Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/76

66 on his odd tricks, never, I believe, escapes the effects of organic nervous shock. Some of the worst forms of such shock I have seen have sprung from this cause.

Political excitements call forth readily the reel of the passions with dangerous energy. A few specially constructed men, who have no passions, pass through active political excitement and, maybe, take part in it without suffering injury; but the majority are injured. As they pour forth their eloquent or rude speeches, as they extol or condemn, as they cheer or hiss, as they threaten or cajole, they are taking out of themselves force they will never regain.

It has been observed since the time of Pinel, that when to political excitement there is added the excitement of war, especially of civil war, the effects on the physical life of the people is at once marked by the disturbance of nervous balance. This fact was forcibly illustrated during and after the last great civil war in America, and it formed the subject of several most able reports by the physicians of that country. One report, by Dr. Stokes, of the Mount Hope Institution of Baltimore, was, I remember, a masterly history which, when the time comes that war shall be no more, will be read with as much wonder as we now read of the witch or dancing mania of the middle ages. One victim of the war mania is cursed with fear until he fails to sleep; another believes all his estates are confiscated; a third imagines himself taking part in some bloody fray; a fourth, the subject of aural delusions, no sooner sleeps than he wakes up, roused by what he considers to be awful sounds afar off, but approaching nearer. These are the more visible evidences of the injuries of war beyond those inflicted on the fighting-men. They represent much, but they represent little if they be compared with the minor but still formidable physical injuries to the heart and brain which stop short of real insanity, but which reduce life, and which pass in line from the generation that receives them primarily to the generations that have to come.

The reel of the passions as a cause of diseases of modern life rests not with the excitements of gaming, of political strife, of war. It is stirred up by some fanatical manifestations for the regeneration of the world, which are well meant, but which, missing the mark, plant degeneration instead.

In a sentence, whenever, from undue excitement of any kind, the passions are permitted to overrule the reason, the result is disease: the heart empties itself into the brain; the brain is stricken, the heart is prostrate, and both are lost.