Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1885 — A Mental Malady and Its Remedy. [ARTICLE]

A Mental Malady and Its Remedy.

A man of high intelligence, well educated, and of vigorous understanding in most things, was nevertheless given to the practice of self-tormenting in regard to the state of his health. He was fairly robust, hto and drank well, slept easily, walked with remarkable energy, was capable of severe and long-sus-tained mental labor and of much physical exertion. Unluckily for himself, he began to study domestic medicine, and straight-way a too active imagination led him to simulate in his own case the symptoms of almost every disease he had happened to read of. He was apoplectic, paralytic, rheumatic ;he had heart disease; his lungs were affected; his liver was congested; gout threatened him; his vision became enfeebled; obscure senations alarmed him as to the state of his brain; fevers of one kind and another were perpetually hatching in his system. The man’s life became a burden and a misery to him; he half killed himself with terror, and nearly succeeded in getting poisoned by a succession of varied and opposing remedies: At last he was cured. Reading the symptoms of a condition from which it is physiologically impossible that men should recover, he found to his horror that each particular Bympton was distinctly marked in his own case. He went pver the ground again and again; eachrenewed examination only served to bring out the symptoms with more alarming distinctness. Then the affair became too ludicrousa hearty fit of laughter dissjpated not only that particular ailment, but all the rest, and the sufferer was cured. —Hearth and Home. ■ Nearly 2,000 watches are made daily in New England.