Forty Years in the Wilderness of Pills and Powders

My advice was that he should leave his studies, entirely, for two years, and labor moderately, in the meantime, on his father's farm. His principal objection to doing so, was, that he was already at an age so much advanced, that it seemed to him like a wrong done to society, to delay entering upon the duties of the ministry two whole years. But I reasoned the case with him as well as I could, and, among other things, pointed out to him the course pursued by his Divine Master.

I have never met with him from that day to this; nor have I ever received from him – strange as it may seem – any communication on the subject. But I have been informed from other sources, that after laboring for a time with his father, he was settled as a minister in a neighboring village with greatly improved health and highly encouraging prospects. He is at the present time one of the main pillars, theologically, of the great State of New York, and, as I have reason for believing, is in the enjoyment of good health.

It is easy to see that the time he spent on his father's farm, instead of being a loss to him, was, in the end, among the most important parts of the work of his education. How much better it was for him to recruit his wasted energies before he took upon him the full responsibilities of preacher and pastor in a large country church and congregation, than to rush into the ministry prematurely, with the prospect, amounting almost to a certainty, of breaking down in a few years, and spending the remnant of his days in a crippled condition, – to have the full consciousness that had he been wise he might have had the felicity of a long life of usefulness, and of doing good to the souls and bodies of mankind.

CHAPTER LXXIII

HE MUST BE PHYSICKED, OR DIE

Mr. S., a very aged neighbor of mine, fell into habits of such extreme inactivity of the alimentary canal, that instead of invoking the aid of Cloacinà, as Mr. Locke would say, every day, he was accustomed to weekly invocations only. There was, however, a single exception. In the month of June, of each year, he was accustomed to visit the seaside, some twenty miles or more distant, and remain there a few days, during which and for a short time afterward, his bowels would perform their wonted daily office.

And yet, despite of all this, he got along very well during summer and autumn, for a man who was over seventy years of age. It was not till winter – sometimes almost spring – that his health appeared to suffer as the consequence of his costiveness. Nor was it certain, even then, whether his inconveniences, – for they hardly deserved the name of sufferings, – arose from his costiveness, or from the croakings of friends and his own awakened fears and anxieties. Nearly every one who knew of the facts in his case was alarmed, and many did not hesitate to cry out, even in his hearing, "He must be physicked, or die!" And their fears and croakings, by leading him to turn his attention to his internal feelings, greatly added to his difficulties.

My principal aim, as his friend and physician, was to convince him that there was no necessity of anxiety on the subject, as long as none of the various functions of the system were impaired. As long as digestion, circulation, respiration, perspiration, etc., were tolerably well performed, and his general health was not on the decline, it was not very material, as I assured him, whether his alvine movements were once a day, once in two days, or once a week.

The various emunctories or outlets of the body should, undoubtedly, be kept open and free, so that every portion of worn-out or effete matter may be effectually got rid of. In order to have this done in the very best manner, it is indispensably necessary that we should eat, drink, breathe, sleep, and exercise the muscles and all the mental and moral powers daily. And yet we are to such an extent the creatures of habit, that we can, in all these respects, bring ourselves to almost any thing we choose, and yet pass on, for a time, very comfortably. Thus we may eat once, twice, thrice, or five times a day, and if possessed of a good share of constitutional vigor, we may even accustom ourselves to considerable variation from the general rule with regard to drinking, sleeping, exercise, temperature, etc. Healthy men have been able to maintain their health, in tolerable measure, for a long time, without drink, without exercise, and even without sleep. Of the truth of this last remark, I could give you, did time and space permit, many well-attested, not to say striking facts.

I was not wholly successful in my attempts at quieting the mind and feelings of my aged patient or his friends. And yet his erratic habit was never entirely broken up. He lived to the age of fourscore without suffering much more from what are usually called the infirmities of age, than most other old men. It must not, however, be concealed that he possessed what has been sometimes denominated an iron constitution.

Mr. Locke strongly insists that children should be trained, from the very first, to diurnal habits of the kind in question; and I cannot help thinking that such habits should be secured very early – certainly at eight or ten years of age. Some of the healthiest men and women I have ever known were those who had either been trained or had trained themselves in this way. And yet I would not be so anxious to bring nature back to this rule when there have been large digressions, as to be found administering cathartics on every trifling occasion.

An old man, who eats little and exercises still less, but has a good pulse, a good appetite, and a free perspiration, with a cheerful mind, need not take "physic" merely because his bowels do not move more than once a week; nor need those who are feverish, and who eat and exercise but little. The disturbance which will ensue, if medicine be taken, may be productive of more mischief, on the whole, than the absorption into the system of small portions of the retained excretions, or the small amount of irritation they produce – and probably will be so.

It will be a solace to some to know that the alvine excretions of the system are not so much the remnants of our food, when that food is such as it should be, as a secretion from the internal or lining membrane of the bowels. Consequently, if this secretion is interrupted by disease, there will be a proportionally diminished necessity for alvine evacuations.

Prof. – , of Ohio, had been sick of fever, for a long time, and, on the departure of the disease, his bowels were left in such a condition that cathartics, or at least laxatives, began to be thought of; but his physician interdicted their use: His costiveness continued to the twenty-first day, without any known evil as the consequence. On this day nature rallied. Then followed a period of quiescence of fourteen days, and then another of seven days, after which he fell into his former diurnal habits. There was much croaking among the neighbors, on account of the treatment of his physician; but the results put all to silence.

The case of Judge – , in the interior of the same State (Ohio), was so much like that of Prof. – , in all its essential particulars, that I need but to state the fact, without entering at all upon the details.

J. W. G., a lawyer of Massachusetts, was sick with a lingering complaint, attended with more or less of fever, for several months. During this time there was one interval, of more than thirty days, during which his bowels did not move. And yet there was no evidence of any permanent suffering as the consequence.

The principal use I would make of these facts, so far as the mass of general readers is concerned, is the following: If, during feebleness and sickness, human nature will bear up, for a long time, under irregularities of this sort, is it needful that we should be alarmed and fly at once to medicine in cases less alarming – above all, in these cases, when, except in regard to costiveness, the health and habits are excellent? May we not trust much more than we have heretofore believed, in the recuperative efforts of Nature?

CHAPTER LXXIV

WHO HATH WOE? OR, THE SICK WIDOW

Early in the year 1852, I received a letter, of which the following, with very slight needful alterations, is an extract. It was written from the interior of Massachusetts.

"About three months ago, I took a long journey by stage-coach, which brought on, as I think, an internal inflammation. Since that time I have taken very little medicine. Please tell me whether it is right for me to bathe daily in, and drink freely of, cold water; and whether it is safe to make cold applications to the parts affected.

"I take as much exercise as I can without producing irritation. I do not, by any means, indulge in the food which my appetite craves.

"I am twenty-six years of age; was married and left a widow, while young and very ignorant, under circumstances the most deeply painful. I have a strong desire to get well if I can; though if I must give up the thought I am willing to die.

"I should be very glad to see you, if you will take the trouble to come and see me. I should have made an effort to consult you, in person, before now, if I could have safely taken the journey."

At the time of receiving this letter I was travelling in a distant State, and, as an immediate visit was wellnigh impracticable, I wrote her, requesting such farther information as might enable me to give her a few general directions, promising to see her on my return in the spring. In reply to my inquiries, I received what follows: —

"I have been, from childhood, afflicted with bunches in the throat. There is no consumptive tendency on either my father's or my mother's side; but I come, by the maternal side, from a king's evil9 family. I am an ardent, impulsive creature, possessing a nervous, sanguine temperament; naturally cheerful and agreeable, but rendered, by sickness, irritable, capricious, and melancholic. I fear consumption so much, that were I convinced it was fully fastened upon me, I might be tempted, unless restrained by a strong moral influence, to commit a crime which might not be forgiven.

"I have great weakness in the throat, and soreness in the chest, with a dull pain between the shoulders. My appetite is extraordinary; – I think it has increased since I have dieted. My flesh is stationary. I gain a few pounds, and then commit some wild freak and lose it. I am unaccountable to myself. I think, sir, that my mental disturbances impair my health.

"I anticipate much pleasure from seeing you; for I see, by your letter, you understand me. I have always been thought inexplicable. I feel a universal languor. I am, at times, unconscious. I feel dead to all things; there seems a loss of all vitality; and sometimes there is a sense of suffocation. All these feelings are extreme, because I am, by my nature, so sensitive. I met the other day with a slight from a friend, a young lady, which caused grief so excessive that I have ever since been suffering from influenza."

These lengthy extracts may not be very interesting to the general reader, except so far as they reveal to him some of the internal cogitations of a soul borne down with a load of suffering, which almost drove her to suicide. "Who hath woe," – as Solomon says, with respect to a very different description of human character, – if not this poor widow?

And yet it required a personal visit, and the conversation of a couple of hours, to fathom the depths of her woe, to the utmost. For there are secrets of the human heart, with which, of course, no stranger – not even the family physician – should presume to intermeddle; though to these depths, in the case of the half-insane sufferer of whom I am speaking, it was not necessary that I should go, in order to find out what I had all along suspected. Disease had been communicated several years before, of a kind which was much more communicable then, than it was eradicable now.

Whenever, by the laws of hereditary descent, in their application to health and disease, our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren suffer, we may recognize in it the hand of the great Creator; nor do we doubt, often, the wisdom of such laws nor their ultimate tendency to work out final good. But when we find a widow suffering many long years, from a disease to which a husband's weakness and wickedness has subjected her, what shall we say, especially when we have reason to fear that the evils in question, some of them, at least, will be terminable only, in their effects, with life itself?

My patient is patiently wearing out her ills; and what she cannot wear out, she is learning to endure. Her case cannot be reached with medicine, at least with safety, and is only to be affected, so far as affected at all, by yielding the most unflinching obedience to the laws of God, physical and moral. She will not die of consumption; she will live on; but how much progress she may be able to make towards the land of life and health, is by no means certain. Her case is, at best, a trying one, and must compel us, whenever we reflect on the subject, to say, "Who hath woe, if not persons situated like this widow?"10

CHAPTER LXXV

THE PENALTY OF SELF-INDULGENCE

The thought that a minister of the gospel can be gluttonous is so painful that, after selecting as the caption to the present chapter, "A gluttonous minister," I concluded to modify it. Perhaps, after all, it might be as well in the end, to call things by their proper names. However, we will proceed, as we have set out, for this once.

A minister about forty years of age came to me one day, deeply involved in all the midnight horrors of dyspepsia.

On investigating his case, I found it one of the most trying I had ever met with. It was not only trying in itself, in the particular form and shape it assumed, but it had been rendered much more troublesome and unmanageable by injudicious medical treatment.

My course was a plain one, and I proceeded cautiously to prescribe for him – not medicine, for in my judgment he needed none, but simply a return to the physical laws he had so long and so palpably violated. These laws I endeavored briefly to recall to his attention. As he was an intelligent man, I dealt with him in the most plain and direct manner.

Some two or three weeks afterward he called on me again, saying that he was no better. I repeated my prescription, only more particularly. Still I was not, as I now think, sufficiently particular and definite, for want of time. Moreover, he still clung to the off-hand customs of empiricism, – that of looking at the tongue, feeling the pulse, and seeming "wondrous wise," – and vainly hoped I would treat him in the same direct way, instead of requiring what he regarded as a more circuitous course.

He called on me the third time. We had now ample leisure and opportunity for attempting to ferret out the causes which had operated to bring him into his present condition, some of which, it appeared, had been of long standing.

I inquired, in the first place, concerning his exercise. This, he said, was taken very irregularly, chiefly in walking abroad on business, seldom or never in company. His mind, in all probability, was not directed, to any considerable extent, from its accustomed mill-horse track. His gait, too, when he walked, was staid and measured. It was never buoyant, lively, or playful. And as for amusement, he had none at all.

His diet was still worse than his exercise. He had a large family, and resided in the midst of a dense population; and was so situated as to render his house, practically, a kind of ministerial thoroughfare. He probably entertained, at his hospitable table, more ministers, literary men, and students than any other three clergymen in the neighborhood.

"Now," said he to me, "we have a good deal of table preparation to make, and Mrs. Y., who dearly loves to have things in pretty good order, sets a full table, with, a large variety. Well, this food must be eaten. It will never do for a minister who has a large family and lives on a moderate salary, to waste any thing. And, besides, as I ought to tell you, we sometimes, if not always, have a very considerable amount of rich food on the table."

"Do you mean to intimate that the bountiful provision you make for others renders it necessary for you to overeat? Or have your remarks a reference to a supposed necessity of eating rich food?"

"We are not, of course, absolutely compelled to any thing. My meaning is this: In order to meet the wants of those who are liable to call on us at almost any hour, we prepare largely. Then, to meet these varying and often very fastidious tastes, we must have a large variety of food, and it must be highly seasoned. And then, if it happens that our company is not as large as is expected, we have an extra quantity remaining, and I am tempted to aid in eating it up, the highly seasoned food among the rest."

"And you think, do you, that this highly seasoned food is the cause of your dyspepsia?"

"Undoubtedly it is."

"And do you expect to be cured of a disease which is produced by certain definable causes, like this, and yet be permitted to go on in the same way you have long gone? Do you suppose I have any power to grant you an immunity from the evil effects of high living while that high living is persisted in? Can you get rid of an effect till you first remove the cause?"

"Why, no, sir, not exactly. Such an expectation would be very unreasonable. But is there no medicine I can take that will partially restore me? Perhaps, at my age, entire restoration from such a hydra disease as dyspepsia is hardly to be expected; but can you not patch me up in part?"

"What! and suffer you to go on sinning?"

"Why, yes, to some small extent. It is very hard, nay, it seems to me almost impossible, to break away from the routine of my family, at least as long as Mrs. Y. is fully determined to prepare for company according to the prevailing customs. I could submit to a different arrangement if she were ready for it."

"I wish I could encourage you to pursue this compromising course of conduct. But it is not so. You must change your habits entirely, or you must continue to suffer. For if it were possible to patch you up, for a short time, while your present habits are continued, it would not be as well for you in the end: It would only add another head and horn, perhaps several others, to the monster that annoys you. No, sir; you must change your habits or give up the contest. There is no use in attempting to do any thing, in such a case as yours, with medicine."

"Well, then, if it must be so, it must. I will try once more, and see what I can do."

He left me with a downcast look, and, I suspected, with a heavy heart. At all events, my own heart was heavy, and seemed almost ready to bleed. Here was a father in our ministerial Israel, – one to whom multitudes looked up for the bread of spiritual life, – who was a perfect slave to his appetites; or, at least, to the conventionalisms of modern house-keeping. He groaned daily and hourly under bodily disease the most aggravated and severe. His eyes were red and swelled; the sides of his nose enlarged and inflamed, till he had the appearance of being about half a sot. He knew all about it, and yet refused to take the first step in the way of reformation.

I saw him, by accident, once more, and would have spoken with him freely; but he seemed to shun every thing beyond a merely passing compliment. I saw how it was with him; and the reflections which arose in my mind gave me the most intense pain.

Two or three weeks afterward, while in an intimate and confidential conversation with two of his very familiar friends, I ventured to predict his fall, with nearly as much particularity as if the events which were predicted had already taken place. I was asked how I dared to say such things, even in secret, of so good a man and such a father in the American Church. So I gave them, by way of reply, the principal facts in the case, as detailed above.

Not many years passed ere this very minister was tried for a crime much more high-handed than gluttony, though sometimes the sequel to it; and not only tried, but silenced. The results of the trial were as shocking to most people as they were unexpected. Every one said: "How can it be?"

Mr. Y. became a farmer, and is still so. But he is cured of his dyspepsia. Compelled, as I have reason to believe he is, to practise the most rigid economy, having very little temptation to unlawful indulgence, and having an abundance of healthful exercise in the open air, he has every appearance, externally, of a reformed man. His old friends would, I think, hardly know him. His skin is as clear, and his eyes and nose as physiologically correct in their appearance, as yours or mine. True, he is an old man, but he is not a gluttonous old man. He is a fallen man, but a healthy, and, I hope, a penitent one. He has experienced a species of first resurrection, and has, I trust, the hope of a better one still.

Now, had this man believed, in the first place, that the fault of his dyspepsia was not wholly chargeable on Mrs. Y., but also on himself, – had he clearly seen that he loved high living, and would not relinquish it, – he might have been reformed without a dreadful and scathing ordeal, and without disgracing the cause of his Divine Master, But alas! "the woman that thou gavest to be with me," as he said, was in fault; and so he did not reform himself.

That his wife was in fault, most deeply, I do not deny. She knew her husband's weakness, and yet continued to place before him those temptations which she well knew were too strong for him. How she could do this, and persist in doing it, is, to me, a mystery. But she had her reward; at least, in part. For in the fall and retirement of her husband from public life, and in the consciousness – which was the most terrible of all – of his guilt, must not her sufferings have been terrible?

It is indeed true that she may not have been wise enough – for this wisdom has not yet been made public property, in the fullest sense – to look at the subject in one point of view, which would be calculated to add to the poignancy of her anguish. So that we may be almost ready to say, in her case, "Ignorance is bliss." I refer, here, to the infliction of scrofula and nervousness, by high living, on the next generation.

For while Mrs. Y. was bowing down to public opinion, and preparing rich viands for her guests, and practically compelling her husband and children to eat up what they had nibbled at and left, she was not only fastening dyspepsia upon the former and nervousness upon herself, but imparting more or less of a tendency to nervousness and scrofula upon the rest of her family. Of the two thousand children born in a day, in the United States, from two hundred to three hundred – perhaps nearer four hundred – come into the world with a scrofulous tendency; and of these, it is highly probable, that at least one hundred per day are manufactured at just such tables as those which were set by Mrs. Y. for the teachers of the religion of Jesus Christ.

I have quoted the old adage, that "Ignorance is bliss;" but alas! is it not to trifle with the most solemn considerations? Can that be regarded as blissful which leaves a mother, who, in general, means to love and honor the Saviour, to destroy her husband and one or two of his children? There is little doubt that, besides shutting her husband out of the sacred enclosure, after she had destroyed his health, Mrs. Y. was the means of destroying at least one or two of her children. One of them, who was scrofulous, ran at last – a very common occurrence – into consumption, and perished early, in the beginning of active usefulness.

I may be suspected of exaggeration, by some of my readers. Would to God, for humanity's sake and for Christ's sake, it were so! For though I cannot subscribe to the creed of those who profess to be willing to come into everlasting condemnation for the glory of God, yet, so long as opportunity for repentance shall last, I would willingly be convicted of untruth, if so that the falsehood might be made palpable to my mind, rather than believe what I am compelled to believe with regard to the murderous tendency on soul and body of our murderous modern cookery. Is it not true – the old adage, that while "God," in his mercy, "sends us meats, the Devil," in his malignity, "sends us cooks?"