"Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in An Apology for Idlers. "He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return." Many a reader of R.L.S. was reminded of his appraisal last week by a more detached description of industrious, unhappy modern man, given by British Surgeon Sir Heneage Ogilvie in the British Medical Journal.
Present-day Western civilization, says Sir Heneage, has made it hard to make proper use of the mind. Man was better...