Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/60

56 of mental pain has become so marked and the results so deeply registered, that it is with great difficulty and only after much time that it can in turn be recovered from, if ever at all. Could we ever have accurate data or skilled experience enough to enable us truly and properly to differentiate the readily impressionable and weakly resisting, from the less impressionable and fully resisting, constitution, the problem of what to expect and consequently what to do by way of prevention in these cases would be much simplified. But here as elsewhere our knowledge respecting inherited traits and tendencies is so vague that practically it is not to be relied upon, at any rate very absolutely or very generally. Hence, it follows, beyond question, that the universally better way is to secure complete recovery from every sort of physical trouble, no matter of what nature or how severe or otherwise, as quickly as possible, and likewise during all the time required for this to sedulously guard against the invasion of mental invalidism with as much determination and skill as against renewal of the injury, or against contagious diseases or other purely physical complication; and if, perchance, mental pain does appear, then promptly to apply such corrective measures as will prevent, so far as possible, its further development into a permanent after condition. Nipped thus at its inception mental disease as a concomitant and resultant of physical trauma or infection can often most surely be; and the outcome to the sufferer is of the nature of a benefit that is simply incalculable.

Important, however, as this theoretically must appear to every one, how frequently, notwithstanding, is exactly the opposite seen. During the process of recovery from physical injury, not only is there incredibly often little or no thought given to the possibility of an original simultaneous psychical "insult," or to subsequent consequences which may be owing to necessarily prolonged distress and confinement and weakening; on the contrary, how often likewise does it seem as if everything untoward was most unwittingly allowed, or made, day by day, to conspire to deepen the impressions of the original experience and whatever immediately follows, as well as to make doubly sure that what was at first but truly accidental and comparatively harmless, shall almost designedly be made to develop into something which in the end must prove to be as permanent and blasting as it was unexpected. Into this conspiracy, not only do the immediate friends and acquaintances of the sufferer often most thoughtlessly enter, but, and it is strange so frequently to note, do those higher in authority and responsibility likewise as unwittingly enter and remain, with a resulting summation of consequences to the sufferer, which in the given case simply defies anticipation or even estimation. Nor in this connection should the rather too frequent untoward outcome of ordinary operative procedures and post-operative care be thoughtlessly passed by. Sometimes, even on the