Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/251

 a week, when they are about eighteen or twenty years of age, and continue the habit, gradually increasing the quantity but not the frequency of the dose, as long as they live. Elderly people take as much as four grains at a time.

It does not seem to shorten their lives, or undermine their strength. On the contrary, they are, as we can say from personal observation, a handsome, sturdy, long-winded, and long-lived set. But the habit once commenced, it is said that it cannot with safety be discontinued, as either symptoms of poisoning or else some fatal disease soon carries the victim off.

The value of this potent drug in treating diseases and discolorations of the skin cannot be over-estimated. But the propriety of using it constantly for its cosmetic effects is, in spite of the example just quoted, open to very grave objections.

In the first place, there are constitutions on which it has, even in the minutest doses, a violently irritating effect. Again, if once commenced it may become unsafe to discontinue it, and who would wish to be tied down to this unnatural diet all their lives? There are other reasons not less weighty. Within the last score of years, since wall-papers colored with arsenical dyes (especially green paper) have come into vogue, physicians have been obliged to treat a number of persons poisoned by the minute amounts of arsenic floating in the atmosphere of rooms thus papered. Such being