Cyril Bennett

“ It is, unhappily, possible to be a walking encyclopedia of so-called knowledge, and yet to be an imperfect reflector of the life of our time.
And of the wonders and glories of Nature that surround us every moment from the cradle to the grave, how much are we taught? Yet these can be studied at our leisure out in God’s blessed air and under God’s blessed heaven. In the garden, at the river-bank, on the hill-side, by the sea-shore, in the lonely desert, there we may find health and wisdom and knowledge and happiness ”

“ The task of raising and training healthy and capable people to the work of the world and the service of God, and—as the orthodox believe—in the very likeness of God, is surely not the least noble task to which human beings can devote themselves. And this, though in a degree men’s work, is, in a greater degree and in a more special manner, the work of women. What honour is awarded to women who guard their health, develop their faculties and enlarge and enrich their minds, that they may be fitted to perform the community’s highest work? ”

“ With how little destruction to life, with how little injury to character, do we graduate the sieves of our younger members? Do we succeed in moulding them into sane, capable citizens, or are we so careful to impart special kinds of instruction, to develop the part at the expense of the whole, that our interference is positively detrimental to the individual, and consequently to the community at large also? ”

“ To death itself we may be resigned; to some it is an escape from suffering; by some it is regarded as the entrance to a higher life. But all alike shrink from the prospect of dragging out long years of pain and hopeless misery in the sick-room. And just as we are becoming better acquainted with the causes and prevention of disease in various forms, one form of it has recently spread in our midst to an alarming extent, our ignorance of its nature and origin rendering us powerless against its incursions.
Nervous prostration encounters us on all sides. It finds victims in all classes of life. ”

“ Women too noble by nature to indulge in ignoble ways the faculties within them that cried out for exercise, stung by taunts of inferiority, chafed by the deprivation of means for obtaining the rational education and the experience of the world which were to them as the very breath of life, conscious of talents no whit inferior to those of the men about them, have flung themselves into the whirl of public affairs, and, with truly admirable perseverance and indomitable pluck, have won for themselves the only honours open to them. ”

“ Sometimes the true cause of the evil is to be found in an exaggerated personal ambition, showing none the less an ill-balanced mind; for, what truly sane person would sacrifice health to such chimeras as wealth and fame? All who have experienced wealth know perfectly well that it means simply an accumulation of bothers and a sense of responsibility; that we cannot, with our best endeavour, spend more than a certain amount upon ourselves, and that the possession of great wealth really means our acceptance of the arduous and thankless task of distributor to other people. ”

“ But we fondly imagine that, though we have faculties to develop and sympathies to enlarge by means of active life in the world and contact with our fellows, we can shut ourselves off from the duties and occupations which are as essential to our health as our daily food, and yet escape the deterioration and suffering which must naturally follow our over-use of one part and our disuse of another. We forget that we can never cease to receive impressions unless we actually close our senses, as when we shut our eyes and stop our ears. ”

“ Money represents so much energy. And if the energy of the country be spent on that which enervates, while that which improves and develops be left to languish, how are we to avoid deterioration?
But before we spend our money on so called education, let us be sure that it is worthy of the name. Cramming with detail is not beneficial instruction; book-lore is not always wisdom; pedantry has nothing to do with culture. It is a trite saying, but none the less true, that the only positive knowledge we are capable of acquiring is a knowledge of our own boundless ignorance. ”

“ But no impression on anything in nature can be done away, not even the impression of the faintest particle of light. The whole universe throughout eternity is altered by our uttering one sentence or leaving it unsaid. ”

“ Consequently, the Shakespeare and the Newton are rare birds; not because it matters to themselves whether they are rewarded or no; not because the heaven-sent genius requires any earthly inducement to do his heavenly work; but because we create, for that which we admire and reward, an atmosphere in which it can arise and flourish. ”

“ A THIEF IN THE NIGHT. OUR life and progress may be aptly compared to the passage of collections of particles through a fine sieve. The particles that will not crumble are inevitably cast out, while those that succeed in passing through it are rendered finer in the process. It would perhaps be apter still to say, that we are passing continually through a series of sieves, some coarse, some fine, and that the particles which survive the ordeal, though refined in their passage, are perpetually losing something they possessed before. ”

“ It is only lately that the majority of non-medical people have become conscious of possessing a nervous system at all. We still hear even educated persons talk of their nerves as though they were something spiritual—as though nervous disorder were not a physical disease. Such inexcusable ignorance leads to shadowy, pernicious ideas about the impossibility of curing the malady, or, supposing it to be regarded as curable, to the adoption of cruel and fantastic methods of treatment. ”

“ But how much greater is the folly of those who, during the early years of the individual’s life, when the constitution is being formed and future health in great measure determined, will persistently compel him to expend his nerve-force in a particular direction, to the detriment of other parts of the organism, or who put such a strain upon the whole that the constitution is permanently injured! ”

“ The study of the one is pleasure; the study of the other is pain.
The mental impressions which delight are those that weave themselves healthily into our structure and form a groundwork for future impressions of a like order. Our happiness is composed, not only of the joys of the present, but of the joys of the past. Learning, if it is to be of the highest benefit to us, must before all things be made pleasurable. ”

“ Does it suffice us to obtain a series of impressions on our plate? No; we now need the dark room, the developing and fixing solutions, and the presiding genius of a higher intelligence, before we can obtain the negative of a face that never yet was seen. ”

“ If we are unduly conscious of any part of our bodies, that part is not in a healthy state. Wherever there is pain, there is disintegration—disease, and because the medical advisers in this instance could not find the disease, it by no means followed that it was not there. “The fact is, we know very little about nerves,” said a medical man the other day. His candour merits our respect. To say that a patient can fancy pain is absurd. Pain is but a condition of the nerves. If it is not there, we cannot feel it. ”

“ We are apt to forget that we go through life rapidly calculating weight, distance, and balance, and that our success in many branches depends on our power of ready attention, on our promptness of action, on our quick observation of natural phenomena and the ways of our fellow-creatures, on our delicacy of manipulation and on our perseverance and self-control, quite as much as it does on the knowledge we have learnt from books. ”

“ It is possible that the higher faculties are not best developed as we imagine; that what we most usually call brain-work is often rather a means of using up our store of intellectual power than of developing it. The fact that our greatest men of genius have come from the lower ranks of life rather than from the higher should lead us to ask whether the nobler part of mind grows better in the school of the pedagogue or in the school of Nature. ”

“ It is by failure that we learn. There is all the more need to draw attention to our failures and to point the moral. We have often tried hard to treat the person and not the disease; we have even tried to treat the disease and not the person. We must accustom ourselves to attacking the enemy on all sides at once. We must realise that not only the food that we eat and the air we breathe act upon the nervous system, but every impression conveyed to it through our senses. We may think it is of little consequence whether we say certain words to a patient or not. ”

“ Almost the hardest thing we have to learn is the impiety of putting cherished beliefs in the place of the great God of the universe. Like Abraham, we are called upon to sacrifice our Isaac. Like Abraham, we no sooner freely consent to do so, than we find the ram ready for the sacrifice. Directly we close our eyes to God’s progressive revelation and accustom ourselves to inconsistency and to fallacious reasoning, we unconsciously deteriorate. ”

“ The way in which we skulk through life in terror of one another is truly ridiculous. Our sensitiveness to the opinion of others is extreme. Can we not realise that the opinion of others is of little moment? It matters, indeed to themselves, though not to us; for the mode in which people accustom themselves to think inevitably alters their nervous structure. ”

“ And we must remember that, in the treatment of nervous disease, we may show our wisdom quite as much by what we refrain from doing as by what we do. We must not start with the idea that we have to work a sudden reformation, but that we have to allow the organism room to grow naturally and in the right direction. We cannot create moral growth, or growth of any kind, but we can minister to it and promote it by placing the organism in the conditions where it shall absorb the largest amount of nutriment—of vitality,—and we can then direct the pressure which determines its form. ”

“ But which symptoms are real and which are simulated? Here the tough or toughened organisation is usually hopelessly at sea. Here no information will enlighten, no rules will guide. If we are by nature incapable of making simple observations correctly, we had better give the whole thing up and go into another line of business. Even the so-called simulated symptoms are in a sense real symptoms of a morbid condition of brain; so, however good observers we may be, if we have not the wisdom and the patience to deal with these wisely and gently, we are still disqualified. ”

“ We have habituated ourselves to regard life and health as natural—death and disease as unnatural if premature; but for our mode of thought in the latter case there seems little justification. The process of disintegration that we call disease is wholly natural. The result of two opposing forces is the path of our planet in space; the result of two opposing forces is our life. Let either force gain the ascendancy, and our life goes, or begins to go. ”

“ That so few women thus prove themselves to be good and well educated is scarcely the fault of women in particular. It is the fault of the whole community. Just as a Shakespeare and a Newton may rise superior to inadequate appreciation, so do some great women. But these women are, and must be, exceptions. The majority of women, no less than men, depend in large measure on the sympathy, approbation, and esteem of others. ”

“ The essential God-like part of their natures had been starved; they had been taught in stuffy schoolrooms by wearied teachers and out of musty books; appreciation of the works of the good God had not been included in the curriculum. Carlyle mourns the extinction of the lamp of the soul. He is premature. In most of us it is never so much as lighted.
Yet we have within us somewhere the capability for seeing—though as in a glass darkly—a dim reflection of the Lord of Glory. We have but to look—to be taught how to look aright—and to us the Lord shall be in the earthquake and in the storm. ”

“ For, instead of Self being sunk in the Cause, the Cause becomes with many a very excuse for selfishness. Persons considered high-principled, who would on no account misrepresent or defraud for their own confessed advantage, will nevertheless think almost any expedient justifiable in what they are pleased to term the public good.
In this loss of moral sense and judgment we find the secret of much of the nerve-trouble of our day. The Self, having found a plausible excuse for its assertion, loses no time in becoming as suicidal in its tendencies as the uncontrolled Self usually is. ”

“ Amongst the most serious secondary causes of nerve-deterioration in modern times we find one to which attention has recently been drawn by many writers of distinction. It is not merely overwork, hurry, and excitement that are injurious to our organisms, but a lack of the solitude and calm in which impressions are combined and ideas created. Many of us live in the midst of such a whirl of rapidly succeeding sights, sounds, and sensations, that only a confused recollection of them is left in our minds. ”

“ The man who amasses a fortune, however selfishly, is the man to whom the peerage is offered, and for whom we manifest admiration. Nemesis follows. Those who are plunged into conditions for which they have not been gradually fitted necessarily suffer in the change. Unaccustomed luxury brings its own deterioration, while the excessively unequal distribution of wealth thus encouraged brings inevitable misery on the whole community. To the Shakespeare and the Newton no peerage is offered and scant admiration is accorded, though by their individual genius the whole race be raised. ”

“ Finally, I would say that the day for the routine treatment of disease has gone by, and progress of the most important character is being made in the study of diet, exercise, sleep, rest, the application of water, cold and hot, and many other agencies; and it has been well said that if in the future, as in the past, nervous diseases are to be the measure of our civilisation; if every increase in the illuminating power of the mind is but an increase of surface to be eclipsed; if all new modes of action of nerve-force are to be so many added pathways to sorrow ”

“ The greatest sufferers from this species of folly and ignorance are, and always have been, women. That curious form of neurasthenia which passes under the singularly inappropriate name of “hysteria” is largely the outcome of our modern ill-usage of the nervous system—the overstrain of one part and the starvation of another. And owing to a marvellous tendency of the human mind to add insult to injury, this very affliction, which should most command our sympathy and aid because it originates in cruel and idiotic injustice, is commonly regarded as fair game for our sneers and reproaches. ”

“ At all events, I have been disappointed to find that women from whom I hoped great things as nurses—women of good organisation, and certainly not of delicate constitution—have broken down completely in the course of their hospital training; whilst women whom I consider positively injurious to any kind of invalid have passed through it triumphantly. The question arises, Are we not unwise so to shape our sieves as to exclude the very people by whom we ourselves would most prefer to be tended in sickness? ”

“ As Cyril Bennett wrote in a former work, when a doctor and a nurse think they are “managing” an invalid, nervous, suffering woman, you may depend upon it that in nine cases out of ten they are mis-managing her. The best physicians of the day are remarkable, not more for their medical knowledge and skill, than for their charm of manner, their human kindness, their warm sympathy with suffering. The wise physician is the family friend, the trusted adviser, the counsellor and comforter in many a trouble and anxiety: and so also with the nurse. ”

“ The most vulnerable part of our machinery is that about which we are most ignorant. We are lamentably ignorant about our nervous systems; our adversary, repulsed in other quarters, effects an entrance there. It is far more difficult to expel him when once he has made his abode with us, than to fortify the stronghold against him. Prevalent as this particular form of disease is at the present moment, that is not the worst of the evil. It is alarming and disheartening to be told that it is still on the increase; but such is nevertheless the fact. ”

“ We need not only learning, but experience and powers of ready observation. Indeed, mere learning will avail us little in a still undiscovered country, or in one where the observations of our predecessors have been so frequently and unavoidably erroneous. But if it be true that all disease is in a sense nervous disease—an affection of the nerves of some particular part of the organism—the importance of the study of neurasthenia cannot be overrated, provided that we study it from Nature, and do not rely wholly on prevalent teaching concerning the mode of treatment required. ”

“ If it be true that when we would do good evil is present with us, it is also true that when we do what seems evil we often bring about good results. How can there be conflict between the laws of Nature and the laws of Nature’s God?
Again, it is contended that it is possible for us to live an evil life, and, by means of scientific knowledge, avert the suffering which, in a God-fearing community is the reward of evil, the race being thereby saved from destruction. A very little consideration will suffice to show us that such contentions are without justification. ”