Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/826

806 of the blood. The bite of poisonous animals has often a similar effect. The most frequent predisposing cause, however, is want of sunlight and out-door exercise. Jaundice and chronic melancholy are often concomitant affections, and both a penalty of our dreary, sedentary modes of life. The ancients, indeed, ascribed both complaints to the same cause, for melancholy is derived from a word which means literally "atrabilious," or black-biled. But the truth seems to be that functional disorders of the liver are the result rather than the cause of a general torpor of the vital process. Remedy outdoor sports, combined with as much fun and sunshine as possible. Alcoholic jaundice-cures may restore the ruddiness of the complexion by keeping the system under the influence of a stimulant fever; but we might as well congratulate ourselves on the return of health when pulmonary affections mimic its color with their hectic glow.

—The Lalita Vistara says that on the day when Buddha, the savior, was born, all the sick regained their health and the insane their memory. Insanity might, indeed, be defined as a partial derangement or suspension of the faculty of recollection. Nature takes that method of obliterating the memory of impressions which the soul is unable to bear, and thus preserves life at the expense of its intellectual continuity. Lunatics are generally monomaniacs; their judgment may be sound in many respects, but, at the mention of a special topic, betrays the partial eclipse of its light. It may be possible that people have been killed by the sudden announcement of good news, but, for one person who has lost his reason from an excess of joy, millions have lost it from an excess of sorrow—a crushing calamity, or the oppressive and at last unbearable weight of the dreariness, the soul-stifling tedium of modern life in many of its phases. The sick soul may have stilled its hunger with a long-hoarded hope, till the evident exhaustion of that hoard leaves only the alternative of despair or refuge in the Lethe of dementation. Where insanity is at all curable it can be cured by the removal of its chief cause—sorrow; and the best remedies are kindness, mirth, and a pleasant occupation. In the middle ages, when both lunacy and the love of earthly happiness were ascribed to the machinations of the devil, lunatics were chained and horsewhipped for the double benefit of their souls, and with results which almost justified the demon hypothesis. Breughel's best illustrations for Dante's hell were made after studies in an Austrian mad-house. The extreme antithesis of such infernos is perhaps the State Lunatic Asylum at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the shadow of gloom has been so successfully banished that the happiest results of the cure have almost been anticipated by its methods: the restoration of reason itself could hardly give the patients an additional reason for being happy. They have a park, a flower-garden, and a pet nursery of their own; they have books and music, gymnasia, bathrooms, and amateur workshops. Wherever their road leads, they can