Barbour County index. [volume] (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-current, 1889-09-11
"PM LIKE MY FATHER"
Tho FOOlishness of Persons Who Live I
der an Ancestral Shadow.

I'M LIKE MY FATHER"
Tho FoOlishness of Persons Who Live Un.
der an Ancestral Shadow.
"Tm just like my father; 1 shall die
young"
The speaker was playing the arrant fool,
and told him SO, writes Harkley Harker
in the New York Weekly. He was bit
aillng, had been for some months OF color.
I called on him in his sick-room and found
him much depressed. He had the notion
that he had inherited "a short-lived consti-
tuition" f" whatever that may be. The life
insurance people had asked him, In their
curious catechism, whether he resembled
his father or his mother the moro strongly,
and il eithor, which. This was q revela-
ton to him; he had never thought of 1t be-
fore. He concluded that he resembled his
father, who had died at thirty years of age.
Ny friend is already forty-six. His ply
sician assured both his wife and me that
nothing gravely threatening was the mat
ter with him. We found-his devoted wife
and THAT his father had died of fever
contracted on the Isthmus But it is no use;
the poor Ounce has the notion that he is to
fade away ''like his father" OF course
this is nervous fatigue, nothing more nor
less it is incipient nervous prostration But
the item of heredity in the case presents
common deluSion.
People presume on longevity as well, be-
cause they "come of O long-lived family''
Singularly, a gentleman boasted this other
extreme to me the week before last. He
was quite sure Of advanced age, ''because
his father, grandfather, and away back all
his ancestry were long-livers." And yet as
Iwrite, that very gentleman is dead.
am certain that both hope and fear are
inspired, without reason and against rea-
son, by the popular notion. It may be true
that longevity or short life Is inherited but
the trace is so feeble that In the battle OF life
it is not worth either expecting or dreading.
II you get such notion into your head it is
a fatuous demon. Your father, for in.
stance, died at sixty years of age. You
will dread the epoch. You will erect a
stone wall of fatalism FOR yourself right
there Unconsciously to yourself you will
continually be calculating upon it with ap-
prehension. You will not talk about it,
even to your wife, till you have approached
your hfty-eighth year; then, as you get
tri1e worn, and perhaps sick, some day,
you will let out your fear. 1t will torture
your loved ones; it will battle your physi-
clans as they wonder what can all you, and
you are ashamed to tell them. 1t will actu-
ally cripple your nervous force, subtract
from your stock of vitality; and there is lit
ness may hasten your death. Your father
will have had nothing to do with your
death; but you may hasten your own death
by psychic depletion. There is far more
evidence that men do actually cause their
own premature death by apprehension
than that hereditary limit causes it.
To presume that you inherit the longevity
of a grandfather who lived to four-score is
even more absurd 1t may not have been
vitality with the old gentleman at all. He
may have had no more powerful organism
than ordinary men. But quiet, unevent-
full life, exceptionally free from any heavy
strain, may have kept his heart throbblng
so long. If you are hard pushed and over
doing; if you solace your alarm by refer
ring your guilty mind back to the shadowy
grandsire rather than taking wholesome
rest, the probabilities are that you will
snap your handspring before you know it.
The theory will make one more victim, and
you are the man. Theory is one thing, but
facts are better. Quite likely your grand
mother will tell you that you. look and act
older at forty-fve than her husband did at
sixty. You live in more exciting and ex-
acting age. You are a city man; he was
country man. You like fancy dishes; he
homely food. You sleep mornings; he
nights. You are fretted by money, as by
politics; he was fretted by nothing worse
than an unruly OK or shower on his new
moWn hay. You are housed in SHOP or
factory, or Office, with the devltalized air of
modern furnace heat; he, this noble octo-
genarlan, lived among mountains, or
breathed the breath of the wide, wide sea-
Do not presume on the venerable fellows
that went before you; there is a temptation
and snare IN it every time.
Every man must sail his own Ship In
the name of the kind Creator, do not think
you are gong to cough your life away be-
cause consumption is hereditary in our
family" Facts show that the decided major
ity of victims of this terrible malady are the
original cases; no taint can be discovered
in ancestry. Think of it! The majority of
consumptives, reassert, are the first cases
In the family. l have it on good au-
thority in pulmonary maladies that de-
| cidedly the vast majority of the offspring of
consumptives finally die of other diseases.
It is not to be denied that there il a law of
heredity in disease. But the children pre-
disposed toconsumption, for instance, being
forewarned, are forearmed to caution; tax
ing excellent care of themselves they out
last their more thoughtless neighbors.
Probably over eighty per cent of the insane
are original cases; that is, IN neither branch
OF the family, within three generations, can
| tempt figures, but medical authority tells Us
that disease of the heart, the liver, the kid
ney Is almost always original.
Reader, live under no ancestral shadow.
Live in your own sunshine. A merciful
Creator has given US each our day The
| dead can neither hinder nor help US much
We have our chance. Each life is unique
in its own individual beauty or deformity
1t is my fathers good example, which, ad-
miring, 1 purposely copy, which benefits
me. 1t is the heritage OF his worthy name
that helps me, more than blood or gold. It
| is the subtle copying of his virtues or vices
that no doubt is powerful impulse. To be
like my father in character is quite possible; :;
but even this must seek after with reso
| lutte purpose. The bugbear Of hereditary
brief life is too shocking, is cruel fetish Of
quasiscience that would be glad to drive
outof the home of many sufferer There
is, however, this curious discovery that /
| have made: Many people seem to actually
regard such respect for their hereditary
! bents in the nature of filial piety. They
think it sacreligious to die of any but an in
heredited malady. They in sist on it.