Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/230

 *casionally marks the change of life. Pallor and slight blueness are sometimes recurrent with the periodical illness. Such discolorations cannot be amended, and the best that can be done is to conceal them when social life requires it.

Another large class are characteristic of disease, and can only be removed by a judiciously regulated and often protracted course of treatment. Here the family physician should be called in, who, if he is a wise man, will not depreciate the importance of even so small a sign as an altered complexion, for this is sometimes the only sign and forerunner of serious maladies.

"The green sickness," so common in young girls, derives its name from the peculiar greenish hue of the complexion. Another not less familiar complaint is jaundice, in which the skin takes on a sickly yellow. In a less degree, this same tint is frequently perceptible in persons who are "bilious," or who suffer from dyspepsia. A light bluish hue, most strongly marked on the lips, often betrays disease or defective action of the heart, the seat of life. A lead-colored tinge points to disease of the spleen.

There is a rare complaint named after Dr. Addison, who first explained it, in which the whole surface of the body gradually changes to a tawny brown or mahogany color; and another, not so rare, which indeed is not infrequent, where dark red spots appear in