Health Through Will PowerWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Science
Health Through Will Power
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Mental healing; Mental health; Will
My dear old teacher, Virchow, of whom they said when he died that four
men died, for he was distinguished not only as a pathologist, {11}
which was the great life-work for which he was known, but as an
anthropologist, a historian of medicine and a sanitarian, was at
seventy-five actively accomplishing the work of two or three men. He
died at eighty-one, as the result of a trolley injury, or I could
easily imagine him alive even yet. Von Ranke, the great historian of
the popes, began a universal history at the age of ninety which was
planned to be complete in twelve volumes, one volume a year to be
issued. I believe that he lived to finish half a dozen of them. I have
some dear friends among the medical profession in America who are in
their eighties and nineties, and all of them were extremely busy men
in their middle years and always lived intensely active lives. Stephen
Smith and Thomas Addis Emmet, John W. Gouley, William Hanna Thompson,
not long dead, and S. Weir Mitchell, who lived to be past eighty-five,
are typical examples of extremely busy men, yet of extremely long
lives.
All of these men had the will power to keep themselves busily at work,
and their exercise of that will power, far from wearing them out,
actually seemed to enable them to tap reservoirs of energy that might
have remained {12} latent in them. The very intensiveness of their
will to do seemed to exert an extensive influence over their lives,
and so they not only accomplished more but actually lived longer. Hard
work, far from exhausting, has just the opposite effect. We often hear
of hard work killing people, but as a physician I have carefully
looked into a number of these cases and have never found one which
satisfied me as representing exhaustion due to hard work. Insidious
kidney disease, rheumatic heart disease, the infections of which
pneumonia is a typical example, all these have been the causes of
death and not hard work, and they may come to any of us. They are just
as much accidents as any other of the mischances of life, for it is as
dangerous to be run into by a microbe as by a trolley car. Using the
will in life to do all the work possible only gives life and gives it
more abundantly, and people may rust out, that is be hurt by rest,
much sooner than they will wear out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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