p. 13 | The Work-Cure

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Feb 25, 1904

The Work-Cure

ONE of the last of modern devices for physical betterment is the so-called rest-cure, a retreat within whose outermost gates no form of bodily exercise can penetrate. The patient, presumably suffering from muscular or nervous exhaustion, is put to bed, and rigorously kept there. “His strength is to sit still.” Absolute inaction is held to be “tired nature’s” best physician, and the only prescription which the superintendent writes for the benefit of the invalid is, “Dolce far niente: ad lib.” Give body or mind opportunity to recover its lost tone, and unless the physical or mental strain has produced some serious lesion, nature will restore the exhausted energy, and send the patient back to his usual round of activities thoroughly renewed.

But even a very slight acquaintance with modern life reveals the fact that if some persons need the rest-cure, as many, or perhaps more, need the work-cure, a remedy far more difficult to administer. Notwithstanding our asserted strenuousness, it is open to question whether we do not as a people suffer more physically, mentally, and spiritually from idleness than from exertion. The many wrecks of nervous exhaustion are deplorably evident, yet it is not to be denied that all about us are valetudinarians whose ills are simply the results of ennui.

Some years ago we were called upon to sympathize with a neighbor who had suddenly been left a widow by the death of her husband, a death which, occurring from natural causes, came nevertheless with tragic unexpectedness. What his “poor invalid wife” would do nobody knew. For years she had hardly been able to comb her own abundant locks. Despite the fact that she possessed the physical proportions of a Venus of Milo, she had been carried up and down-stairs with tender care by a devoted spouse. But at his sudden death it was found that with him ceased his income, and with him had disappeared the family capital. She was not only a widow, but bedridden and penniless. It was a situation of which she had never dreamed. Manifestly something must be done. Within forty-eight hours the widow was on her feet; within a week she was “taking lessons,” and in ninety days was not only “healed,” but earned a competence as a “healer.”

Sickness and pain are real evils. God knows. But every honest physician tells us that he has a multitude of patients who will never get well unless some emergency arises in which they must “either fish or cut bait.” The drug store flourishes, and the patent-medicine man gets rich out of a class fretting themselves to death because without household tasks to engage the mind and supply physical exercise to muscles threatened with atrophy. Dumb-bells and golf-sticks only partially and for a brief season relieve the situation. They poorly take the place of those household industries which once kept both mind and body normal, but which now bestow their blessings on our domestics alone.

Modern essayists and preachers are wrestling again with the old-time problem of pessimism; nevertheless, there never yet was any real remedy for melancholy but work. There are more suicides in the palace than in the tenement. . . . Some years ago we received a letter from a friend, now dead, written from Paris, and complaining that with abundant wealth, agreeable social connections, and an untroubled faith in the gospel, she was, on account of certain past experiences, “the most unhappy woman on the Continent.” In a spirit of utmost friendliness, but with perfect plainness, we replied that the remedy for her unhappiness lay close at hand. She had been seeking in prayer the help which she should have sought in labor. We called her attention to the sufferings of the poor in that city,—to their insufficient wages, their unsanitary homes, their defective instruction in morals and religion. There was, we said, only one cure for her sorrow, and that was work. She took the advice in serious earnest; and having organized a charity for a distinct class among those of her own sex, she wrote within a year letters full of sunshine, because her life was now sweet with service.

It is not less true that the only cure for that spiritual valetudinarianism from which the church suffers to-day is work. The Chinese have a homely proverb to the effect that “the dog in his kennel barks at his fleas; but the dog that hunts doesn’t feel them.” We have too much barking to-day from those in the kennels, and too little of the happy forgetfulness of those in the field. . . . Half the ills from which we suffer to-day in body, mind, and soul, as individuals or as a church, can only be relieved by a prayerful use of the best of all remedies, and that is the work-cure.—The Interior.