Part 21 (1/2)
Within the past few months one of the leading neurologists of New York, a man whose practice is confined exclusively to mental and nervous diseases, stated in a public address that purely or even chiefly imaginary diseases were among the rarer conditions that the physician was called upon to treat. Shortly after, two of the leading neurologists of Philadelphia, one of them a man of international reputation, practically repeated this statement; and they put themselves on record to the effect that the vast majority of those who imagined themselves to be ill were ill, though often not to the degree or in precisely the manner that they imagined themselves to be.
Obviously, then, this possible realm of suffering in which the mind can operate is very much more limited than was at one time believed. In fact, imaginary diseases might be swept out of existence, and humanity would scarcely know the difference, so little would the total sum of its suffering be reduced.
Another field in which there has been much general misunderstanding and looseness of both thought and statement, which has again led to exaggerated ideas of the direct influence of the mind over the body, is the well-known effect of emotional states, such as fright or anger, upon the ordinary processes of the body. Instances of this relation are, of course, household words,--the man whose ”hair turned white in a single night” from grief or terror; the nursing mother who flew into a furious fit of pa.s.sion and whose child was promptly seized with convulsions and died the next time it was put to the breast; the father who is prostrated by the death or disgrace of a favorite son, and dies within a few weeks of a broken heart. The first thing that is revealed by even a brief study of this subject is that these instances are exceedingly rare, and owe their familiarity in our minds to their striking and dramatic character and the excellent ”material” which they make for the dramatist and the gossip. It is even difficult to secure clear and valid proof of the actual occurrence of that sudden blanching of the hair, which has in the minds of most of us been accepted from our earliest recollection.
More fundamental, however, and vital, is the extent to which we have overlooked the precise method in which these violent emotional impressions alter bodily activities, like the secretions. Granting, for the sake of argument, that states of mind, especially of great tension, have some direct and mysterious influence as such, and through means which defy physical recognition and study, it must be remembered that they have a perfectly definite physiological sphere of influence upon vital activities. Indeed, we are already in a position to explain at least two-thirds of these so-called ”mental influences” upon purely physical and physiological grounds.
First of all, we must remember that these emotions which we are pleased to term ”states of mind” are also states of body. If any man were to stand up before you, for instance, either upon the stage or in private, and inform you that he was ”scared within an inch of his life,” without tremor in his voice, or paling of his countenance, or widening eyes, or twitching muscles, or preparations either to escape or to fight, you would simply laugh at him. You would readily conclude, either that he was making fun of you and felt no such emotion, or that he was repressing it by an act of miraculous self-control. The man who is frightened and doesn't do anything or look as if he were going to do anything, the man who is angry and makes no movement or even twitching suggesting that fact, is neither angry nor frightened.
An emotional state is, of course, a peculiarly complex affair. First, there is the reception of the sensation, sight, sound, touch, or smell, which terrifies. This terror is a secondary reaction, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is conditioned upon our memory of previous similar objects and their dangerousness, or our recollection of what we have been told about their deadliness. Then instantly, irrepressibly, comes the lightning-flash of horror to our heart, to our muscles, to our lungs, to get ready to meet this emergency. Then, and not till then, do we really feel the emotion. In fact, our most pragmatic philosopher, William James, has gone so far as to declare that emotions are the after-echoes of muscular contractions. By the time an emotion has fairly got us in its grip so that we are really conscious of it, the blood-supply of half the organs in our body has been powerfully altered, and often completely reversed.
To what extent muscular contractions condition emotions, as Professor James has suggested, may be easily tested by a quaint and simple little experiment upon a group of the smallest voluntary muscles in the body, those that move the eyeball. Choose some time when you are sitting quietly in your room, free from all disturbing thoughts and influences.
Then stand up and, a.s.suming an easy position, cast the eyes upward and hold them in that position for thirty seconds. Instantly and involuntarily you will be conscious of a tendency toward reverential, devotional, contemplative ideas and thoughts. Then turn the eyes sideways, glancing directly to the right or to the left, through half-closed lids. Within thirty seconds images of suspicion, of uneasiness, or of dislike, will rise unbidden in the mind. Turn the eyes to one side and slightly downward, and suggestions of jealousy or coquetry will be apt to spring unbidden. Direct your gaze downward toward the floor, and you are likely to go off into a fit of reverie or of abstraction.
In fact, as Darwin long ago remarked, quoting in part from Bain: ”Most of our emotions [he should have said all] are so closely connected with their expression that they hardly exist if the body remains pa.s.sive. As Louis XVI, facing a mob, exclaimed, 'Afraid? Feel my pulse!' so a man may intensely hate another, but until his bodily frame is affected he can hardly be said to be enraged.”
And, a little later, from Maudsley:--
”The specific muscular action is not merely an exponent of pa.s.sion, but truly an essential part of it. If we try, while the features are fixed in the expression of one pa.s.sion, to call up in the mind a different one, we shall find it impossible to do so.”
It will also be recollected what an important part in the production of hypnosis and the trance state, fixed and strained positions of these same ocular muscles have always been made to play. Many hypnotists can bring their subjects under their influence solely by having them gaze fixedly at some bright object like a mirror, or into a crystal sphere, for a few minutes or even seconds.
A graphic ill.u.s.tration of the importance of muscular action in emotional states is the art of the actor. Not only would it be impossible for an actor to make an audience believe in the genuineness of his supposed emotion if he stood gla.s.sy-eyed and wooden-limbed declaiming his lines in a monotone, without gestures or play of expression of any sort, but it would also be impossible for him to feel even the counterfeit sensation which he is supposed to represent. So definite and so well recognized is this connection, that many actors take some little time, as they express it, to ”warm up” to their part, and can be visibly seen working themselves up to the pitch of emotion desired for expression by twitching muscles, contractions of the countenance, and catchings of the breath. This last performance, by the way, is not by any means confined to the stage, but may be seen in operation in clashes and disagreements in real life. An individual who knows his case to be weak, or himself to be lacking in determination, can be seen working himself up to the necessary pitch of pa.s.sion or of obstinacy. There is even a lovely old fairy-tale of our schoolboy days, which is still to be found in ancient works on natural history, to the effect that the King of Beasts himself was provided with a small, h.o.r.n.y hook or spur at the end of his tail, with which he lashed himself into a fury before springing upon his enemy!
What, then, will be the physical effect of a shock or fright or furious outburst of anger upon the vital secretions? Obviously, that any processes which require a full or unusually large share of blood-supply for their carrying out will be instantly stopped by the diversion of this from their secreting cells, in the wall of the stomach, in the liver, or in the capillaries of the brain, to the great muscular ma.s.ses of the body, or by some strange, atavistic reflex into the so-called ”abdominal pool,” the portal circulation. The familiar results are just what might have been expected. The brain is so suddenly emptied of blood that connected thought becomes impossible, and in extreme cases we stand as one paralyzed, until the terror that we would flee from crashes down upon us, or we lose consciousness and swoon away. If the process of digestion happens to be going on, it is instantly stopped, leaving the food to ferment and putrefy and poison the body-tissues which it would otherwise have nourished. The cells of the liver may be so completely deprived of blood as to stop forming bile out of broken-down blood pigment, and the latter will gorge every vessel of the body and escape into the tissues, producing jaundice.
Every one knows how the hearing of bad news or the cropping up of disagreeable subjects in conversation at dinner-time will tend to promote indigestion instead of digestion. The mechanism is precisely similar. The disagreeable news, if it concern a financial or executive difficulty, will cause a rush of blood to the brain for the purpose of deciding what is to be done. But this diminishes the proper supply of blood to the stomach and to the digestive glands, just as really as the paralysis of violent fright or an explosion of furious anger. If the unpleasant subject is yet a little more irritating and personal, it will lead to a corresponding set of muscular actions, as evidenced in heightened color, loud tones, more or less violent gesticulation, with marked interruption of both mastication and the secretion of saliva and all other digestive juices. In short, fully two-thirds of the influences of emotional mental states upon the body are produced by their calling away from the normal vital processes the blood which is needed for their muscular and circulatory accompaniments. No matter how bad the news or how serious the danger, if they fail to worry us or to frighten us,--in other words, to set up this complicated train of muscular and blood-supply changes,--then they have little or no effect upon our digestions or the metabolism of our liver and kidneys.
The cla.s.sic ”preying upon the damask cheek” of grief, and the carking effect of the Black Care that rides behind the horseman, have a perfectly similar physical mechanism. While the primary disturbance of the banking balances of the body is less, this is continued over weeks and months, and in addition introduces another factor hardly less potent, by interfering with all the healthful, normal, regular habits of the body,--appet.i.te, meal-times, sleep, recreation. These wastings and pinings and fadings away are produced by mental influence, in the sense that they cannot be cured by medicines or relieved at once by the best of hygienic advice; but it is idle to deny that they have also a broad and substantial physical basis, in the extent to which states of emotional agony, despair, or worry interfere with appet.i.te, sleep, and proper exercise and recreation in the open air. Just as soon as they cease to interfere with this normal regularity of bodily functions, the sufferer begins to recover his health.
We even meet with the curious paradox of individuals who, though suffering the keenest grief or anxiety over the loss or serious illness of those nearest or dearest to them, are positively mortified and ashamed because their countenances show so little of the pallid hues and the haggard lines supposed to be inseparably a.s.sociated with grief. So long as the body-surplus is abundant enough to stand the heavy overdrafts made on it by grief and mental distress, without robbing the stomach of its power to digest and the brain of its ability to sleep, the physical effects of grief, and even of remorse, will be slight.
It must be remembered that loss of appet.i.te is not in itself a cause of trouble, but a symptom of the stomach's inability to digest food; in this instance, because it finds that it can no longer draw upon the natural resources of the body in sufficient abundance to carry out its operations. The state is exactly like a tightness of the money market, when, on account of unnatural retention or h.o.a.rding in some parts of the financial field, the acc.u.mulation of sufficient amounts of floating capital at the banks for moving the crop or paying import duties cannot be carried out as usual. The vital system is, in fact, in a state of panic, so that the stomach cannot get the temporary credit or capital which it requires.