bercular
disease of the brain or to heart maladies; but even in the practice of
medicine the distinction as to cause cannot always be made; and as a
large proportion of this loss of life is really owing to brain
affections, I have thought best to include the whole class in my
statement.

A glance at the individual diseases which are indubitably nervous is
more instructive and less perplexing. For example, taking the extreme
years, the recent increase in apoplexy is remarkable, even when we
remember that it is a malady of middle and later life, and that Chicago,
a new city, is therefore entitled to a yearly increasing quantity of
this form of death. In 1868 the number was 8.6 times greater than in
1852. Convulsions as a death cause had in 1868 risen to 22 times as many
as in the year 1852. Epilepsy, one of the most marked of all nervous
maladies, is more free from the difficulties which belong to the
last-mentioned class. In 1852 and '53 there were but two deaths from
this disease; in the next four years there were none. From 1858 to '64,
inclusive, there were in all 6 epileptic deaths: then we have in the
following years, 5, 3, 11; and in 1868 the number had increased to 17.
Passing over palsy, which, like apoplexy, increases in 1868,--8.6 times
as compared with 1852; and 26 times as compared with the four years
following 1852,--we come to lockjaw, an unmistakable nerve malady. Six
years out of the first eleven give us no death from this painful
disease; the others, up to 1864, offer each one only, and the
last-mentioned year has but two. Then the number rises to 3 each year,
to 5 in 1867, and to 12 in 1868. At first sight, this record of
mortality from lockjaw would seem to be conclusive, yet it is perhaps,
of all the maladies mentioned, the most deceptive as a means of
determining the growth of neural diseases. To make this clear to the
general reader, he need only be told that tetanus is nearly always
caused by mechanical injuries, and that the natural increase of these in
a place like Chicago may account for a large part of the increase. Yet,
taking the record as a whole, and viewing it only with a calm desire to
get at the truth, it is not possible to avoid seeing that the growth of
nerve maladies has been inordinate.

The industry and energy which have built this great city on a morass,
and made it a vast centre of insatiate commerce, are now at work to
undermine the nervous systems of its restless and eager peo