disagreeable subjects in conversation at dinner-time will tend to
promote indigestion instead of digestion. The mechanism is precisely
similar. The disagreeable news, if it concern a financial or executive
difficulty, will cause a rush of blood to the brain for the purpose of
deciding what is to be done. But this diminishes the proper supply of
blood to the stomach and to the digestive glands, just as really as the
paralysis of violent fright or an explosion of furious anger. If the
unpleasant subject is yet a little more irritating and personal, it will
lead to a corresponding set of muscular actions, as evidenced in
heightened color, loud tones, more or less violent gesticulation, with
marked interruption of both mastication and the secretion of saliva and
all other digestive juices. In short, fully two-thirds of the influences
of emotional mental states upon the body are produced by their calling
away from the normal vital processes the blood which is needed for their
muscular and circulatory accompaniments. No matter how bad the news or
how serious the danger, if they fail to worry us or to frighten us,--in
other words, to set up this complicated train of muscular and
blood-supply changes,--then they have little or no effect upon our
digestions or the metabolism of our liver and kidneys.

The classic "preying upon the damask cheek" of grief, and the carking
effect of the Black Care that rides behind the horseman, have a
perfectly similar physical mechanism. While the primary disturbance of
the banking balances of the body is less, this is continued over weeks
and months, and in addition introduces another factor hardly less
potent, by interfering with all the healthful, normal, regular habits of
the body,--appetite, meal-times, sleep, recreation. These wastings and
pinings and fadings away are produced by mental influence, in the sense
that they cannot be cured by medicines or relieved at once by the best
of hygienic advice; but it is idle to deny that they have also a broad
and substantial physical basis, in the extent to which states of
emotional agony, despair, or worry interfere with appetite, sleep, and
proper exercise and recreation in the open air. Just as soon as they
cease to interfere with this normal regularity of bodily functions, the
sufferer begins to recover his health.

We even meet with the curious paradox of individuals who, though
suffering the keenest grief or anxiety over the loss or serious ill