The aim of reasonable people should be to keep themselves in health rather than to be always straying, as it were, upon the confines of disease and seeking assistance from drugs in order to return to conditions from which they should never have suffered themselves to depart. The various alkaline salts and solutions, for example, the advertisements of which meet us at every turn, and which are offered to the public as specifics, safely to be taken, without anything so superfluous as the advice of medical men, for all the various evils which are described by the advertisers as gout or heartburn, or as the consequences of “uric acid,” do unquestionably, in a certain proportion of cases, afford temporary relief from some discomfort or inconvenience. They do this notwithstanding persistence in the habit or in the indulgence, whatever it may be, the overeating, the want of exercise, the excessive consumption of alcohol or of tobacco, which is really underlying the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue and to premature death. (Text.)—The Lancet.
(2295)
PANIC THROUGH FEAR
The New York Evening Post thus describes the condition of panic on our ships at the beginning of the Spanish War:
Almost any officer who served in the fleet before Santiago could relate not one, but a great many incidents that occurred where the men of our ships would have slaughtered each other if the good little angel that sits up aloft (and our exceedingly bad marksmanship at that time) had not protected us from the mistakes (incomprehensible to landsmen) which caused our ships to fire at each other, at colliers, dispatch-boats, torpedo-boats, and at nothing at all—and all this in the clear atmosphere of the tropical seas.
Such was the effect of the long, nervous tension that thousands of shots were fired at pure fantoms of the imagination. The broadsides of powerful battleships repeatedly burst into a furious cannonade that was arrested only with the complete annihilation of the supposed enemy. For one of our ships to approach the fleet at night was to run a grave risk. The sea was alive with Spanish torpedo-boats. Signals, lights, etc., were misunderstood or disregarded. The enemy might have obtained possession of them and displayed them for our confusion. There were many narrow escapes. Several of our vessels were struck by shells, but the luck that followed us throughout the war prevented a disaster. I could mention the names of officers who have never been able to comb their hair down flat since the particular night on which they came within an ace of sinking a friend—with whom they have never since ceased to exchange congratulatory drinks. (Text.)—New York Evening Post.
(2296)
Panoply—See [Armor].
Paper, Invention of—See [Antiquity].
Papers, The Opinions of—See [Reports to Order].