed at in all publications, one's immediate neighbours and friends come first, and the wave of influence spreads according to the effectiveness of the ideas suggested in doing good; that is, in altering the point of view and conduct of people so as to make them a better sympathetic environment.
For instance, the children of your neighbours are likely to be the playmates of your own children, and the children of degenerate parents in the slum district of your city will possibly be the fellow-citizen partners of your own family. Again, when it is known that right or wrong nutrition of the body is the most important agent in forming character, in establishing predisposition to temperance or intemperance of living, including the desire for intoxicating stimulants, it is revealed to one that right nutrition of the community as a whole is an important factor in his own environment, as is self-care in the case of his own nourishment.
The moment a student of every-day philosophy starts the study of problems from the A. B. C. beginning of things, and to shape his study according to an A. B. C. sequence, each cause of inharmony is at once traced back to its first expression in himself and then to causes influenced by his environments.
If we find that the largest influences for good or bad originate with the right or wrong instruction of children during the home training or kindergarten period of their development, and that a dollar expended for education at that time is worth more for good than whole bancs of courts and whole armies of police to correct the effect of bad training and bad character later in life, it is quite logical to help promote the spread of the kindergarten or the kindergarten idea to include all of the children born into the world, and to furnish mothers and kindergarten teachers with knowledge relative to the right nutrition of their wards which they can themselves understand and can teach effectively to children.
If we also find that the influence of the kindergarten upon the parents of the infants is more potent than any other which can be brought to bear upon them, we see clearly that the way to secure the widest reform in the most thorough manner is to concentrate attention upon the kindergarten phase of education, advocate its extension to include even the last one of the children, beginning with the most needy first, and extending the care outward from the centre of worst neglect to finally reach the whole.
Experience in child saving so-called, and in child education on the kindergarten principle, has taught the cheapest and the most profitable way to insure an environment of good neighbours and profit-earning citizens; and investigation into the problem of human alimentation shows that a knowledge of the elements of an economic nutrition is the first essential of a family or school training; and also that this is most impressive when taught during the first ten years of life.
One cannot completely succeed in the study of menticulture from its A. B. C. beginning and in A. B. C. sequence without appreciation of the interrelation of the physical and the mental, the personal and the social, in attaining a complete mastery of the subject.
The author of the A. B. C. Life Series has pursued his study of the philosophy of life in experiences which have covered a great variety of occupations in many different parts of the world and among peoples of many different nations and races. His first book, "Menticulture," dealt with purging the mind and habits of sundry weaknesses and deterrents which have possession of people in general in some degree. He recognised the depressing effect of anger and worry and other phases of fearthought. In the book "Happiness," which followed next in order, fearthought was shown to be the unprofitable element of forethought. The influence of environment on each individual was revealed as an important factor of happiness, or the reverse, by means of an accidental encounter with a neglected waif in the busy streets of Chicago during a period of intense national excitement incident to the war with Spain, and this led to the publication of "That Last Waif; or, Social Quarantine." During the time that this last book was being written, attention to the importance of right nutrition was invited by personal disabilities, and the experiments described in "Glutton or Epicure; or, Economic Nutrition" were begun and have continued until now.
In the study of the latter, but most important factor in profitable living, circumstances have greatly favoured the author, as related in his latest book, "The A. B. – Z. of Our Own Nutrition."
The almost phenomenal circulation of "Menticulture" for a book of its kind, and a somewhat smaller interest in the books on nutrition and the appeal for better care of the waifs of society, showed that most persons wished, like the author, to find a short cut to happiness by means of indifference to environment, both internal and external, while habitually sinning against the physiological dietetic requirements of Nature. In smothering worry and guarding against anger the psychic assistance of digestion was stimulated and some better results were thereby obtained, but not the best attainable results.
Living is easy and life may be made constantly happy by beginning right; and the right beginning is none other than the careful feeding of the body. This done there is an enormous reserve of energy, a naturally optimistic train of thought, a charitable attitude towards everybody, and a loving appreciation of everything that God has made. Morbidity of temperament will disappear from an organism that is economically and rightly nourished, and death will cease to have any terrors for such; and as fear of death is the worst depressant known, many of the worries of existence take their everlasting flight from the atmosphere of the rightly nourished.
The wide interest now prevalent in the subjects treated in The A. B. C. Life Series is evidenced by the scientific, military, and lay activity, in connection with the experiments at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University and elsewhere, as related in the "A. B. – Z. of Our Own Nutrition" and in "The New Glutton or Epicure" of the series.
The general application is more fully shown, however, by the indorsement of the great Battle Creek Sanitarium, which practically studies all phases of the subject, from health conservation and child saving to general missionary work in social reform.
HORACE FLETCHER.