Life & Mortality Quote by John Armstrong

Music isn’t entertainment here; it’s a field medicine kit. Armstrong stacks verbs like a drill sergeant: exalts, allays, expels, softens, subdues. The cadence is martial, almost clinical, as if he’s inventorying what sound can do to a body under strain. That’s the quote’s trick: it borrows the authority of physical remedies to argue for an invisible one. By the time he gets to “rage of poison” and “the plague,” the claim is intentionally extravagant, less a literal prescription than a way of elevating music into a force that can compete with the era’s omnipresent threats.

Context matters. Armstrong lived in a century when “medicine” still mixed observation with moral theory and the language of “passions” governing health. As a soldier, he would have known grief, pain, and disease not as metaphors but as camp realities: wounds, contagion, exhaustion, and the psychological attrition we’d now call trauma. In that world, music’s most plausible power is social and neurological before anyone had those words: it regulates breath, synchronizes bodies, builds cohesion, offers ritual when control is scarce.

The subtext is a gentle rebellion against despair. War and illness reduce life to triage; Armstrong insists there’s a counterforce that doesn’t merely distract but reorganizes feeling. Calling music an antidote to poison and plague is hyperbole with purpose: it asserts that morale, consolation, and communal rhythm are not luxuries. They’re part of survival.