"In 1992 all but seventeen have left this mundane sphere forever, while the last remaining wreck will probably, in seeming thoughtlessness, watch the sands filter through the hour-glass of time, and die in the year 1997 at the age of one hundred and eight.
"What a bounteous supply of food for reflection!"
"Laughter as a Health Promoter.—In his 'Problem of Health,' Dr. Greene says that there is not the remotest corner or little inlet of the minute blood-vessels of the human body that does not feel some wavelet from the convulsions occasioned by good hearty laughter. The life principle, or the central man, is shaken to its innermost depths, sending new tides of life and strength to the surface, thus materially tending to insure good health to the persons who indulge therein. The blood moves more rapidly and conveys a different impression to all the organs of the body, as it visits them on that particular mystic journey when the man is laughing, from what it does at other times. For this reason every good hearty laugh in which a person indulges tends to lengthen his life, conveying, as it does, new and distinct stimulus to the vital forces."
CHAPTER X.
"While bright-eyed science watches round."
A scientific investigation into the nature and causes of consumption proves the immediate causes, apart from hereditary, to be dampness of houses and localities. Of races, the negroes seem most liable, and the Jews the most exempt. A french scientist has found that inhalation of air containing a small amount of hydrofluoric acid gas has a remarkably good effect on consumption. In England good results were obtained by inspiration of air mixed with ozone. That the disease results chiefly from inactivity of the lungs is the statement of a physician who maintains that the cure of the disease is a mechanical question. The International Tuberculosis Congress lately held at Paris admits that tuberculosis is contagious, can be transmitted from man to animals, and vice versa, and is the same in men, women, and cattle. Diseased milk is the most frequent agent of transmission, and with this meat, particularly lightly cooked, as food. Predisposing causes are sedentary life, overwork, mental anxiety, insufficient nourishment, in general, anything calculated to lower the vitality. The congress has discovered no remedy, only palliatives for tuberculosis. Catarrhs, bronchitis, and other throat troubles have a tendency to develop into pleurisy or consumption when neglected.
Typhoid fever never affects the atmosphere, but it does affect water, milk, ice, and meat. The eggs of a parasite from dogs, and hence more or less infecting all waters to which dogs have access, appear to have an unequaled facility of passage to all parts of the human system.
As for surgical operations, in a German paper are particulars of a case in which the eye of a man was thrust out of its socket by a parasite cyst in the rear, discovered by surgical exploration and extracted. From a 5-year old boy an injured kidney was removed successfully and the patient recovered. The bridge of the nose was completely restored by using the breast-bone of a chicken and stretching the flesh of the old nose over it.
Even the part of a destroyed nerve of the arm was restored by the substitution of a part of a sound nerve from an amputated limb, so that the continuity was restored and sensation returned in 36 hours! Prematurely-born children are kept in an artificial mother, which consists of a glass case warmed by bowls of water. A new opiate has been discovered called the sulsonal. It produces sleep in nervous people and those affected with heart disease, but not in healthy subjects. The idea that sufferers from heart disease should avoid physical exertion has been dispelled by a noted physiologist who has successfully employed regulated exercise.