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indefinitely strengthened. In the old countries, broadly speaking, a man is born where he expects to remain. The son of a butler looks forward to being a butler; the son of the operative to labor at the loom; the daughter of the housekeeper to being a lady's maid. The unlikelihood of great social promotion spares to ninety out of the hundred the wearing and wearying struggle for social promotion. The amount of nerve-waste and nerve-strain thus saved is something incalculable. In America, speaking again broadly, every boy born with the certainty that he may be President, looks upon himself as not wholly a success if he fail to be President. The restless impulse to rise is the inevitable sequence of the open chance to rise. Add to these factors in nerve-strain, the Puritan conscience that has been educated to look upon wilful idleness, however brief, as an invi tation to Satan to come a-visiting, and the American proclivity to nerve-wreck needs little further accounting for.

Few things are more hopeless of sound cure nothing more hopeless of speedy cure-than neurasthenia. The physician called to its treatment must struggle with it as he can, finding, on the whole, hygiene, dietetics and mental therapeutics his most hopeful stand-bys. But so far as the very real national danger is concerned,,the physician can hopefully labor, and is bound to earnestly labor in the field of prophylaxis. Specialists have not yet wholly driven that good old-fashioned institution, the family doctor, from the field; and it is the family doctor, to whom is committed a responsible measure of the care of Young America from birth to adult years, who can make himself a powerful influence toward crushing out the "American disease." Knowing the certain and inevitable strain that is to be borne by virtue of being born an American, the doctor can see to it from the first that the nervous organism is fed to healthy growth, and spared all superfluous stimulation. He will teach the parent that to set at the child's plate, or within his reach, the coffee-cup or the tea-cup is only less a crime than to thus set the whiskeyglass. He will see to it that the children are, as long as possi ble, kept children; that instead of tackling the questions of sixty before they are turned sixteen, as, by sharing the talk and reading the books of their elders, they are too often permitted to

do, they should be furnished with the literature suited to their age, and so interested in the sports and duties befitting their age as to have little time for attacking the problems of the universe. They should from babyhood be taught and held to physical and mental self-control, until the learned lesson passes into a sane and blessed instinct, and hysterical outbursts of any sort take rank as the disgrace they are. They should be helped to form the habit of relaxing to entire passivity at will; and of taking voluntarily, many minutes a day of such relaxation; if the relaxation of nerve and muscle pass naturally into brief sleep, so much the better. From earliest life, diet should be adapted to meet, as far as possible, the nerve-strain of American life; fats of all wholesome sorts should be insisted on; the habits acquired of using much butter; of stinting the table of pie to supply it with cream; of having confectionery take the form of butter-. scotch; in a word, of having the supply of fats in daily food maintained at the maximum. As-and this will be the case, even in school life - unusual weariness calls for unusual stimulation, fix early in mind the truth that in such cases a bowl of hot milk is worth, for strengthening and steadying the nerves, all the coffee or beer ever brewed; and that there is no better investment, in view of hard work, than breakfasts of bacon and nightcaps of cod-liver oil..

Above all, seek to educate youth into that most tranquilizing of mental and spiritual attitudes, in which a man troubles himself only about the quality of his work, and not at all about its effects or its rewards.

In all these matters, the family doctor may vastly help to shape the growing American generation. And in proportion as these matters are wisely handled, the generation, when grown, will laugh at neurasthenia.

EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

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MARRIAGE-REGULATION BY LAW is interestingly commented upon, editorially, in a recent issue of our esteemed contemporary, the North American Journal of Homœopathy, apropos of Dr. Fiske's address on the subject, before the State Society of

New York. Dr. Fiske's plea for the regulation of marriage by law is not a new one; we regret to add it is far from a valid one. Children are begotten, strictly speaking, not by marriage,

only in marriage sometimes, and occasionally out of it; and the begetting of diseased children would by no means be stopped by prohibiting the marriage of diseased men and women,- this would only ensure the begetting of diseased children under lower moral conditions. The whole question, whose moral and spiritual bearings cannot be ignored in eager study of its physical bearings, is not one with which the legislator can safely meddle. The education of the individual intelligence, will and conscience, furnishes the only hope of its solution. When the question is that of criminal and depraved inheritances, there is something to be said for castration as a drastic measure alike of 'punishment and of social prophylaxis.

MEDICAL EPIGRAMS of a sort rarely given to literature since the golden days when the Autocrat was in his prime, are thicklysown over the pages of that unique and delightful book which Dr. Wier Mitchell calls "Characteristics." Dr. Mitchell is, in many senses, Dr. Holmes' literary successor; in instant wit, in keen observation, in appreciation of the ideals and possibilities of the noble profession of medicine, in unconscious adoption of the physician's standpoint in regarding even the characters created by his own fancy; and—whimsically and regrettably — in the ingrained aversion to homoeopathy which finds vent in several queer, sidewise thrusts where the author evidently and justly feels that labored and open attack would be misplaced and undignified. But the broad-minded physician can smilingly forgive a prejudice or two, to the profound thinker and charming writer who can enrich our literature with such wise and epigrammatic sayings as are found in the volume referred to, and from which we are tempted to quote the following; hoping to woo our readers to a perusal of the whole :

"There is no place where good breeding has so sweet a chance as at the bedside. There are many substitutes; but the sick man is a shrewed detective; and soon or late gets at the true man inside of the doctor.”

"No man, however secure he may be in mind as to the future life, ever died a triumphant death with disease below the diaphragm."

"Personal acquaintance with pain inclines me to think that every doctor ought to go through a sharp little course of colic, gout, and, if you please, a smart fit of hysterics, before venturing on the practice of his profession."

"To get a sick man into bed and a sick woman out of bed is almost equally difficult."

"I should have been glad to have written those lines of Somerville, on a good physician,

'And well he knew to understand

The poor man's cry as God's command.''

"The physician's guild is a world-wide guild the only one. The world over we keep touch of one another, claim constantly of one another unrequited service, and abide by a creed of morals old when Christ was born."

"Once by a death-bed, in a hospital, as a man ceased to breathe, I heard a surgeon say: It has stopped; the engine has ceased to go.' His senior, an old man, replied No. It is only that the engineer has left it.''

"I wonder why it bothers a fellow to speak, on his feet. I once had to speak at a dinner. I shiver at the remembrance. . Judging from one's feelings the day after a public dinner, one's thoughts must go to the liver."

Where did my thoughts go?

"No disease is understood. We trace back its threads a little way, only to find a tangle none can unravel."

"MEDICAL HEROES? - They're as thick as blackberries! The man who imagines medicine an unheroic profession, either actually or potentially, is an unlettered and unimaginative Ass!" says the Doctor, bringing his hand down on his desk with such a crash that the cover flies off the tobacco-jar. Which reminds the Doctor of the duties of hospitality.

"Fill your pipe, Douglas, my boy!" says he, and sets the example, crowding down the tobacco, with a liberal hand, into the bowl of the big German pipe which only burns incense on

rare and festive occasions. He smiles benignantly across the desk at young Douglas, once his pet student, now his assistant, with a well-earned M.D. on the bright new "shingle" which puts the Doctor's dull old sign to shame, on the sober housefront. Douglas, nothing loth, obeys. The Doctor's monologues are among the familiar conditions - Douglas says the emoluments of his new position.

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"You thought I didn't approve of smoking?" says the Doctor, between his puffs. Well, theoretically I don't; but practically,-O, we can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, as the proverb goes, or make a holiday without breaking a hygienic rule or two. Christmas brings much license of cheer." He indicates, with a comprehensive and jovial wave of his pipe, the many signs of Christmas which gladden the quiet study; the wreaths in the frost-veiled window; the mistletoe, mischievously hung beneath the chandelier; the Yule-log glowing on the hearth; the wreathing pine-sprays that frame the great photograph above the mantel, of One, pictured

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"And Christmas"-goes on the Doctor, musingly, best of times to meditate on exactly such questions as that you started just now. It is the best of times for a man to put himself in touch with the ideals of his work,- which is to say the heroic possibilities and achievements of his work. What work is richer in these things than is ours?

Where will you find so great a cloud of witnesses as we can bring, to the fact that either the medical profession breeds heroes or attracts heroes,— as you choose to put it! What an unbroken line of heroes from Hippocrates down - Hippocrates, who back in the dim, unlit old days of heathendom framed a doctor's oath so noble that the best of us have mighty hard work to live up to it, and the worst of us can use it to measure our shame by! Think of the men who have had the splendid pluck to stick to their truths through poverty and ridicule and persecution, Harvey, Jenner, Hahnemann, and all the great

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