will stop and enjoy ourselves," the
brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open
insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. There
are therefore two periods of existence especially prone to those
troubles,--one when the mind is maturing; another at the turning-point
of life, when the brain has attained its fullest power, and has left
behind it accomplished the larger part of its best enterprise and most
active labor.

I am disposed to think that the variety of work done by lawyers, their
long summer holiday, their more general cultivation, their usual tastes
for literary or other objects out of their business walks, may, to some
extent, save them, as well as the fact that they can rarely be subject
to the sudden and fearful responsibilities of business men. Moreover,
like the doctor, the lawyer gets his weight upon him slowly, and is
thirty at least before it can be heavy enough to task him severely. The
business man's only limitation is need of money, and few young
mercantile men will hesitate to enter trade on their own account if they
can command capital. With the doctor, as with the lawyer, a long
intellectual education, a slowly-increasing strain, and responsibilities
of gradual growth tend, with his out-door life, to save him from the
form of disease I have been alluding to. This element of open-air life,
I suspect, has a share in protecting men who in many respects lead a
most unhealthy existence. The doctor, who is supposed to get a large
share of exercise, in reality gets very little after he grows too busy
to walk, and has then only the incidental exposure to out-of-door air.
When this is associated with a fair share of physical exertion, it is an
immense safeguard against the ills of anxiety and too much brain-work.
For these reasons I do not doubt that the effects of our great civil
war were far more severely felt by the Secretary of War and President
Lincoln than by Grant or Sherman.

The wearing, incessant cares of overwork, of business anxiety, and the
like, produce directly diseases of the nervous system, and are also the
fertile parents of dyspepsia, consumption, and maladies of the heart.
How often we can trace all the forms of the first-named protean disease
to such causes is only too well known to every physician, and their
connection with cardiac troubles is also well understood. Happily,
functional troubles of heart or stomach are far from unfrequent