Many members of the medical profession and the drug-stores have
themselves to thank for this state of perpetual worriment and mental
unrest. They inculcated, nurtured, and fostered a colossal ignorance
in regard to the needs of the body, and a tremendous dread and blind
fear of everything that seems the slightest degree removed from the
everyday normal. They have persistently taught those who rely upon
them that the only safe and wise procedure is to rush immediately to
a physician upon the first sign of anything even slightly out of the
ordinary. Then, with wise looks, mysterious words, strange symbols,
and loathsome decoctions, they have sent their victims home to imagine
that some marvelous wonder work will follow the swallowing of their
abominable mixtures instead of frankly and honestly telling their
consultants that their fever was caused by overeating, by too late
hours, by dancing in an ill-ventilated room, by too great application
to business, by too many cocktails, or too much tobacco smoking.
The results are many and disastrous. People become confirmed
"worriers" about their health. On the slightest suspicion of an
ache or a pain, they rush to the doctor or the drug-store for a
prescription, a dose, a powder, a potion, or a pill. The telephone is
kept in constant operation about trivialities, and every month a bill
of greater or lesser extent has to be paid.
While I do not wish to deprecate the calling in of a physician in any
serious case, by those who deem it advisable, I do condemn as absurd,
unnecessary, and foolish in the highest degree, this perpetual worry
about trivial symptoms of health. Every truthful physician will
frankly tell you--if you ask him--that worrying is often the worst
part of the trouble; in other words, that if you never did a thing
in these cases that distress you, but would quit your worrying, the
discomfort would generally disappear of its own accord.
One result of this kind of worry is that it genders a nervousness
that unnecessarily calls up to the mind pictures of a large variety
of possible dangers. Who has not met with this nervous species of
worrier?
The train enters a tunnel: "What an awful place for a wreck!" Or it is
climbing a mountain grade with a deep precipice on one side: "My, if
we were to swing off this grade!" I have heard scores of people, who,
on riding up the Great Cable Incline of the Mount Lowe Railway, have
exclaimed: "What would become of us if this cable were to break?" and
they were apparently people of reason and intelligence. The fact is,
the cable is so strong and heavy that with two cars crowded to the
utmost, their united weight is insufficient to stretch the cable
tight, let alone putting any strain upon it sufficient to break it.
And most nervous worries are as baseless as this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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