*Read at the Naval War College, July 21, 1904.
In thinking over the matter of what subjects to choose for my lectures at the war college this year, the conviction gradually took possession of me that the urgency of the hour demanded that something should be said on the training and the care of the men in our service from the hygienic point of view. I felt confident that every one of you, with years of practical experience behind him and with the amount of thought already given to the problem, would be prepared to admit that it was impossible to study the question of training from too many points of view and that additional light from almost any direction might, therefore, be received with interest. From the number of able treatises that have appeared from time to time in the columns of the Naval Institute, the subject appears to be a large and comprehensive one and I must state at the outset that my remarks will be limited to the hygienic precautions that are to be observed in the care and training of our men. Even then, my time will only permit me to touch upon the general principles of my theme, from which, however, it will be easy for you to deduce the details as they may apply to special cases.
By way of introduction, I will merely state that in discussing this very important subject I will leave aside, as much as possible, all sentimental and emotional aspects of it and try to consider the man under training merely from an economic point of view, as a living machine to be educated for service in the Navy of the United States and as an intelligent tool in the hands of his commanding officer.
The ultimate object of all training we will admit to be the development to perfection of all those inherited and potential qualities in a man which will make out of him the best and most useful man possible.
As a living machine, man differs, in the first place, from a machine made by human hands in that it can be trained and improved by proper use and in that it contains within itself the germs of its own perfectibility. It must always be kept in mind by those who have the care of men in their keeping that the living machinery of man is subject to certain immutable laws, which must remain inviolate and the combined influence of which upon his development is absolute and inalterable. These laws must, therefore, be known, duly observed and properly administered in order that his training by educational processes may result in the highest degree of efficiency attainable,—which his inherited faculties will admit of.
When considered in this light, it will at once be seen how great is the responsibility that rests with the trainers and caretakers of the men in the service and how essential it is that they should know the laws, the observance of which is now regarded as fundamental and conditional to success of any kind.
Broadly considered, the Navy in all its various branches is a great school in which the attendance is compulsory, work obligatory, discipline strict and the end and object serious and well defined. Hence, all the principles of school hygiene apply also to the naval service. A very, if not the most, essential difference between an ordinary school and the naval service is that, in the former, the education may be spontaneous, more or less unhampered and free, under the merely guiding influence of the teacher, while in the latter, the education must proceed along certain absolutely defined lines and in accordance with the strictest regulations emanating from lawful authority, and which leave the pupils no choice or selection of their subjects. Hence, also, the far greater responsibility of the heads of such schools and the necessity that the training and education in them be done on the best principles which the sciences of the day have evolved.
The key to our problem and the point I am aiming at will become clear to you by the following brief consideration of a sirnple physiological law which applies to all living things, including man, and with which all our educational efforts must agree, whether they be addressed to the mind or the physique of the man. This law states, that the exercise of the normal function of any organ or combination of organs or tissues will exert a favorable influence upon the structure, growth and working capacity of that organ or tissue as long as the burden of the work, implied in the exercise, is kept within the physiological range of the capacity of the organ involved. We know that absolute inactivity of any organ or tissue of the body is followed by a process of degeneration and, that, on the other hand, activity carried beyond the normal range of the endurance of an organ, is followed by fatigue, exhaustion and ultimate paralysis. Between these two extreme limiting points lies the normal range of our endurance and somewhere within this normal range we will find the optimum point of activity for work, which is the point at which work exerts the most favorable reflex influence upon the normal growth and development of the organ concerned.
The object of all objects in education and training being the permanent increase in the capacity and endurance for work, it follows that the highest results can only be obtained when we observe this point and try to keep the amounts of our instruction and training well within the range of the endurance of the individual as well as within that of the average, in handling a large number of men as we do in drills. If more is demanded, the educational result will be failure; if less is exacted, we do not make the best of our opportunities.
So far, then, as concerns the capacity for work, we know by experience that it can be increased, if the proper principles are observed. The nearer we come to observe these, the better must be our results; for there are degrees even of perfection.
The question will, by this time, probably have arisen in the minds of those of you who have followed me in my argument: How can we tell whether we exact too much or too little from the men under training? Two things must be relied upon for giving you that information, namely: (1) the physique of your men, as determined by the scale and the tape measure, and (2) the quality and character of the work done by them as determined by their records. In other words, it is by the product of your work that You must judge the method. Everything else being equal, the difference in the records between two ships, for instance, during an important maneuver, must be taken as an index to the success and the manner with which the educational work on the two ships has been performed. The same difference must decide which one of two ships will sink the other in the event of a fight between them. The result will be the same, whether we overtrain our men by exacting more than the law allows or whether we undertrain them by not exacting enough; in other words by failing to make the best out of the men under training which the above law allows. Whether the records of the performances of the work done by the men can be so kept as to form a guide that will be consulted at more frequent intervals than is now the case, I am not prepared to say. A method by which their physical status could be ascertained and compared with past records could be more easily suggested.
These are in brief the bold outlines of the skeleton of this subject. Into the details of it we have no time to enter, nor would it, in my opinion, be good judgment on my part to burden you here with the minute details of it. It was my purpose, as mentioned in the beginning, to impress you with the broad principles of it, be cause the details can be deduced from them when thoroughly mastered, later, and when you will have the necessary leisure to consider them on board the ship you will command and where you will always have one or more medical officers to consult.
There is, however, one thing upon the nature and causes of which it is necessary for me to dwell a little longer and which the commander of a large body of men should be able to recognize when it occurs among his men. I refer to the subject of fatigue. Fatigue is the danger signal and precedes the stage of exhaustion beyond which, as you now know, any further educational effort is futile and ceases to be attended with the desired result.
(1) The nature of this condition can perhaps best be shown by a brief description of a simple instrument, and the experiment that is made with this instrument in physiological laboratories, to ascertain what is known as the fatigue curve of a person. The instrument is called the ergograph. This instrument is very simple in construction and consists of a weight to which is attached a strong cord. The cord is passed over a pulley and the loose end is attached to the end of the finger, generally the middle finger of the hand which rests with its back on a support in the extended state. A little above the weight a pencil is attached to the cord so that it can be made to write its excursions on the smoked paper of a drum, revolving at a certain rate, whenever the finger is flexed and raises the weight. When the experiment begins, the finger starts to raise the weight at a certain rate and continues to be flexed and extended as long as it has the power to do so. The resulting tracing is known as the fatigue curve of the man. The finger, that is the muscles and nervous apparatus engaged in doing this work, is in a state of fatigue when it is unable to raise the weight any longer. Fatigue is that condition which is due to the accumulation of the products of wear and tear in the tissues that do the work. Experiments have shown that this condition is produced both in muscle and in the central nervous system whenever the work they are required to do is excessive. Fatigue is not yet exhaustion, and although the former condition precedes the latter, the cause of exhaustion is a lack of material which is necessary to make up the loss in energy expended, while the cause of fatigue is the accumulation of the products of wear and tear in the tissues.
The exercise of an organ stimulates the destructive phase of as an organ, rest starts the assimilative phase. To keep any organ in the state of equilibrium, the amount of damage done to the tissues must be repaired, and to this end they must get an interval of rest sufficiently great to accomplish it. In order to cause the organs engaged to grow and develop, the object we are trying to attain, the rest period must be greater than the working period.
You will see then that in fatigue it is more especially the disassimilative phase that suffers. But, when this state recurs too often, we find that the assimilative phase begins to weaken, and when this gives out a more permanent state of exhaustion supervenes which is not so easily recovered from as is the simple state of fatigue. Hence the great importance of recognizing the state of fatigue in time to avoid the greater danger of overtraining which is exhaustion and which practically paralyzes all further educational efforts.
The recognition of the stage of fatigue is of such paramount importance as to justify me in analyzing it a little further with you. If we, for instance, examine some of the curves obtained by the ergograph of Mosso, we find them all to be made up of three essential elements which can be expressed by the following simple fraction, P/Rr where P represents the available power of the neuro-muscular apparatus, R stands for the resistance and r for the rate with which the resistance is overcome or the weight lifted. The fatigue curve, then, may be modified by varying either the resistance or the rate, or both together, as we can see in the tracings produced. By reducing the rate, we can even prolong the curve almost indefinitely. The reasons for this must now be clear to you: it is simply due to the recreative rest period being prolonged. The products of wear and tear are given a chance to drain out of the tissues. This simple fraction tells you not only the nature and composition of all efforts, but it gives you besides the key for modifying the results to suit any requirements which you may meet with in practical life.
So far I have abstained from giving a single instance from practical life of how fatigue is produced. I have done so purposely for the reason that the greatest variety of conditions in practical life will lead to the condition known as fatigue, and because I wished to avoid the impression on your minds which would lead you to connect it with a particular sequence of events. Instead of attaching any special importance to any particular combination of circumstances as being productive of fatigue, it will be more advantageous to our purpose to remember the general law that continued effort in any one direction without change or relief will inevitably be followed sooner or later by fatigue and exhaustion. The living machine will work its own destruction, without the required and necessary period of rest and recreation. And this is the inevitable consequence of any continued effort, whether it be work visible or invisible, whether it be lifting heavy burdens or looking at a printed page. As long as there is an effort involved in the process, whether it be hauling on a rope or whether it be sitting down and waiting for something with hands folded, as long as it is enforced, it is also liable to lead on to a state of fatigue and exhaustion. Utter monotony, which would seem at first sight a safeguard and probably often is, because it transfers conscious effort and responsibility from the higher nerve centers to the lower automatic ones, is in reality more trying and wearing than forms of labor of a higher and more strenuous order. According to my experience and observation the fatigue and exhaustion noted among the men on board ship, in fact, do least often come from the amount of work the men are required to do whether it be mental or physical. They are most frequently the direct result of causes operating against the normal development of a good will and spirit on the part of the men, as for instance when they are forced to do something, no matter what that may be, in spite of want of interest, disgust and ennui.
These being the simple facts, how can this state be recognized in a large body of men? It would, of course, be impossible to ascertain it by taking the fatigue curve of every man on board of a large ship, even if it was necessary, which it is not. Whenever the time comes when your men show a spirit of increasing discontent, when the records begin to show an ever increasing number of infractions against the discipline of the ship, when the prison cells are full and overflowing and the admissions to the sick list begin to show an increase in number, without an appreciable cause, when murmurs are heard and discontent is openly expressed about the insufficiency of liberty and the desertions begin to increase, when individual punishments are resisted and interpreted more as being individual injuries than as the result of the logical sequence of offenses against the regulations, then you may be sure that something is wrong somewhere in the "king's household" and that both your officers as well as your men are dangerously near the condition expressive of fatigue from some cause or other.
Whenever this state of things supervenes, you may be very sure that you have lost or are beginning to lose control over the best part that is in your men; indeed the men themselves are beginning to lose control over the best part of their own actions, even if they still submit to the routine discipline, just as truly as a man loses control of his own normal temperature when he becomes infected with a disease-producing germ. Whenever, as I said, this condition becomes an undeniable fact and is brought to the attention of the commanding officer, it will require him, if he knows his interest, to cause a thorough investigation into the methods of the work done and ascertain the remedies most likely to counteract the evil.
It is the spirit of the ship's company for which the commanding officer must cultivate a keen sense of appreciation. So far as the educational results are concerned, it would indeed be better to stop all drills and suspend for a time the entire routine of the ship and send everybody out of the ship that can be spared, for all the good that you would produce by continuing the methods that have brought on this state of affairs. Before you have succeeded in eliminating every just cause of the discontent that has taken possession of your men and, before you will have in a measure restored the good spirit of them, you will not be able to make any headway so far as the results of your educational efforts are concerned, for you have, for the time being at least, lost control of the best parts of the human machine, namely, its good will or spirit.
If, under such circumstances, it was possible to take the fatigue curve of every man on board a discontented ship and these curves could be compared with the curves taken from the same men under more favorable conditions, they would show a most astonishing loss in the range of endurance. Expressed in different terms it would be shown that their normal range of endurance has decreased, or the extreme limiting points of it have moved to a position nearer each other. In other words such comparison would show that the very opposite result had been obtained from that which was expected; the men being the same, it could only follow that your methods must be wrong and consequently it would be these that would require your first attention.
And this brings us face to face with another side of our subject. We have now been made painfully aware of the fact that the normal or physiological range of the endurance of any part of our anatomy is liable to be made narrower as well as wider, in strict accordance with the character of the methods employed.
In this particular instance, it was shown that the lack of the proper spirit on the part of those to be educated and trained proved to be the cause of the narrowing of the normal range of endurance throughout all parts of the human machine to which ever our efforts may be addressed. It follows, therefore, that the proper spirit, and its development and maintenance, is of far more fundamental importance and of greater general significance than the development of any other single human trait or faculty within our educational reach. This should, consequently, be made the object of our first aim and one that should be kept constantly in mind and never for one moment lost sight of, no matter what other special aim it may be that is ultimately to be reached.
Fortunately the training of this spirit is not a matter of chance but as much the result of carefully considered educational methods as is the development of any other human trait or faculty. This assertion needs proof of the strongest kind in order that it shall carry absolute conviction.
Since, to convince you of this fact, forms the climax of my entire argument and the chief object of this paper, I will for the first time be compelled to leave theoretical ground and step out into the arena of practical life. This spirit upon which so much stress was laid in the foregoing, call it esprit de corps, or whatever you may, is, at the bottom, nothing but interest, personal, individual interest in the things you do, accompanied by a certain pride in how the things are done, summed up in self respect. Interest, then, being at the bottom of it all, how is this to be aroused? Interest in any art, science, profession or trade is practically impossible without previously acquired knowledge. Interest in anything whatsoever can only be begotten in previously acquired knowledge of the thing. The first, most important and fundamental step we must take with a view of acquiring an interest in the work before us is to acquire a knowledge of the "how" it is to be done. It stands to reason, then, that whether this interest is finally aroused or not, can only depend upon the method of instruction that was employed, and, that the amount of interest thus aroused must be in direct proportion to the amount of knowledge acquired by the individual, of the subject concerned. The beginning will have been made and the foundation laid with the acquisition of a certain amount of knowledge.
The method employed to bring about the expected result must be in accord with human nature. Human nature demands that the burden of the work we are required to do be adapted to the working capacity of the individual, if the expected result is to be increased capacity for the same kind of work. In the beginning of all things, large amounts of work and long periods of work must be avoided, lest our object be failure at its inception. Short periods of real and accurate, slow work, with frequent pauses, to be lengthened gradually, must be our beginning. Why is this so? Referring to our range of endurance it will be seen that we can only by such methods keep nearest the optimum point of our working capacity, and we already know that by doing so it may confidently be expected that a daily increase in our knowledge, and consequently in interest, will be the certain result of our efforts.
Just as the normal range of the digestive powers of our stomachs can only be very gradually increased in the newly born by a careful gradation of our demands upon the digestive functions, and just as we would produce certain ruin by attempting to feed an infant with a complete meal for an adult, instead of the easily digested mother's milk, just so would our results be equally attended by failure by the application of similar methods with a mental pabulum which is new to the individual. The best results, in other words, are possible only when we keep our burden well within the range of the working capacity of the learner, as near as we can to the optimum point, but never past the point of fatigue. The nearer our methods are calculated to attain this end, the surer we may be of a daily increase in knowledge, interest and power on the part of our pupils.
All training and education should, accordingly, be begun by slow and easy steps, and aim much more at qualitative thoroughness than at quantitative results until the novice has mastered all the little details and the technique of his work and—what is of the greatest importance—has been made himself conscious of the fact that he has gained and progressed. Nothing indeed is so well and so directly calculated to arouse in him the spirit we are aiming to develop as the self-consciousness on the part of the learner that he has progressed and is daily progressing in overcoming the difficulties of the task set before him. This, as you will now understand, can only be accomplished when the burden of the work is kept constantly within the limits of the capacity of the individual.
Finally, when the learner gives absolute and certain proof of the fact that he has by slow and easy steps mastered all the details of the work before him and can do it without fatigue, we may begin to increase the rate at which the work is done, but according to the same principle and never at the expense of sacrificing either accuracy or thoroughness. It is only by the most careful attention to these details in the methods of training that the highest results of perfection and the largest number of men can ever be reached.
All training, accordingly, to be attended by the highest results and by the development of that interest and that spirit for the work which we have found is so essential, must be divided into two distinct stages: First, we must aim at teaching the beginner to overcome the real difficulties of each part of the technique—that is the burden or the weight of it—by slow and easy steps and with great patience and, second, we must drill him with a view to increasing the speed with which the work is to be done (the rate with which our weight is lifted), until both accuracy and thoroughness combined with rapidity will have reached the highest degree of attainable perfection consistent with human faculties.
I will here mention only incidentally that this conception of the subject of education and training would render absolutely wrong in principle the proposition, which I have read somewhere was made, namely, of mixing untrained landsmen with thoroughly trained seamen for the purpose of training the former. The results of such an association might be the development of a few exceptionally gifted boys, but the great majority of them would certainly be ruined. We must aim at least at the average, if not at the great majority of our enlisted force.
Referring once more to our classical fatigue curve and to our fraction, let us review what we have done so far and how it was done. We have accomplished our results by first decreasing the weight, dividing it into small sections, but have insisted upon the lifting of each fraction with accuracy and thoroughness, thus exercising the entire circuit of the anatomy engaged in the work. We have gradually increased the burden, without sacrificing thoroughness until the full amount of the burden was reached and overcome with ease and, at last, we have increased the rate in addition, until the highest perfection attainable in both was accomplished. We have, in addition, at the same time and by the same method, developed an unconquerable pride in our man, based upon his personal interest in the work accomplished and upon his own consciousness that he not only knows his duty but that he can also do it as well as any man living. The result is an accomplished artist with an undaunted spirit.
Suppose now that we had overburdened this same man by demanding more of him in the beginning than was within the normal capacity of him or any other man, by training according to the formula P/(R1R2R3). It can be easily seen that, with the same amount of available power or capacity, dividing it into 20 or 30 parts by attempting to teach a man as many different things at one time, no useful results could ever be expected and none have been recorded. The man as well as the instructor will see the utter hopelessness of the expected result and both will become dissatisfied and discouraged long before any results are reached. In other words, their spirits will become depressed. Here, for instance, is an example, illustrative of the indubitable fact that the spirit of your men is directly connected with and traceable to the methods of instruction you employ. This natural sequence of events is moreover based upon the natural law that the burden must be adapted to the capacity, if the latter is to be trained to higher power. The consequence of such methods of training indeed would be utter failure, and for reasons that are as unalterable as human nature itself. The best result than can be expected by such a method of training is that one out of a hundred men, at the end of twenty or more years of such training, would turn out that "good all around man," the handy man, the jack of all trades and master of none, perhaps the best man to win your battles in the old days but of very little use in a modern sea fight.
An example and exponent of the results of methods of training more in keeping with natural laws and more in harmony with the present and future needs we have in the modern and recently trained gun pointer. With his eyes on the target and his hand on the gun gear, trained by gradual and easy steps up to his work, allowed to concentrate and direct all his available power upon one thing, this expert could never have been accomplished if his individual energy had been split up between fifty different drills; neither would he have developed that proud spirit had he not been made to feel that he had accomplished a great thing and was constantly encouraged to accomplish still greater ones in the future, by methods of education in perfect harmony with the eternal laws of human nature. He is one of the exponents of the class of specialists needed in every part of the ship, each one developed to the highest degree of perfection in his own duty, and working in concert with every other man, in order to win in a modern sea fight.