ill always beat anything you can fancy. But it has seemed to me
sometimes that a curious paper might be read at some of these meetings
about the uses of medicine in popular fiction."

"How?"

"Well, of what the folk die of, and what diseases are made most use of
in novels. Some are worn to pieces, and others, which are equally
common in real life, are never mentioned. Typhoid is fairly frequent,
but scarlet fever is unknown. Heart disease is common, but then heart
disease, as we know it, is usually the sequel of some foregoing
disease, of which we never hear anything in the romance. Then there is
the mysterious malady called brain fever, which always attacks the
heroine after a crisis, but which is unknown under that name to the
text books. People when they are over-excited in novels fall down in a
fit. In a fairly large experience I have never known anyone do so in
real life. The small complaints simply don't exist. Nobody ever gets
shingles or quinsy, or mumps in a novel. All the diseases, too, belong
to the upper part of the body. The novelist never strikes below the
belt."

"I'll tell you what, Foster," says the alienist, "there is a side of
life which is too medical for the general public and too romantic for
the professional journals, but which contains some of the richest human
materials that a man could study. It's not a pleasant side, I am
afraid, but if it is good enough for Providence to create, it is good
enough for us to try and understand. It would deal with strange
outbursts of savagery and vice in the lives of the best men, curious
momentary weaknesses in the record of the sweetest women, known but to
one or two, and inconceivable to the world around. It would deal, too,
with the singular phenomena of waxing and of waning manhood, and would
throw a light upon those actions which have cut short many an honoured
career and sent a man to a prison when he should have been hurried to a
consulting-room. Of all evils that may come upon the sons of men, God
shield us principally from that one!"

"I had a case some little time ago which was out of the ordinary," says
the surgeon. "There's a famous beauty in London society--I mention no
names--who used to be remarkable a few seasons ago for the very low
dresses which she would wear. She had the whitest of skins and most
beautiful of shoulders, so it was no wonder. Then gradually the
frilling at her neck lapped upwards and upwards, until last