TWENTY-FOURTH YEAR THE Medical Herald Official Journal Buchanan Medical Society of the Missouri Valley: Emulsified cod liver oil as contained in Scott's Samples Free. SCOTT & BOWNE, Chemists, 409-415 Pearl St., New York. TRI-IODIDES (HENRY'S) Colchicin 1-20 grain. Liquor Sali-lodides. A powerful alterative and resolvent, glandular and hepatic stimulant, and succedaneum of the iodides. Indicated in all conditions dependent upon perverted tissue metabolism; in lymphatic engorgements and functional visceral disturbances, in lingering rheumatic pains which are "worse at night" Bone, periosteal and visceral symptoms of late syphilis; for the removal of all inflammatory, plastic and gouty deposits. A remedy in sciatica, megrim, neuralgias, lumbago and muscular pains; the gouty and rheumatic diathesis; acute and chronic rheumatism and gout; chronic eczema and psoriasis, and all dermic disorders in which there is underlying blood taint. An hepatic stimulant increasing the quantity and fluidity of the bile. Relieves hepatic and intestinal torpor; does not cause the unpleasant gastric symptoms of potassium iodide. THREE CHLORIDES (HENRY'S) Each drachm contains $1.00 Liquor Ferrisenic. An oxygen-carrying ferruginous preparation, suitable for prolonged treatment of children, adults and the aged. Indicated in anemia and bodily weakness, convalescence from acute diseases and surgical operations; boys and girls at the age of puberty, and the climacteric period in women. In children with chorea, rickets, or who are backward in development, or in whom there exists an aversion to meats and fats. Prolonged administration never causes "iron headache." As an adjuvant for potassium iodide the undesirable manifestations known as iodism can be removed. Stimulant to the peptic and hydrochloric glandular system of the stomach, especially serviceable in the impaired appetite, nausea, vomiting and other gastric symptoms of alcoholic subjects. MAIZO-LITHIUM Liquor Lithium Maizenate. Nascent Chemic Union 1 to 2 drachms. 8-oz. bottle Two $1.00 A genito-urinary sedative, and active diuretic; solvent and flush indicated for the relief and prevention of renal colic; a sedative in the acute stage of gonorrhea, cystitis and epididymitis; in dropsical effusions due to enfeebled heart or to renal diseases. As a solvent in the varied manifestations of gout, goutiness aand neurotic lithemia, periodical migrainous headache, epigastric oppression, cardiac palpitation, irregular, weak or intemittent pulse; irritability, moodiness, insomnia and other nervous symptoms of uric-acidemia. Decidedly better, more economical, extensive in action and definite in results than mineral waters. Those cases of irritable heart, irregular or intermittent pulse so frequently met with by insurance examiners and found to be due to excess of uric acid, are special indications for Maizo-Lithium. HENRY PHARMACAL CO., LOUISVILLE, KY. OFFICIAL JOURNAL: Buchanan County Medical Society ST. JOSEPH, MO., FEBRUARY, 1905. Contributed Articles MENTAL INHIBITION; OR THE RELATION OF THE NEUROSES AND PRE-MELANCHOLIAS TO THE DIVORCE COURT.* S. Grover Burnett, A. M., M. D., Kansas City, Mo. Superintendent Dr. Burnett's Private Home for Nervous Diseases and Alcoholics and Drug Inebriates; Professor Clinical Neurology, and the Histological and Applied Anatomy of the Central Nervous System, University Medical College. T HE object of this paper is not to relate family discords, but to cite their etiological factors, which are rarely, if ever, given a solutionary thought, namely, the neuroses that have to do with influencing mental inhibition, whether fostered through ignorance, whether morbidly acquired or whether the sole lineal heritage that was everything but desirable. To this should be added the remote, undeveloped and usually unsuspected prodromal symptoms of a pre-melancholia of the simple or intellectual type. By "prodromal symptoms" is meant that period of mental and systemic incubation which eventuates, if it goes on to development, in the initial melancholia symptom period, prognostically important, but never recognized excepting by the trained alienist. MENTAL INHIBITION OR SELF-CONTROL. The one great problem of nature, civilized or otherwise, has been to harmoniously associate all things in their relation to each other. Upon this harmonious association depend integrity and prosperity, and a mutual relationship in the species that tends to the blending of individualities, the acme of which is the meeting of the two indivisible sun rays of life in the procreation, bearing, training and development of their kind. Upon the exactness of the solution of this problem depends the crumbling or steadfastness of the Gibraltar of Nations and the Rooseveltian corner-stone of racial intactness. The presence of a brain center presiding over mental inhibition scarcely needs to be discussed. The fact that such a function exists is sufficient proof of such a center. As physicians we must view the lesson as taught us clinically, beginning with the child and tenderly nourishing his mentalization through the period up to responsibility and into maturity. The new-born is as mentally brainless as it is devoid of pedestri anisin. The mental must develop by a more tedious process than that of locomotion. The child's first acts, somatic and psychic, are crude and Read by invitation before the Buchanan County Medical Society, St. Joseph, January 16, 1905. imperfect. The blunders, falls and accidents are powerful stimulants to the puerile faculties of judgment and inhibition. They are stirred to functional development and the child soon inhibits his acts and judgment leads him to safer paths. He soon learns that he must or must not do certain things, though his desire to do otherwise is strong. His little temper passions yield to parental dictation, and step by step the inhibitory action over self-control is stimulated; day by day the records of his little mental storehouse are made more complete, and the library for future mental reference grows voluminous. These recorded acts of self-control, or inhibition, are the mile posts, or resting parlors where judgment is allowed to catch up and consult with inhibition as to the nature and propriety of the act contemplated. The little instincts begin reaching out into their surroundings astonishingly early, for mental stimuli-food, as it were, which they appropriate and assimilate in the mental depository. This makes proper methods of teaching, and the moral and mental environment, powerful factors in shaping the mental status of the child's future. They are, in fact, the resources from which the maturing mental storehouse is drafting its supplies and, like the busy bee, the childish summer of life garners and treasures the material at hand, and accordingly as the bitters or sweets have been extracted and stored, so shall the sweets of golden autumn be tainted or more golden and the bleak days of the hoary winters be more bleak or tempered with the warmth of intellectual sublimity. The child can be taught to inhibit or control his wants and desires, impulses and outbursts, or he can be taught to cultivate them; and each successive infraction, insignificant though it may seem, is but a step toward fixing a brain habit that dwarfs judgment, weakens every basic element of the faculties of the mind and tends to foster the passions and emotions of the "cussed" side of nature; and every victory of inhibition, subjecting all facts to the dictates of judgment, marks the storing away of another character unit in mental development. The number and quality of these character units, instilled into the childish mind, will stamp its unit of value in adult life. The weak inhibition by inheritance, if taken early, may be educated and trained into a reasonably strong inhibitory state, while the strongly inherited inhibition, by faulty training and poisonous moral and social environment, may imbibe, assimilate and develop the very mental character units that smother the natural idiosyncracies of self-control and force, pervert the germ of judgment into a spurious off-shoot and cultivate all the instincts of the common sloth of the lower or criminal walks of life. DEGREE OF INHIBITION. Self-control at birth is the algebraic X quantity for the future to determine. Its degree of perfection is as variable as is the somatic mould of individuals. The human being with perfect inhibition over self may have been, but is not now, and probably reached the angelic clime by some other than the earthly route. That its degree of development, in proper coordination with that all-powerful faculty, judgment, marks the mental status of the individual can scarcely be questioned. With the degree of inhibition essential to control all reasonable tendencies to mental insubordination, there is the opportunity for the happy second thought, so-called; and during this precious moment the judgment assumes the dignified control of a master and, like the artist, adds the perfecting shades and tints to the mental picture, externalized in the product of the act, that is beautiful to behold. Its presence in high dergee makes possible, the master mind; its low degree undermines the very foundation of superior intellectual attainment. Its superlative degree rounds out, adds grace, purity, nobleness and stability to that which we call character and tempers the moral dictates of a nation with justice and extends the hand of fellowship across the threshold of our homes; its minimum degree grows a monster that grapples, in the dark highway of life, the very throats of social, moral and domestic virtues and bedews the most fragrant buds. of youthful springtime with tears that scorch and burn till the petals of the June rose, warped, crisp and dry, crumble and return to mother earth in the shadow of the almshouse, the asylum, penal institutions and the gallows, it educates and militates against, and detracts from self-acquirement in youth; it fosters prostitution, human bonfires and hell! The law, a crude daguerreotype of nature's reflections, has long recognized childish irresponsibility to infractions of its code during the first seven years of life; and from that unto the twelfth and fifteenth year it hedges him round about with the protective and educational modus operandi of the Juvenile Court. Born with all the invectives of mental nothingness, this human mite begins to crawl up the rocks, gullies, crags and precipices of life's mountain, from darkness below to light above, and in his mental darkness he wonders, and as he wonders he blunders, and as he blunders he may fall, for the guiding ray of intellectual light on the horizon of adult age above is seen but dimly, and during his journey the developing powers of inhibition must be stimulated or depressed, perverted or invigorated by contact with vicious or ennobling influences. For the first seven years the degree of inhibition is largely stamped by the tender caresses and the imbibed firmness of character of the mother. The second seven years the mother is aided by precepts and the law if needed; and the third seven years adds the perfecting, finishing touch of social laws and the broader education; and during the last seven years, waiting, as it were, on the horizon, we throw the searchlight down to him stronger and stronger as we see him coming with flying colors, in the distance, swaying from side to side like a locomotive at full speed; and as he approaches. nearer and nearer, our breath sticks in the fifth intercostal space in the fear that his youthful load of dynamite may explode under his own momentum. But when adolescence is successfully attained the epoch of trial and strains is at hand. Previously latent instincts demand a hearing in reason or out of reason: Their buds bloom in all their glory or in blight; they deteriorate or emulate; they add to or detract from; they build up or tear down; they tend to the physiological completion or the pathological ruin; it is an epoch when the lower, the lascivious and pleasurable instincts are arrayed, as it were, in line of battle against the attained inhibition as it presides over judgment; and as inhibition is strong, weak or lost, so shall judgment master, vacillate or be At this epoch of life the individual must launch his craft on the sea of realities, wholly self-reliant, and according to the perfected degree of stored inhibition to act as both governor and rudder to his ship of den |