worry is
rust upon the blade. It is not movement that destroys the machinery, but
friction."

It is not so much the great sorrows, the great burdens, the great
hardships, the great calamities, that cloud over the sunshine of life,
as the little petty vexations, insignificant anxieties and fear, the
little daily dyings, which render our lives unhappy, and destroy our
mental elasticity, without advancing our life-work one inch. "Anxiety
never yet bridged any chasm."

"What," asks Dr. George W. Jacoby, in an "Evening Post" interview, "is
the ultimate physical effect of worry? Why, the same as that of a fatal
bullet-wound or sword-thrust. Worry kills as surely, though not so
quickly, as ever gun or dagger did, and more people have died in the
last century from sheer worry than have been killed in battle."

Dr. Jacoby is one of the foremost of American brain doctors. "The
investigations of the neurologists," he says, "have laid bare no secret
of Nature in recent years more startling and interesting than the
discovery that worry kills." This is the final, up-to-date word. "Not
only is it known," resumes the great neurologist, counting off his
words, as it were, on his finger-tips, "that worry kills, but the most
minute details of its murderous methods are familiar to modern
scientists. It is a common belief of those who have made a special study
of the science of brain diseases that hundreds of deaths attributed to
other causes each year are due simply to worry. In plain, untechnical
language, worry works its irreparable injury through certain cells of
the brain life. The insidious inroads upon the system can be best
likened to the constant falling of drops of water in one spot. In the
brain it is the insistent, never-lost idea, the single, constant
thought, centered upon one subject, which in the course of time destroys
the brain cells. The healthy brain can cope with occasional worry; it is
the iteration and reiteration of disquieting thoughts which the cells of
the brain cannot successfully combat.

"The mechanical effect of worry is much the same as if the skull were
laid bare and the brain exposed to the action of a little hammer beating
continually upon it day after day, until the membranes are disintegrated
and the normal functions disabled. The maddening thought that will not
be downed, the haunting, ever-present idea that is not or cannot be
banished by a supreme effort of the will, is the theoretical hammer
wh