Life's Minor Collisions

by Frances Lester Warner; Gertrude Chandler Warner

Once having put him into the class of needless suffering, we roll along merrily to the moment when we decide that it is time for us to speak. Let us speak tactfully, by all means. Let us auto-suggest as it were! Let those of us who are amateurs do what we can in a quiet way.

At this point, the healthy do three things. We diagnose, we prescribe, and we tell you to take your mind off yourself.

This is where the healthy ignorance comes in. When we are well, we think of the mind as a convenient tool; in Huxley's words, “a cool, clear, logic engine.” We know that minor ailments of our own have vanished when we have vigorously taken our mind off our symptoms and gone to the movies. We are at our best, we know, when we have given our whole attention to something absorbing, quite outside ourselves; business, friendship, good works. We feel that our acquaintance will be the better for this valuable thought. We do not know that every other healthy person in town has also decided that it is time to pass on the same idea. Neither do we realize that the ability to do as we suggest is the sick person's idea of heaven.

Thinking thus masterfully of the mind, we speak glibly of doing things with it. We do not know how slippery and complex a thing the mind is when assailed by suffering. “Take off your mind.” Take off your hat. We do not know what long hours every invalid spends driving his mind along on every pleasant topic under the sun, only to feel it skidding, skidding, from side to side, just as you feel yourself steering for the nearest tree when you begin to drive a car. And after all this effort, what has he been doing but putting his mind on his mind? Less exhausting to put it on the pain and be done with it. When we urge our friend not to steer for the tree, we feel that we are presenting him with a new idea.

Healthy ignorance, in the second place, assumes that the mind of a sick person is more than normally susceptible to suggestion. We have heard that, if you say to a patient, “How thin you are,” he will instantly feel thinner and thinner, will droop and wilt and brood morbidly upon his state. Very well, then. We go to visit our friend resolved to make no such unfortunate remark. We conceal our shock at the changed appearance of our friend, but we cannot help thinking about it. Every healthy person is a trifle taken aback when he sees anybody else laid low. The neat white corners of the counterpane lend an awe-inspiring geometrical effect; if the patient is a man, he looks subtly changed without his high collar; if the patient is a lady, she is transformed with her hair in braids. We know that we must not cry, “How changed you are, Grandmother,” lest we send the patient into a relapse. It is a poor rule that will not work both ways. If a comment on frail appearance would thus depress our friend, surely the contrary assurance ought to chirk him up in proportion. We therefore say blithely, “Well, you certainly do look fine!” Then later we perhaps repeat it, to make sure that auto-suggestion has a chance to set in.

Now, personally, if somebody told me that I looked well, I feel that I could manage to bear up. But in the sick-room, the remark seldom makes a hit. Nine chances out of ten the patient does not understand the healthy. He feels that we suspect him of rusticating in bed under false pretences. He does not want to be ill, nor to look ill; but since he is ill, he would be sorry to have us think that he might as well be up and about. He does not know that we adopt the cheery note to avoid the fatal opposite, and to encourage him. He does not know how helpless we are, nor how sure of the susceptibility of the stricken mind.

All these traits of the healthy imagination and the healthy ignorance are magnified tenfold if the invalid's disorder is nervous. To the untutored layman, a nervous disorder means an imaginary disorder. What nervous wreck has not prayed to exchange his baffling torments for something showy and spectacular, like broken bones or Spotted Fever? The healthiest imagination can grasp a broken leg. The healthiest ignorance can see that it should lie for a while in splints, and that we cannot help our friend by urging him, however tactfully, to forget all about his fracture and join us on a hike. But disordered nerves are different. Everybody admits that. We feel instantly competent to prescribe. We have read up on psychotherapy, in the magazines.

Having diagnosed the case, having prescribed remedies, we feel a trace of impatience if our friend seems not quite cured.

In addition to our eager way of giving advice, we who are healthy have also a way of confusing cause and effect. When our patient finally does succeed in building up his vitality to the point where he can resume his work, when we see him going busily about the world again taking his share of hard knocks without flinching, then we say, “There! Didn't we say he'd be better the minute he had something to do?” We know nothing about the times when he hoped that he had recovered, attempted to take up work again, and succumbed. We see only the triumphant emerging of his renewed vitality. To us the cause is obvious, just what we had been prescribing all along. When he was idle, he was ill. Now that he is busy, he is well. Could anything be more logical? Therefore, when we find him working hard at his old profession, we smile indulgently upon him and we say, “That's right! It will do you good! Now you have something to take your mind off your—”

But I will not repeat it. Never in all my life shall I say that beautiful and grammatical phrase again. There is probably a good deal in it—how much, I, for one, have not the least idea. Probably there are invalids in the world who would be completely cured if they could be worried into hard work at all costs, “roughing it” with a vengeance. We stray perilously near the fields contested by experts when we come to that. The point is that the subject will always be a field for experts, and that never in the long history of suffering was very much accomplished by the well-meant exhortations of friends. As far back as Old Testament days, friends came to see a patient man, and reasoned at length with him. And he cried unto the Lord.