st of reasons; but it does indicate the
rational attitude toward headache and its treatment, and one which is
coming to be more and more adopted. No motorist would dream of pushing
ahead with a shrieking axle or a scorching hot box, unless his journey
were one of most momentous importance or a matter of life and death.
Pain is nature's automatic speed regulator. It is often necessary to
disregard it, to get the work of the world done and to discharge our
sacred obligations to others; but this disregarding should not be
exalted to too high a pinnacle of virtue, and least of all worshiped as
inherently and everywhere a mark of piety and one of the insignia of
saintship.

A business firm or a factory, for instance, which would send home for
the day each of its employees who reported a genuine case of bad
headache, would, in the long run, save money by avoiding accidents,
mistakes, muddles, and confusions, often involving a whole department,
due to the kind of work that is done by a man or woman who is physically
unfit to attempt it. And the higher the type of work that has to be
done, the more the elements of insight, grasp, and sound judgment enter
into it, the graver and costlier are the mistakes that are likely to be
made under such circumstances.

Of course, it will probably be objected at this point: "What is the use
of wasting a day, or even half a day, when by taking two or three
capsules of So-and-So's Headache Cure I can get rid of the pain and go
right on with my work?" It is perfectly true that there are a number of
remedies which will relieve the average headache; but there are two
important things to be borne in mind. The first is that all of these are
simply weaker or stronger nerve-deadeners; most of them actual
narcotics. All that they do is to stop the pain and thus cheat you into
the impression that you are better. You are just as tired and as unfit
for work as you were before. Your nervous system is just as saturated
with poisons, and the chances are ten to one that the quality of the
work that you do will be just as bad as if you had taken no medicine.
Further, like alcohol, when used as a "pick-me-up" under somewhat
similar conditions, the remedy which you have taken, while producing a
false sense of comfort and even exhilaration by deadening your pain and
discomfort, in that very process itself takes off the finer edge of your
judgment, the best keenness of your insight, and the highest balance of
y