The commonwealth of cells

by H. G. F. Spurrell

The muscles, moreover, must be well developed and kept in a healthy condition for their own sake. They form a large part of the whole bulk, and no healthy man can have unhealthy muscles. Ignorant people sneeringly say that they have no ambition to lift weights or bend pokers; but they should remember that they are dependent upon their muscles for their bodily warmth, and also to save their internal organs from being oppressed by their own weight.

The bones of the skeleton do not rest one upon another; they are jointed, and kept slung in position by springing bands of muscle attached to their levers. If these muscles are not properly developed, they tire under the strain of holding the frame up, and a disastrous rearrangement of the organs is made to save labour. The chest is drawn in, the hips and knees thrust forward, and the man stands with cramped chest, compressed viscera, and his diaphragm under dire constraint. The result of the redistribution of weight is that his bones tend to rest upon one another like a column of bricks, and his whole weight is upon his heels. Such an individual cannot walk; he stumps along, jarring his whole body at every step.

A pleasant contrast is the athlete. The athlete is a man who endeavours to develop the latent powers of his body to the utmost; and in the achievement of this desirable object the physiologist takes great interest. Physiology has revolutionized our ideas of training, as well as many other things, during the last half-century. We now recognise two kinds of training—the preparation which a healthy man makes for an occasion on which unusual exertions will be expected of him, and the slower and permanent strengthening of the whole body, now usually called physical culture. The former is a comparatively short process now that athletes no longer think it de rigueur to live in bestial intemperance when they have no contest in immediate prospect. A little extra exercise, to stimulate excretion and clear away any waste products that may have accumulated in the tissues; a little extra proteid in the diet, since there is at first a slight inclination to growth; a good deal of extra carbohydrate, since the muscles want extra fuel; rest—and the man is ready. Many athletes live continually in training, and are ready at any moment to ‘fight for their lives.’

The second kind of training is for those who are weakly or those who wish to excel. Its object is not only to improve the health, but to increase the absolute strength and size of the body, and its effects are permanent. It necessitates careful diet and constant exercise for a long period, and proves equally beneficial to both sexes. This book has been written in vain if the reader has not grasped by now that the activity of the muscles implies the activity of all the organs in the body. Accordingly, the whole muscular system is by appropriate methods given frequent exercise: gentle at first; never exhausting; but constantly increasing as the strength grows. The result is a general development of the organs throughout the body, which will in time work a complete metamorphosis in the individual’s physique.

Yet by strength alone no athlete can excel; success depends upon skill. He must have the strength to work with, but he must have the knowledge to apply it without wasting energy, and the ability to do this with precision. He must practise well the sport he intends to adopt—in other words, train his central nervous system.

Here, again, we must hark back to the main idea—the unity of the body. We have already dealt in this essay with the bodily needs in the way of food and exercise, and we must now consider the needs of its nervous components. The chief of these is education; but education of the nervous system means, of course, education of the whole body. There are still people who cling to the old fallacy that the mind can be developed at the expense of the body, but a visit to a hospital or a lunatic asylum will afford many opportunities of seeing how Nature avenges ill-treatment of ‘those delicate tissues wherein the soul transacts its earthly business.’ Physical culture must come before mental: Mens sana in corpore sano—hackneyed, but true.

I do not, of course, say that a man must develop equally both his body and mind; only, that the former must be functionally competent. The absurdity of supposing that the brain can benefit by forming part of an unhealthy body is, surely, obvious to all. Determined invalids may produce splendid work, as Darwin did, in spite of ill-health, but not because of it, and men of great mental energy will sometimes wear themselves out prematurely by their restlessness; but starvation and maltreatment of the body will not create intellect, however morbidly it may stimulate the imagination.

Granting the tenement of a healthy body, the education of the central nervous system must proceed along four distinct lines. A child must learn useful reflex actions, such as walking; have its association centres trained, that it may reason quickly and correctly; be endued, if it is not to live upon a desert island, with a sense of moral responsibility and ethical principles; and have its head stored with useful facts, from the meaning of words and the A B C to the value of the coinage.

Few people seem to realize how much a child has to learn before it gets to the A B C. It begins life with very little beyond a capacity for learning, and even its sense organs tell it little until it has had practice in using them. If baby is so unfortunate as to get a scratch from a pin, he wriggles, and makes the whole house aware of it; but he does not seem to have a clear idea at all as to where he is hurt. He has to learn the way about his own body. He passes his hand over his face, and learns that he has features with a definite position and magnitude; he then waves his arms in the air, and learns that there is such a thing as empty space; finally, he knocks his knuckles against the edge of his cradle, and learns that there are other things in existence besides himself. Of course, his eyes help him considerably to form his ideas of things, but his eyes tell him nothing until he has learnt how far to believe them by correcting their impressions by touch. He learns the properties of matter by experiment, not intuition.

Very interesting experiments have been made upon people who have been born blind, and to whom sight has been given late in life by an operation. They generally take some time to appreciate their good fortune. Things, they say, are all pressed up against their eyes, and they are afraid to move. Objects with which they have carefully been made familiar before the operation—wooden spheres, cubes, cones and prisms—they have been absolutely unable to recognise by sight until they have handled them. They have mistaken sparrows for tea-cups, and it is sometimes only after weeks that they have suddenly discovered that pictures are something more than a mixture of irregular splashes of colour on a flat surface.