As a consequence of the absence of athletics and its diverting interest, the German is apt to have learned more than his English colleague, but a [{200}] comparison of mortality and morbidity tables would show that his resistive vitality, his power to overcome disease and recover from accident is not lower than that of his colleague from across the North Sea. The German is less strong muscularly, and in a contest of physical effort would as a rule come out second best, but then we have gotten beyond the period when it is important for a man to be able to defend himself by physical force, except in emergencies that may never come. Surely the English time and effort devoted to athletics is not justified by this.
Preparation for a Sedentary Life.—Certainly if a young man is going to live a sedentary life in his after years, it does not seem advisable for him deliberately to devote much time to muscular exercise during his growing years. This only provides him with a set of muscles for which he has no use. Ordinarily it is assumed that muscles are organs for the single purpose of evolving energy. This is not true, since they are important organs for the disposition of certain food materials and for the manufacture of heat for the body. Nature in her economy probably never makes an organ for one function alone, but usually arranges so that each set of organs accomplishes two or three functions, thus saving space and utilizing nutrition to the full. The man with a well-developed muscular system, which he is not using, will have to feed it, and besides will have constantly to exert a controlling power over the heat that it manufactures whenever it is not dissipated by actual exercise. For these reasons he will be constantly nagged by it into taking more exercise than his occupation in life demands, and if he does not do this, his developed musculature is likely to deteriorate so as to be a serious impediment, or to degenerate by fatty metamorphosis into a lower order of tissue that is a clog and not a help to life.
The Germans are more sensible. As students, they live quite sedentary lives, develop their muscles just enough to keep them in reasonably good health, and then, when it comes to living an indoor life, as will be almost inevitable in their chosen professions or occupations, they do not meet with the difficulties that confront the Anglo-Saxon with his burdensome, over-developed muscular system. German professors, as a class, do not find themselves under the necessity of taking systematic daily exercise. They are quite content and quite healthy with an hour or two of sitting in the open air, and a quiet walk from the home to the university or the school. With the ideas that some people have with regard to the value of exercise for health, it might be expected that the German professors would be less healthy than their Anglo-Saxon colleagues. This is notoriously untrue, for the Germans live longer lives on the average, and most of them accomplish much more, and above all are much more content in the accomplishment, than their physically strenuous Anglo-Saxon colleagues. They are not oppressed by the demands of a muscular system that insists on having its functions exercised, since it has been called into being in the formative period. These German professors live to a magnificent old age, requiring very little sleep and often doing a really enormous amount of work. The man with a developed muscular system generally requires prolonged sleep, particularly after exercise, but even without it very seldom is it possible for him to do with less than seven hours, while the Germans often are content and healthy with five hours, or less.
Our muscular system is our principal heat-making apparatus. It is easy to understand. If we have larger heat-making organs than are necessary for the maintenance of the temperature of the body, and if we have no mode of dissipating our heat by muscular energy, as through exercise, then there will be a constant tendency for our temperature to rise, which must be overcome, at considerable expense of energy, by the heat-regulating mechanism of the body. This heat-regulating mechanism is extremely delicate, yet does not seem to be easily disturbed. With the external temperature at 120° F. or—10°, human temperature is constant. With a heating apparatus entirely too large for its purpose, it is no wonder that irritability of the nervous system ensues because of the constant over-exercise of a function called for from it. It is this state of affairs which seems to me to account for the marked tendency to nervous unrest, and to the presence of many heart and digestive symptoms that often characterize athletes who develop a magnificent muscular system when they are young, and later have no use for it. They must learn the lesson and keep up the practice of using their muscles sufficiently to dissipate surplus heat, so as to prevent this energy from being used up in various ways within the body, with a resulting disturbance of many delicate nervous mechanisms.
Useless Muscles.—Whatever a human being has to carry round as useless can only be expressed by the telling Roman word for the baggage of an army, impedimenta. Prof. James, in his "Principles of Psychology," sums up the law very well:
The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual as early as possible as many useful actions as can be and guard against the growing into ways that may be disadvantageous to us as we should guard against the plague.
An over-developed muscular system, with its tendency to manufacture heat and its craving to be used, and the consciousness it is so apt to produce of ability to stand various dangerous efforts, is a disadvantage rather than an advantage.
Useless Fat.—This reminds us very much of the attitude with regard to children in the acquisition of fat. Chubby babies with rolls of fat all over them and deep creases near their joints are considered to be "perfectly lovely." Mothers are proud to exhibit them. They are supposed to be typical examples of abounding good health. Neighborly mothers come in to coo over them and, in general, the main aim of existence for children in their early years would seem to be to make them as fat as possible. Such children, as is brought out in the discussion of the subject in the [chapter on obesity], are not healthy in the true sense of the word, are well known to be of lower resistive vitality than thinner infants, and easily succumb to diseases.
Resistive Vitality.—One reason for the early deaths of many athletes is the fact that, confident of their strength, they allow themselves to become so overwhelmed by an infection, before they confess that they are sick and take to bed, that often the cure of their affection is hopeless. Ordinarily neither pneumonia nor typhoid are likely to be fatal diseases for men between twenty and fifty. If a man's heart and kidneys are in good condition during this [{202}] period, an attack of either of these diseases, while a serious incident, is likely to be only a passing loss of time. Rather frequently, however, strong and healthy men without any organic defect that may be considered responsible for the fatal termination, succumb to these diseases. The reason for the fatality is that they are not willing to admit that they are ill enough to be in bed, they have a large reserve force of strength on which they call and which enables them, for a good while, to resist the weakening influence of disease. Doctors know and dread these cases. A young man in the flower of youth, with magnificent muscular development, comes into the office breathing very rapidly and with a laboring pulse. Almost exhausted, he sinks into a chair, confesses that he is nearly "all in," and wonders what is the matter. At times the physician will find practically a whole lung solidified by pneumonia, and at times both lungs are seriously affected. The wonder is how the young man succeeded in holding out so long. Sometimes the doctor is summoned to see him because he has fainted in his home, or in his office, and his friends are alarmed. These cases are almost invariably fatal. Any one who continues to be up and around until the third or fourth day of pneumonia will have so exhausted his vitality, no matter how great that may be, that he will have no reserve force for the life-struggle that must come before the crisis is reached.