Now! Then! The Mercury quotes T. Clifford Allbutt (Leeds Infirmary) on the commendable beastliness of northerners

Excerpt

Now, happily, quantity, unlike quality, of brain force is much under the power of education. Quantity may be conceived as lying partly in the bulk of the nerve cells themselves, and partly in the volume of their vessels; partly also in the virtue of the blood itself. It cannot be forgotten that the health of the brain and nervous system, upon which the abundance of its fruit depends, is closely related to the tone and activity of the rest of the corporeal frame. The volume of force issuing from the brain is largely dependent, for example, upon the power of the stomach and allied viscera, upon the power of rapidly digesting and assimilating an abundance of food, and of breaking up and excreting spent material. Like Brougham and Cavour, men of great power of continuous work have usually been large as well as sound eaters. A “hard-headed” man is also a hard-bodied man, and the national history of Europe is a long display of the successive triumphs of the men of colder over the men of warmer regions; of the hardy, lusty, and hungry races over the softer, more indolent, and more abstemious. Northern drunkenness is a survival of Northern feasting and Northern prowess; and the hearty Bishop of Peterborough touched a deep truth when he said he had liefer Englishmen to be drunkards than slaves… Before women can hope to do hard and high work, sense must expel sensibility, and schoolgirls must cease to walk out in a row, to veil their faces, to wear stays, and to eat delicately. [LM tactfully omits TCA’s footnote: “In the Girls’ High School at Leeds, a well-managed school in many respects, the girls are at work from breakfast to dinner and after dinner, with no interval for digestion, till four – for much of the year, that is, during all the daytime. Their cheeks know not wind nor sunshine.”]

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

Allbutt’s full article, “On Brain Forcing,” recapitulates the eternal debate between schoolteachers and physicians and was published in the inaugural issue of Brain (Allbutt 1878/04).

Hansard quotes the bishop thus: “I should say it would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.” But Hansard is (still) not always a faithful record, and “Better a nation of free drunkards than a nation of teetotal slaves” may be nearer the truth.

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Original

“BRAIN.”
The latest venture in the world of periodical literature deserves a special word of welcome. “Brain” is a journal devoted to all matters relating to the nervous system in health and disease. Both the physiological and psychological aspects of the subject will be dealt with, and thus a marked want in the scientific journalism of the day will be supplied. That “Brain” will be not unworthy of the high work to which it is to be devoted may be taken for granted, when we see the names of the eminent men by whom it is to be conducted, and the staff of contributors already secured. Drs. Bucknill, Crichton Browne, Ferrier, and Hughlings Jackson are all too well known to require any new introduction to the public. They are, moreover, all distinguished in that special field of investigation to which the new magazine is to be devoted. The first number, which has just been issued, contains many important and interesting original articles by Mr. G. H. Lewes, Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Gowers, Dr. Clifford Allbutt, and others. The contribution of Dr. Allbutt deals with the very interesting subject of “Brain Forcing,” and contains many passages worthy of the attention of the general public, as the following extract will prove:-

The early dunce often ripens into the later genius. I find this late unfolding of greater gifts, though by no means universal or perhaps even general, yet is so common that as a teacher I have schooled myself into much sympathy with dunces. An observant master may detect the pushing germs beneath the immobile surface of his pupil’s mind, but such masters are rare, and perhaps nothing is lost by leaving their quickening to kindly time. Our duty is meanwhile not to harass or exhaust the brain prematurely by anxious culture, by stimulant or by systematic forcing. Few men can look back upon their early companionships without seeing, with a feeling akin to surprise, how the race has not always been to the swift, nor the battle to those who were strong.

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Quality of brain, then, cannot be made nor forced; consisting, moreover, as it probably does, in added ganglionic and commissural structure, it, like all more complex growth, will be late in the bud and later in the bloom. And in pointing this out it must be remembered that we are speaking not only of the rarer forms of genius, but also of character – of that which gives to each person his individual colour and value. Quality of brain may, however, be lost if it is not invigorated and impelled by a strong breeze of nervous energy; nay, as in the case of the late Sir James Simpson, dauntless and inexhaustible nerve quantity may so elevate the spirit and so strengthen the hand as to clothe the individual with a power beside that of genius itself, and urge him to work which will win the undying gratitude of men. Now, happily, quantity, unlike quality, of brain force is much under the power of education. Quantity may be conceived as lying partly in the bulk of the nerve cells themselves, and partly in the volume of their vessels; partly also in the virtue of the blood itself. It cannot be forgotten that the health of the brain and nervous system, upon which the abundance of its fruit depends, is closely related to the tone and activity of the rest of the corporeal frame. The volume of force issuing from the brain is largely dependent, for example, upon the power of the stomach and allied viscera, upon the power of rapidly digesting and assimilating an abundance of food, and of breaking up and excreting spent material. A dyspeptic may well have nerve force of high quality, and of high tension; but I never met with a dyspeptic whose nerve force welled continuously forth. Like Brougham and Cavour, men of great power of continuous work have usually been large as well as sound eaters. A “hard-headed” man is also a hard-bodied man, and the national history of Europe is a long display of the successive triumphs of the men of colder over the men of warmer regions; of the hardy, lusty, and hungry races over the softer, more indolent, and more abstemious. Northern drunkenness is a survival of Northern feasting and Northern prowess; and the hearty Bishop of Peterborough touched a deep truth when he said he had liefer Englishmen to be drunkards than slaves. It is quantity, then, rather than other conditions of nerve power, which is favoured by “physical education,” quantity without which quality may flag; but quality is also indirectly increased, for quality is born doubtless out of the fountains of quantity. If it be true that the sons of genius are often fools, the explanation may be that the parent has spent his great fortune of intellect and passion, and transmitted to his offspring a sapless and atonic brain. It may be true also that as from the lesser robustness of women the streams of vitality in them are more slender and less perennial, so the buddings of higher genius in them are fewer and less fertile. The weaving of the higher thought and emotion is found in our experience, even of individuals, to be especially exhausting, and apt, therefore, to alternate in its function with hours of indolence, and even of depression. The greatest master cannot be unconscious of these tides in his creative work, and the lesser, seeking relief and distraction between whiles, drifts into the “Bohemian.” To secure, then, quantity of nerve force directly, and quality indirectly, the encouragement of bodily vigour and sturdy grain is fundamentally necessary. Without wealth of bone and blood volume of nerve force will dwindle, and the rarest quality may fail of proof, or lose its splendour. Before women can hope to do hard and high work, sense must expel sensibility, and school-girls must cease to walk out in a row, to veil their faces, to wear stays, and to eat delicately. Nay, if a certain ruggedness be not foreign to mental strength and growth, it may be that women, as a class, if they will excel in originality and endurance, must cease, as a class, to seek after the charms of daintiness and sentiment. I am not therefore of those who think that the love of athletics is as yet in excess. Here and there man may expend in the hunting-field or on the river that which should have been given to their tripos, to their profession, or to their country; yet this at worst is but an individual loss far outweighed by the impulse given to the hardy, hungry vitality by which the nation thrives and its general volume of nervous force is augmented. Again, it is an old truth that in youth production and growth or development are in a measure opponent. The gardener, the stockbreeder, the trainer all know this and act upon the rule. The spontaneous and equable play of all sides of life favours growth and tone, but to enter the colt for the race, to bloom and seed the young plant, or to put the young male to the stud is to stint their growth and to exhaust their vigour. Precocity is gained at the cost of feeble maturity and early decay. And yet can the young on brain grow, cell add itself to cell, and fibre knit itself to fibre without work and play? … The mischief done daily by calling on the unripe brain for productive work, for original composition, for competitive examinations, for teaching and even for preaching, is calamitous, and the evil is increasing. The impatient examinations of young children are as injurious and as foolish as the searching of the roots of the pushing plant. Cram again is that which secures the immediate production of brain results rather than the growth of the brain itself, and it must be thrusting itself upon the vision of all but the moonstruck, that young men who are prize-winners at the ages even of eighteen or twenty years have too often spent their brains before the natural yielding-time. Too often the star of his year is quenched ere his course be well begun, and if his life be not thenceforth a failure it may fall far short of its early promise, and the brain which might have been year by year more flexible, more potent, and more enterprising, is warped, stiffened, and staled. Such young men are now sent into the world in numbers, with minds orderly, trim, and garnished, but without élan and without initiative – admirable clerks and formalists – but as men of action spoiled for ever.

1465 words.