A SURGEON AND BOREDOM

Evening Star, Issue 19329, 16 August 1926, Page 7

A SURGEON AND BOREDOM

“ I remember once sitting in a room in Harley street with a distinguished surgeon and a great mental specialist. They wore both men absolutely consecrated to their warfare with disease. They hated disease as St. Paul hated sin. We had ' been discussing modern anaesthetics and their power of killing pain,” writes the Rev. G. A. Studdert Kennedy, in the ‘ Churchman.’ “ Tho surgeon had been an untiring worker in that field. It had been an animated and interesting talk, hut at last there fell a silence on us all, and for some time we sat and smoked and thought, listening to the dull roar of the Loudon traffic as it floated in through-the open window. “Then the surgeon said quietly; ‘ After all, the greatest of human miseries, the most deadly of diseases, is one we cannot touch with the knife or save men from by drugs.’ “‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘ Cancer?’ “ ‘ Oh, no,’ he replied, ‘ we’ll get that little devil yet; I mean—boredom. There is more real wretchedness, more torment driving men to folly or to what you parsons call sin, due to boredom, than there is to anything else. “‘Mon and women will do almost anything to escape it; they will drink, drug themselves, prostitute their bodies and sell their souls; they will take up mad causes, organise absurd crusades, fling themselves info Inst hopo§ and crazy ventures; they will torment themselves and _ torture other people to escape tho misery of being bored. Anyone who discovered a cure for that would put an end to more tragedy and misery than all of us doctors and physicians put together.’ “It was a queer speech. I-have not given it verbatim. There was a lot of it, illustrated by stories from a long and varied experience of men and women. It set mo thinking. The misery of boredom and the necessity of romance! Too much of our modern discontent is due to that if you get down to the real roots?”