ople who do not exercise enough to use up a healthy amount of
overfed tissues is common enough as an individual peculiarity, but there
are also two other conditions in which fat is apt to be accumulated to
an uncomfortable extent. Thus, in some cases of hysteria where the
patient lies abed owing to her belief that she is unable to move about,
she is apt in time to become enormously stout. This seems to me also to
be favored by the large use of morphia to which such women are prone, so
that I should say that long rest, the hysterical constitution, and the
accompanying resort to morphia make up a group of conditions highly
favorable to increase of fat.

Lastly, there is the class of fat anaemic people, usually women. This
double peculiarity is rather uncommon, but, as the mass of thin-blooded
persons are as a rule thin or losing flesh, there must be something
unusual in that anaemia which goes with gain in flesh.

Bauer[8] thinks that lessened number of blood-corpuscles gives rise to
storing of fat, owing to lessened tissue-combustion. At all events, the
absorption of oxygen diminishes after bleeding, and it used to be well
known that some people grew fat when bled at intervals. Also, it is said
that cattle-breeders in some localities--certainly not in this
country--bleed their cattle to cause increase of fat in the tissues, or
of fat secreted as butter in the milk. These explanations aid us but
little to comprehend what, after all, is only met with in certain
persons, and must therefore involve conditions not common to every one
who is anaemic. Meanwhile, the group of fat anaemics is of the utmost
clinical interest, as I shall by and by point out more distinctly.

There is a popular idea, which has probably passed from the
agriculturist into the common mind of the community, to the effect that
human fat varies,--that some fat is wholesome and some unwholesome, that
there are good fats and bad fats. I remember well an old nurse who
assured me when I was a student that "some fats is fast and some is
fickle, but cod-oil fat is easy squandered."

There are more facts in favor of some such idea than I have place for,
but as yet we have no distinct chemical knowledge as to whether the
fats put on under alcohol or morphia, or rapidly by the use of oils, or
pathologically in fatty degenerations, or in anaemia, vary in their
constituents. It is not at all unlikely that such is the case, and that,
for example, the fat of an obe