The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [130]
It is all great, but it is also a specific trancelike fantasy that allows us to go to a “paradise” while on vacation. If every year you take three months off, the pleasure of their passage can be mild and diffuse, but if you get only a week, you’ll need some strong symbols of delight. I don’t mean to say these vacations do not just plain feel good in a way apparent to most people, regardless of their culture. Some parts of our vacations are essentially the same as what the ancient Romans did to relax and get happy. They didn’t care at all about palm trees, but there are some remarkable continuities. Some of what we enjoy on vacation is just the resting that we allow ourselves to do there. Might some such symbols help us authorize ourselves to rest for days on end at home?
Along with the modern myth of the palm tree, consider the image of the orgasmic shower. The Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo commercial was memorable and remains familiar: a woman moaning with pleasure as she takes an ordinary shower. Companies make body washes, shower, sponges, and other paraphernalia and advertise them as luxurious, euphoric, and dreamy. Why are we imagining ourselves having such a good time in the shower? We don’t traditionally love washing things. We are on our feet in there, so not exactly resting. What sense does it make?
These two modern images of happiness are part of a long history of treatments and practices that promise bliss and relief. There are water cures, mud baths, acupuncture, yoga, chiropractics, high colonics, saunas, steam rooms, tai chi, sitting meditation, ecstatic dance, Swedish massage, and shiatsu. There is also bleeding, cupping, purging, and flushing the system. This latter group was based on the doctrine of the four humors. It is an old one. Hippocrates, our earliest historical doctor (he lived from 460 to 370 B.C.E.), already knew about it, but it was our second historical doctor, Galen (131–201 C.E.), who first famously advanced the idea. The four major fluids in the human body were happy blood, groggy phlegm, anger’s yellow bile, and the black bile of depression. Sanguine means “bloody,” and since blood was the happy humor, sanguine means “merry.”1 It wasn’t that blood was happiness itself; it was that happiness was based on having the right balance of blood. Thus, misery could be treated by leeches. Anxious people, in particular, seemed to need a bit of a draining to be happy. The doctrine had influence across millennia, and was not fully dismissed from medicine until the nineteenth century.
Until then, drawing from the idea of the four humors, doctors took blood and induced their patients to vomit, sweat, or excrete.2 Sometimes the doctor rebalanced the harmony of a patient’s humors; at other times the patient died—from the original complaint or the treatment. Since these treatments persisted for so many centuries, though, it makes sense to guess that they worked, in some way, and to investigate how. Of course, often the cure did little harm or good. Sometimes the methods helped because painful treatments bring endorphins or even an adrenaline high. I think here of trepanning, acupuncture, and extremely strong massage. Being bled makes one lightheaded, and, of course, lowers blood pressure. Also, there were potent medicines that were unrecognized aspects of adjusting someone’s humors, from analgesics given for the procedure to the anticoagulant properties of leech saliva, which can travel throughout the human circulatory system, dissipating blood clots. What we call “heroic medicine” tried to heal people by bleeding, sweating, purging, and blistering them; one justification for such treatments was that you could hasten the symptoms along by bringing them on. The methods could be especially potent if the