Several years ago one of the New York papers published an interview with a well-known physician, on the advisability of women being drafted for war. He expressed himself in favor of their receiving military training, although, he casually remarked, “a good many would undoubtedly perish. But,” he argued, “if we blot out the individual equation and judge from the standpoint of race, would their perishing be regrettable?” He thinks not. “For, objectors must remember,” he continues, “that mental and moral man gets his strength and efficiency only from the physical man. A sick man, just as a sick race, is the one that goes to the wall.”

This outrageous statement was published at the very height of the world war, when men without arms, legs, eyes, men permanently shattered in health, men who will hide all their lives behind masks, were crawling home in hordes. And the worst of it is, that practically everybody agrees with his verdict.

We offer these heroes, who have sacrificed their splendid young bodies on the altar of humanity, a few fine phrases about glory and honor, yet are smugly content to allow them to be crushed by our degrading conviction that the heights of achievement are no longer for them.

Now if a sick race could exist at all, it might go to the wall as the doctor prophesies; but when he narrows his contention to the individual, when he declares that “a sick man goes to the wall,” he is venturing a statement which only a surprising ignorance can excuse.

For what is more surprising than for an educated man, a physician, to put forward a claim which can be refuted by anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of the past? Every one I have questioned has been able to recall at least one invalid who has attained celebrity. For instance, all but the unlettered are familiar with the fact that both Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson were diseased.

The vast majority, however, even of cultivated people, do not seem to realize what an extraordinarily large percentage of the greatest men and women have been physically handicapped. It is the joyous mission of this book to prove to all invalids, but more especially to those living victims of the Great War, that Keats and Stevenson, far from representing isolated instances of achievement despite bodily infirmities, are but members of a gallant army, some of whom have reached even greater heights in spite of more painful disabilities.

The relation of insanity to genius has not escaped the notice of scholars, who have already exhaustively dealt with it. I intend therefore to confine myself to those giants of the past who have suffered either from disease, mutilation or constitutional debility. If I have cited a few who have been afflicted with attacks of insanity, I have selected only those whose best work was done after recovering from such seizures, and have carefully excluded all who have had to pay with their intellects the price of a too stupendous vision. I wish furthermore to impress upon you that of all the illustrious men and women I shall enumerate there is not one whose fullest development was not coincident with ill-health, or reached after joining the ranks of the physically unfit.

If we scrutinize more closely this heterogeneous assemblage, we shall discover that it is composed of representatives of the most varied forms of human endeavor,—Saint and philosopher, poet and scientist, author and statesman, musician and artist, and, what is really astonishing, some of the greatest soldiers and one, at least, of the greatest sailors are among them.