Take It Easy

"Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in An Apology for Idlers. "He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return." Many a reader of R.L.S. was reminded of his appraisal last week by a more detached description of industrious, unhappy modern man, given by British Surgeon Sir Heneage Ogilvie in the British Medical Journal.

Present-day Western civilization, says Sir Heneage, has made it hard to make proper use of the mind. Man was better off in the Middle Ages, when he had a better chance of 1) a job that demanded individual skill, 2) some security, and 3) a sense of doing something useful in the community. Modern man has been straining so long after success, often doing a job he dislikes, that the strain has become second nature. Men of today, says Ogilvie, "are so constantly keyed up to fight the world that is trying to tread them down that they are in a state of continual and futile preparedness." Their nervous systems, "tuned for combat in the day and rehearsing combat during sleep," get out of whack. So do their glands. The result is such "stress diseases" as ulcers, high blood pressure, overactive thyroids.

Surgery "of a somewhat crude nature" then does what it can to repair the damage. It can shut off some of the abnormal impulses by nerve-cutting operations such as vagotomy, or cut out diseased thyroids and hunks of stomach. But Surgeon Ogilvie has what he regards as more effective treatment: proper doses of idleness, for "idleness is a part of function." A change of occupation is often a good thing, too. The mind that has been driven too hard may do its best work when tension is relaxed and it is allowed "to find the natural paths that shape themselves in idle periods." Ogilvie adds: "Science is advanced further in a shorter time by the informal chatter of a few like-minded friends over cocktails than by the formal exchange of a paper or by any number of congresses."

Last week Sir Heneage, who is 61 and senior surgeon at Guy's Hospital, London, was working a 14-hour day, as usual.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.