Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1896-05-24
AGE OF lNvALIDIsm.
iil-Heaith Never So Popular a Tonic ..
 1t Is Now


 aoout our health in 8 way Chat would nave excited the contempt of our un- scientific ancestors. Go where one will people are found discussing ailments comparing symptoms, reeommenaino remedies and exchanging the addresses or specialists. We seem to 90 about feel Ing each others pulses, looking at. each others tongues and reveling in the mu- tual diagnosis of functional ..troubles.n , Inc eld-fashioned notion that it was undesirable to refer in public to ones internal economy has long since been exploded. Indeed, the liver has become not merely standing topic of conyer- sation, but a dominant factor of mod. ern social life, a fetish to which all ages and all conditions pay exaggerated wor- ship.
 A complaint once supposed to be the speciality of sun-dried Anglo-Indians is now claimed by apparently robust and healthy young persons of both sexes. and IS made the excuse for every kind of weird dietary eccentricity. It has recognized brigade of yaletudinarian cavaliers named in it's honor, who treat thelr morning canter as a solemn aetof homage to their dreadful idol and A still larger phalanx who now seek to avert its terrors by the aid of the pro- pitiatory ''cycle." There is something positively grotesque in the intensity of self-coddling which prevails in these times. The eagerness with which peo- pie fly at new specific and hail new mineral water is only surpassed by the meek complaisance with which they troop across the channel to be annually steeped in hot mud, suffocated with mephitic vapofs and "curedo with the indeseribably nasty products of regula- ton euelle.
 No health scare, even of the most far fetched description, is too extravagant to secure ready and alarmed attention. Even with the protection of their rusks and milk buildings, their minced chicken and plain outlets, their all-wool vesture and their 25-mile ''spins," our modern sanitarians remover thoroughly at rest. They are forever forswearing this, warn- ing their friends against that, discov- ering outrages to the liver god and in- yitatiens to chronic dyspepsia in the other, until one begins to doubt whether fatal illness would not be, all things considered, a welcome alternative to a life conducted on the latest sanitary principles.
 A vast proportion of this health-fanat- ieism is, of course, nothing but the ex-. pressien of a particularly unlovely form of modern egotism. It is akin to that other variety of self-pity which prompts so many moderately busy people to pose as maftys to everwork.. As a mat ter of fact, there is not the least reason why, with all it's enormous advantages, the existing generation should not be sounder in health and digestion than the men and women of time when sanitary science was unknown, when medicine was in it's infancy and when cooking had not yet taken it's place among the fine arts.
 Our rude forefathers," who could eat anything and knew nothing of diet tables, did not waste time in fussing about their liyers, and were probably unaware, for the most part, that they possessed such incumbrances. Itwould be by no means a bad thing if simi- lar wholesome ignorance prevailed in our day, when a smattering of medi- cine and anatomical knowledge com hines with a good deal of morbid self consciousness in procuring recruits for the .1iver brigade" As it is, we might do worse than revive the abrogated law of the social code which held it a breach of good taste and good manners to draw attention to ones personal ailments and afflictions. Those who are unlueky enough to be relegated or to relegate themselves, to an invalid diet are out of place at the tables of their friends. Until their recovery, it would be far better for the doors to be locked upon them, that they might play the valetu- dinarian nowhere but in their own houses.-London World.