, the attack of acute infections of milder character,
falling upon less favorable soil. The other is of a vaguer type and is
due, probably, to the accumulation of poisonous waste-products in the
tissues, setting up irritative and even inflammatory changes in nerve,
muscle, and joint. Either of these may be made worse by exposure to cold
or changes in the weather. In fact, this is the type of rheumatism which
has such a wide reputation as a barometer and weather prophet, second
only to that of the United States Signal Service. When you "feel it in
your bones," you know it is going to snow, or to rain, or to clear up,
or become cloudy, or whatever else may happen to follow the sensation,
merely because all poisoned and irritated nerves are more sensitive to
changes in temperature, wind-direction, moisture, and electric tension,
than sound and normal ones. The change in the weather does not cause the
rheumatism. It is the rheumatism that enables us to predict the change
in the weather, though we have no clear idea what that change will be.

Probably the only statement of wide application that can be made in
regard to the nature of chronic rheumatism is that a very considerable
percentage of it is due to the accumulation of poisons (toxins) in the
nerves supplying joints and muscles, setting up an irritation
(neurotoxis), or, in extreme cases, an inflammation of the nerve
(neuritis), which may even go on to partial paralysis, with wasting of
the muscles supplied. The same broad principles of causation and
prevention, therefore, apply here as in acute rheumatism.

The most important single fact for rheumatics of all sorts, whether
acute or chronic, to remember is that they must _avoid exposure to
colds_, in the sense of infections of all sorts, as they would a
pestilence; that they must eat plenty of rich, sound, nourishing food;
live in well-ventilated rooms; take plenty of exercise in the open air,
to burn up any waste poisons that may be accumulating in the tissues;
dress lightly but warmly (there is no special virtue in flannels), and
treat every cold or mild infection which they may be unfortunate enough
to catch, according to the strictest rigor of the antiseptic law.

The influence of diet in chronic rheumatism is almost as slight as in
the acute form. Persons past middle age who can afford to indulge their
appetites and are inclined to eat and drink more than is good for them,
and, what is far more important, to exe