‘Soldiers may Fall but Athletes Never!’: Sport as an Antidote to Nervous Diseases and National Decline in America, 1865–1905

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century concerns about hysteria and other nervous diseases in males became extensive in some countries. One presumed cause of such afflictions were military conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The Anglo-Saxon, at least according to many British and American commentators, had more sand, pluck, and courage than did men of other nations. In the United States, concerns about ‘Soldier's Heart’, a condition brought forth by the Civil War (1861–1865), were soon replaced by ‘neurasthenia’, a term used by American physician George Miller Beard in 1869. In an 1872 article entitled ‘Are Americans Less Healthy Than Europeans’, author C. S. Young hoped that the types of ‘games of competition’ that were infused with the values of Muscular Christianity’ would become part of ‘every educational establishment in the land’ so that the youth of America would acquire not only muscular vigor but ‘the manly virtues of truth, honor, and fair play’. Some attention would be given to such values; however, attention turned increasingly to ‘gridiron football’, a game likely to be infused with rampant commercialism that rapidly became the predominating sport in American institutions of higher learning. In 1898, American physician Morton H. Prince asked whether football might cause ‘traumatic neurasthenia and hysteria’ in males in the way that these conditions sometimes occurred among men engaged in a battle, and answered his own question by replying ‘no’! Football players were so well-prepared physically and mentally that there would be ‘no shock or terror’ attendant upon their injuries as might occur in a military conflict. By the time the 1903 edition of Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders: A History of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry was published debates about intercollegiate athletics that continue today were reaching a fever pitch.