COLLEGE FOOTBALL AS NOW PLAYED.
THE following is taken from a letter from Charles Fessenden Nichols, a gentleman, a physician, and a graduate of Harvard University, “who is not willingly iconoclast or faultfinder,” to Geo. T. Angell, editor of Our Dumb Animals, and appears in full in that paper for February, 1904:— In that game [football], as in all American “sport” of the sort, it is understood that each player of light weight shall be slugged, if possible with the hope of disabling him. In the course of two of this season’s games, one of those consigned to slugging—a brilliant student and president of his class—was waylaid, held down, thrice kicked on the head by heavy boots, rendered entirely unconscious for two hours, finally left with dangerous brain symptoms and sent home entirely incapacitated for study. “A burlesque of a fine game,” says the London Graphic, “is football as conducted in the United States.” “Lovers of Rugby football would not recognize the game as played in America, where it seems to be a thoroughly brutal pastime, played without skill and without science.” An apologist for football—Professor S. W. Patrick—in the American Journal of Psychology says: “This game is more brutal—that is, more primitive—than others, permitting us to revel for a time in long restricted impulses.” To the writer it is shameful that authority in our great universities should encourage a low and cowardly form of slugging contests, costlier than those of the Roman amphitheater or the professional ring, because of the material used to the detriment of scholarly rivalry.” The past year shows twenty-one dead players of football, sixteen more who have suffered grave injuries, and one insane. The injuries have been skull-fracture, broken backs, a broken neck, ruptured hearts and arteries, and internal injuries. And a very small proportion is this of the general wreckage of a school or college course. Betting and gambling come in for their full share, both at and after the “season.” For “Rules of Football Poker, which has now become the rage with college students,” see a half page of the —. In other matters a prison or lasting self-reproach is the lightest penalty following death inflicted unless in self-defence, but the yells and thumbs in the stadium can not deny that the football injuries which frequently cause death are deliberately dealt. Law should require the State to punish every case of manslaughter, wherever committed. One of the most insidious and dangerous of drugs known in pharmacy is cocaine; the cocaine habit is an extreme danger, as evil as the absinthe habit. The habit is readily formed, for it gives pleasure and stimulates flagging strength. Besides enormous doses of strychnine, cocaine is known to be employed by “professionals” in athletic games. I have unquestioned evidence that in the last Harvard game one of the eleven was drugged (I speak advisedly,—the dose was small, but it acted specifically) to force his supreme effort. The amazing excuse was given that it entered the boy’s heels only. As every medical man knows, it also entered his brain. The boy was a wreck when cocaine’s stimulation ended. And one downward step had been taken! There is hypocrisy in “fearing to remonstrate against cocaine” on the ground that “innocent” college boys may learn to use such things. The same surgeons who find football and cocaine “locally applied” harmless, have found it necessary to send this boy from study, an invalid for the winter—one of the illustrations of the “invigorating effects of football training.” The prince of darkness alone keeps a full list of football doses of strychnia, cocaine, etc. To “overtraining,” the surgeons now attribute boils, weak joints, and general football exhaustion, mental and physical. There seems to be a deal of overtraining in training. It is known professionally that “athletes,” so called, with the heart and other muscles overdeveloped and strained, are apt to die suddenly before middle age. The annual report of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia finds that the statistics of the game for the year show a startling list of players killed, and the serious maiming of many more, and that no self-respecting school organization should tolerate such manslaughter in the name of athletics, and that the board will not fail, if need be, to prohibit the game. Another highly-esteemed physician, a graduate of Harvard, the rules of whose medical society will not allow the publication of his name to his communication, writes to Mr. Angell:— In connection with your investigation of college football, I would say that yesterday I was called to see a student at Harvard who had fallen in a fit in one of the class rooms. After he recovered consciousness he informed me that he had had over a hundred such convulsions, and that they were due to a blow on the head received during a game of football. The only hope of recovery in his case is a surgical operation, which might possibly cure him. I would also say that a student at Harvard with me was thrown on his head during a game of football, and ever since has been a mental wreck. I also know of various broken limbs and minor injuries which have been permanent. What can be said in defense of such an education?