Wee, experimental Nina Dropped her mother's Dresden China. The Doctor of the Future. WALLACE IRWIN. Among other good things, Dr. Woods Hutchinson had the following to say in his address at the Tuberculosis Exhibition: "There are persons in this hall who will live to see tuberculosis as nearly extinct as leprosy or smallpox. The death rate from tuberculosis in this city has decreased 20 per cent in the last twenty years. The disease is being rapidly stamped out. The fact is, we doctors are working ourselves out of a living by checking diseases. "We doctors used to live by typhoid fever in the fall, pneumonia in the winter, and influenza in the spring. A doctor with a fair practice could always count on from $300 to $3,000 every fall from typhoid fever. Now that is practically gone. Every doctor could also count on a good deal from the visits of the stork, but even that has almost passed away these days. From this point of view the future for the doctor is a bit discouraging. But I also see signs of encouragement, for this is the dawn of the new doctor. The time is rapidly coming when two-thirds of the doctors will be in the employ of the community, either as inspectors in the schools or on boards of various kinds. The day is near at hand also when the doctor will no longer be engaged to patch up the sick man, but to prevent him from getting sick. He will visit families, examine the premises, inspect factories and shops, and give instruction to his patients how to keep from getting sick. Each family will select its doctor and pay him so much a year per capita. The doctors will not lose by the arrangement, either." Emmanuelite Worcester's Cure for Insomnia. "When you retire, think of the beautiful things of Nature, Imagine you are on the brink of a placid lake; then think of the soft moonlight as it falls on the peaceful water." Doesn't old Abernethy say: "You may see a person with gout who is almost unable to move with pain, but produce a shock on his nervous system by telling him that the house is on fire, and he will scamper about like a lamplighter." Dear Doctor: Enclosed find my subscription. I like the way you "talk out" or rather "write out" in your CRITIC & GUIDE, and I also like your motto concerning the search after and the handling of truth, or what one supposes it to be. Last evening I ruminated over your last number and feel that some more such mental food would be pleasant and nourishing. Would that there were more men like you who would dare to declare themselves concerning truths necessary to be established. Sincerely yours, B. H. Grove, M. D., 334 Pearl St., Buffalo, N. Y. The Pathologic in Art. By ARTHUR C. JACOBSON, M. D. It has been said that if art is inspired by one purpose more than another it is to lead men to a guileless, disinterested love of beauty. How, then, can we account for the rather frequent occurrence in art works of the pathologic, save on the theory that to certain minds that which is pathologic sometimes appears to be beautiful? In point of fact, we not infrequently, in actual life, see this principle even determining sexual selection. (E. G. Pope, et al.) Certainly we may here infer something pathologic in the suitor's mind no less than in the person of the wooed; psychic morbidity responds to physical morbidity. Speaking specifically, is there not, necessarily, something the matter with the psychology of the man who sees beauty in a chlorotic girl? Probably it is pathologic to that degree that his adoration would not be lessened much in intensity did he even know that chlorosis implies a defective vascular system, a small heart, impoverished blood, constipation and its secondary vitiation of the system, and a penchant for eating chalk and paper. It can not be regarded as a device of nature; nature is never such a scurvy trickster as that. No, rather does she provide an excess of normally attractive girls. The woods are full of them. Who deliberately and by choice selects the pathologic must himself be pathologic. In this light we can understand the fascination of the obese female for the Oriental. In this connection we recall Lady Randolph Churchill's amusing story about the difficulty with which an Eastern potentate was prevailed upon to take the Queen in to dinner after having set his heart on a certain stout duchess. In the domain of literary art we find DeQuincey writing an extravagant panegyric on the hydrocephalic head of his sister. Baudelaire, we discover to our disgust, is fascinated by corpses. Some of his verses may be characterized as objective, crystallized psychopathology. Tasso's beloved, the princess Leonora d'Este, possessed "a countenance of sickly cast." The poet celebrated this pallor, "which vanquishes the rose, and makes the dawn ashamed of her blushes." Another of his flames, the Countess of Scandiano, enchanted him by reason of an abnormally protuberant under lip. He wrote sonnets having this physical defect as their burdon: "Quel labbro, che le rose han colorito Molle si sporge, e tumidetto in fuore," etc. Giambattista Zappi's verses celebrate his Faustina's "pale and delicate" complexion. ("Epithalamium.") Maria Beatrice d'Este (Second wife of James the Second) was another anemic charmer. Dryden wrote of her: "What awful charms on her fair forehead sit, And Envy did but look on her and died." Perhaps we should applaud Envy for her manifest aversion to the pathologic. According to Warburton one of Pope's early flames, the one he is supposed to address in the "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," was as deformed as himself. Pope, it will be remembered, was a victim of Pott's disease of the spine and was humpbacked. Madame d'Houdetot (Rousseau's Sophie), to whom her lover Saint Lambert dedicated the "Seasons" (she is the Doris in the opening passage), was plain and pock-marked. She was extremely short-sighted, too, which gave her countenance and address an appearance of uncertainty and timidity; her figure was poor and her movements awkward. Swift's Vanessa was distinguished for her tendency toward obesity. From our point of view, what shall be said of the nearly four hundred poems of Petrarch which celebrate Laura? The passion which inspired them was psychopathologic beyond a doubt. Petrarch himself said of his attachment for Laura: "Would to God that my Laura was indeed but an imaginary person, and my passion for her but sport!-Alas! it is rather a madness-....No! we may counterfeit the action and voice of a sick man, but not the paleness and wasted looks of the sufferer; and how often have you witnessed both in me. "* Laura in the flesh inspired his verses from 1327 to 1348, and for twenty-six years after her death did her memory likewise inspire him. The lady never capitulated. Such a peculiar, effeminate relationship was certainly pathologic, to say the least. Only to the hysteric esthete is there anything divine in it. That Petrarch was a psychopath is additionally proved by the fact that he was "suspicious, irritable, and susceptible; subject to quick transitions of feeling; raised by a word to hopeplunged by a glance into despair. * Letter to Bishop of Lombes. "Even in his declining years, enslaved and distracted by his dreaming passion, he was continually employed in polishing love verses. [Truly a pitiable object. As in the case of Dante and Beatrice, all this was simply intellectual eroticism.] His great mind would have given us some excelling, epic work of genius of superior glory if not always chained to the everlasting Laura." Schlegel has said that Laura herself, if obliged to read over, at one sitting, all the verses which her lover composed on her charms, would have been bored to death. Laura was a fragile creature whose inspiration of Petrarch appears to have been akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelite types painted by Holman Hunt and the Rossetti school in our own times. Even the ravages of phthisis have afforded artistic inspiration to a certain type of mind. Of this more hereafter. Dante's Beatrice died at the age of twenty-four. She appears to have been a normal young woman. We think the seventh and eighth sonnets of the "Vita Nuova" tend to bear this out. Dante tells us in these verses that she was amused by his embarrassment in her presence and pointed it out to her companions. Dante was entirely given over to melancholy abstraction and mysticism. His psychology was essentially pathologic. When Beatrice died he changed so that his best friends could barely recognize him. "He scarcely ate or slept; he neglected his person until he became a savage thing to the eye (Boccaccio)." In his own words, he was "grief-stung to madness." Jealousy of an insane type is shown by the addressing of his verses to Beatrice's young women companions, because his own sex, he assures us, was not worthy to listen to her praises, nor to be trusted to withstand his verses and her to whom they were addressed. Truly "Dante loved Beatrice and nobody else." It were fortunate that no one crossed this intense lover's path; perhaps it were well that Beatrice died at twenty-four; otherwise there might have been no epic, but, in its stead, a vulgar Italian tragedy of the most earthly sort. "It was not the frost of winter that chilled her [Dante says of Beatrice], nor was it the heat of summer that withered her; it was the power of her virtue, her humility and her truth, that ascended into heaven, and moved the Eternal Father to call her to himself, seeing that this miserable life was not worthy of anything so fair, so excellent!" A poetic certificate of death, surely; the cause assigned a unique one, if we may be permitted to say so without risk of being considered utterly sordid. We think a delicate distinction ought to be made between dying for virtue and truth, which many women have done, and dying of them. In the case of Beatrice, we should prefer the certificate of the leech who attended her. It would probably assign something |