Crawford avalanche. (Grayling, Mich.) 1879-19??, 1899-06-15
zo,1zs1cxnzss IN TIM AMY.

The vOluntees's Malady That IL In
Hardest to Treat successfully.
1t Is the WEAKNESS Of heart which is
to-day most feared by the surgeons Of
the American army In the Philippines;
the hope failure for innumerable men
of the army In Cuba after whose
names eventually appear the entries;
''Died, malarial fever"
Physicians use the technical name
nostalgia" in describing the disease,
but rarely care to attribute a death
to 1t because of Its many still unknown
phases and unstudied symptoms. The
dictionary definition of this word
Is:
Morbid longing to return to ones
home or native country; inconsistencies
especially In its severe forms, produc-
ing arrangement Of mental and physi-
cal functions"
Writers for medical journals say
that the German army is more subject
to nostalgia than any other In exis-
tence; that the German race possesses
the strongest tendency to melanchOlia
when long separated from familiar
scenes.
That man can die from homesick-
ness seems incredible, perhaps. Yet
a surgeon of the regular army whose
experience in Cuba was a varied one
told me that after the volunteers were
once in Cuba and in action the gravest
danger which confronted the men was
the funk" resulting from the irresis-
tible longing for the sight of old home
and the glimpse Of faces near and dear.
My friend of the Thirteenth Minnesota
In Manila confirms this in the lines:
''The heat bothers some and the
roads are not blooming fine, but we
could not have a finer set of officers
nor be treated better for men who
came out here to fight and not to play
marbles. What Is troubling many of
the boys land we are not able to get
at it, is that they know spring has
come in the home country, and every
man of them wants to hear blue
bird whistle and hear the call of the
meadow lark. The result of this is
that the fellows get Juggling at their
hearts that feels like big lump, and
they go down in heap. They don't
seem sick. but they just talk and think
all the time of home, and larruping
wouldn't do them bit of good"
That's nostalgia.
In the winter of 1882 1883, when the
Northwest country was buried in snow
and on the frontier trains did not oper-
ate for ninety and a hundred days,
there was big shouldered, big-brain-
ed man from Wisconsin by the name
Of Hemingway who was showed In at
little unnamed settlement on the
Manitoba road in the Hope country.
Up to the time that the billiards. com
menced he received once n week n let
ter from his wife or sweetheart, and
these letters evidently were of much
account to him, for on Sundays when
most of the pioneers were horse racing
on the plainland he would be in his
shack looking his letters over and writ
ing home. After the snow came the
mails ceased and the letters. For six
or eight weeks no one noticed any
change in Hemingway, who was out
there for the purpose of taking n
claim and incidentally to look after the
interests of n Chicago machine COM
pany. But ut the end of that time,
with the snow six feet deep on the
level, the temperature twenty-five and
thirty degrees below, and communlca-
ton with the outside world absolute
ly impossible, Hemingway began to
turn blue"
His ailing first manifested itself In
great desire to talk about the home,
something he had never done before.
He talked to everybody about his past,
the people he knew, what his
home had been, how the old farm look
ed, and so on until there was no longer
any reason for taking any interest in
it. He felt this himself and grew mo-
rose. Later he kept to his shack, be-
came morose and sulky. One morn
ing in March. when the ice and snow
field had been masters Of the region
for five months, Hemingway was mis-
sing from his place. A little search
revealed his body in the rear of his
shack. bullet through his heart In
the night he had gone out there in the
cold and found his end.
If you have ever listened to the in
strumental piece called "Heimweh"
You may know how Hemingway felt
when he pulled the trigger of his pis-
tol. He was victim of nostalgia, big
and strong rs he was.
The cure for the disease Is great ex-
ertiOn of will power, liberal use of
water internally and externally and
diversion of the mind from the pain
full thoughts. The cure is much easier
prescribed than practced. There is
another remedy than this. though.
which physicians readily favor when
practlcable-sce home.
Ran Away tn Fight.
John T.. IngOldSDy of the Utah bat