DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT.

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume VII, Issue 450, 11 December 1897, Page 5 (Supplement)

DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT.

Modern science has brought to light nothing more curiously interesting than the fact that worrywill kill. More remarkable still, it has,been able to determine, from recent discoveries, just how worry does kill. It is believed by many scientists who have, followed most carefully the growth of the science of brain diseases, that scores of the deaths set down to other causes are due to worry, and that alolie. The theory is a simple one—so simple that anyone can readily understand it. Briefly put, it amounts to this: Worry injures beyond repair certain cells of the brain: and the brain being the nutritive centre of the , body, the other organs become gradually injured, and when some disease of these organs or a combination, of them., arises, death finally ensues. Thus does worry kill. Insidiously, like many another disease, it creeps upon the brain in the form of of a single, constant, never-lost idea; and as the dropping of water over a period of years will wear a groove in a stone, so does worry gradually, imperceptibly,' but no less surely, destroy the brain cells that lead all the res t__that are, so to speak, the commanding officers of mental power, health and motion. Worry, to make the theory still stronger, is', an irritant at certain points, which produces little harm if it comes at intervals or irregularly. Occasional worrying of the system the-brain can cope with, but the iteration and re-iteration of one idea of a disquieting sort the cells of the brain are not proof It is as if the skull were laid bare and the surface of the brain struck lightly with a hammer every few seconde, with mechanical precision, with never a sign of a let-up or the failure of a stroke., Just in this way does the annoying icfol. the maddening thought • that will not bo done away with, strike or fall upon certain nerve cells, never ceasing,and week by week diminishing ihe vitality of these delicate organisms that are so minute that they can only bo seen under the i microscope.