lin and
thyroid secretions are poured out as the result of emotion; digestion
is stopped, circulation disturbed, and the whole apparatus thrown out
of gear.

=Sick-Headache.= Sick-headache is primarily a circulatory disturbance;
and although the disturbance may have been inaugurated by some
chemical unbalance, the sum total of the force that makes a
sick-headache is emotional. The emotion, of course, need not be
conscious in order to be effective. If we picture the arteries all
over the body as being supplied with, among other things, a wall of
circular muscles, and then imagine messages of emotion being flashed
to the nerves controlling this muscle wall, we may get an idea of what
happens just before a sick-headache. Some parts of the arteries
contract too much and other parts relax. The arteries to the head
tighten up at the extremities and become loose lower down. The force
of the blood-stream against the constricted portion can hardly fail to
cause pain. The sick part of the headache is merely a sympathetic
strike of the nerves which control circulation and stomach.

The moral of all this is plain. If a sick-headache is the result of an
emotional spasm of the blood-vessels, the obvious cure is a change of
the emotion. Some people manage it by going to a party or a picnic,
others by ignoring the symptoms and keeping on with their work. A
woman physician whom I know was in the midst of a violent headache
when called out on an obstetrical case. She felt sorry for herself,
but went on the case. In the strenuous work which followed, she quite
forgot the headache, which disappeared as if by magic.

Sometimes it happens that a headache recurs periodically or at regular
intervals. It is easy to see that in such cases the exciting cause is
fear and expectation. At some time in the past, headaches have
occurred at an interval of, say, fourteen days; as the next
fourteenth day approaches the sufferer says to himself: "It is about
time for another headache. I am afraid it will come to-morrow," and of
course it comes. One man told me that if he ate Sunday-night supper he
inevitably had a headache on Monday morning. We were about to sit down
to a simple Sunday supper and he refused very positively to join us. I
told him he could stay all night and that I would take care of him if
the Monday sickness appeared. He accepted my challenge but was unable
to produce a headache. In fact, he felt so unusually flourishing the
next morn