Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 94, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1898 — LOVE A DISEASE. [ARTICLE]

LOVE A DISEASE.

The Tender Passion Regarded by Science as a Malady. When a Man Falla in Love He la in a State of Physical Diaturbance, According to a Learned Physician. Science is making itself obnoxious. As if it were not enough to discover to a germ-fearing world that there are microbes in kisses, it now declares that love is itself a disease. It adds, moreover, that the lover, whom all mankind has held in tender esteem, is a being almost as unsound and out of health, in body and mind, as a person with parefeis. Love may be caught, like measles or pneumonia, by exposure to pertain influences when the system is run down or exhausted. With all the gravity that medical language can throw around a simple statement, science describes love as a fever, a malftdy of the human tissues,' with wellrecognized symptoms and often mortal results, and may be treated from the materia medica like any other illness. This discovery means cruelty to many individual feminine hopes. Man is not often in a condition to fall in love; he is too healthy during the greater part of his life. So, instead of expecting that any male person who comes her way may be struck with desire for hpr, a girl hereafter will know that only men who happen to see her first when they are in a rare, peculiar state are likely th take the fever. How Jn uc h that reduces a girl’s chances of marriage may be imagined when, under the old supposition that every man was a possible husband, a girl could not count on more than one chance m 3,000. But about the new discovery. When Mrs. Reis drowned herself in the Park reservoir Dr. Nagle, the eminent student of causes of suicide, told a Press reporter that love is a morbid state — a state of sickness. This theory has been accepted by many physicians since a scholarly Frenchman, Dr. Janet, published “L’Automatisme Psychique” a few weeks ago. It is a theory easily justified from what medicine has learned in the last ten years through discoveries in bacteriology and physiological chemistry. Dr. Van Gieson, chief of the new pathological institute of the New York state lunacy commission, is conducting that great laboratory on the belief that disease in general is due to toxic, or poisonous, secretions in the body. He and his staff are studying dementia particularly. They are analyzing the, secretions of several insane patients in the hope of isolating an organic poison which is supposed to be at the bottom of the difficulty. Dr. Janet asserts in his new treatise that “We can only fall in love at special moments, when we are in a peculiar condition. When a man is fit and well, morally and physically, he can expose himself to the most inflammatory circumstances, but he won’t fall in love. But if he is fatigued or intellectually overworked or upset by grief or trouble, played out, sad, absent-minded, nervous, below par, he will fall in love on the most paltry provocation. A face, a gesture, a word, takes him and is the germ of a long, amorous complaint.” “First,” continues Dr. Janet, “there is, as in all virulent maladies, a period of incubation. The new idea flits vaguely through the dreams of enfeebled consciousness, then seems to depart; but it has done its work and provoked actions whose origin is not in the personal consciousness,” These actions generally are sufficient to give ground for a breach of promise suit if not adhered to. In support of the suggestion that love comes like a disease. Dr. Janet cites this: “What is the amazement of a man of intelligence when he comes pitiably to himself under the window of his lady, whither his wandering steps unconsciously have led him? What is the surpriseof a clever man. when, in the midst of work he hears his lips ceaselessly murmur a name, always the same name?” He holds, in short, that we arc automatic when we are iri love, and are out of our own control, as though we were highly intoxicated, or had delirium, or some fever.

“Such,” goes on Dr. Janet, “is real passion, not as idealized in fantastic descriptions, but as reduced to its essential psychological symptoms? Novelists have deceived us about love. So for the most part have poets, though pome have come near to forestalling science. “Love is like a dizziness,” says one. and another observes: “Who loves, raves—’tis youth's frenzy." Historians give strong evidence in favor of the new theory. They relate that although Alexander was fit and well (his father wanted to enter him in the Olympic games), he despised women. Prince Charles, according to Lord Elcho, “had a body made for war,” but women invariably bored him. Everybody knows that love is epidemic in spring. Tt comes just as inevitably as that tired feeling—in fact, that tired, played-out feeling seems to be the prvmotive cause. One’s blood is at its worst then; one’s entire system is at n low ebb; melancholia and malaria nre more prevalent, and suicides, from discouraged, love or mental depression, due to physical illness, become numerous. But in summer the health improves. Is that why seaside flirtations nre seldom serious wooling?' Yes. if one accepts the new theory that love Js a morbid condition, due to a microbe or a damaged nerve cell.—N. Y. Press.