pain is largely relative to the diversion of attention,--as "headaches disappear promptly upon the alarm of fire" and "toothaches vanish at the moment of a burglar's scare." Much pain is due to the super-sensitivity of an area through hyperaemia, or increased blood supply, following concentrated attention. Thus it is actually possible by volition to control the spread of pain, and the therapeutic virtues of an electric shock or a slap in the face are equally demonstrable. This reasoning is also applicable to the absence of sympathetic reactions among many disaster workers. They were found often to be "curiously detached and not greatly moved by the distressing scenes in morgue, in hospital, in the ruins and at the inquiry stations."[84] [83] Sano, F., "Documenti della guerra: Osservazioni psicologiche notate durante il bombardamento di Anversa," _Rivista di psichologia_, anno xi, pp. 119-128. [84] Smith, Stanley K., _The Halifax Horror_ (Halifax, 1918), ch. iv, p. 44. Catastrophe and the sudden termination of the normal which ensues become the stimuli of heroism and bring into play the great social virtues of generosity and of kindliness--which, in one of its forms, is mutual aid. The new conditions, perhaps it would be more correct to say, afford the occasion for their release. It is said that battle does to the individual what the developing solution does to the photographic plate,--brings out what is in the man. This may also be said of catastrophe. Every community has its socialized individuals, the dependable, the helpful, the considerate, as well as the "non-socialized survivors of savagery," who are distributed about the zero point of the social scale. Calamity is the occasion for the discovery of the "presence of extraordinary individuals in a group." The relation of them to a crisis is one of the most important points in the problem of progress. At Halifax there were encountered many such individuals as well as families who refused assistance that others might be relieved. Individual acts of finest model were written ineffaceably upon the social memory of the inhabitants. There was the case of a child who released with her teeth the clothes which held her mother beneath a pile of debris. A wounded girl saved a large family of children, getting them all out of a broken and burning home. A telegraph operator at the cost of his life stuck to his key, sent a warning message over the line and stopped an incoming train in the nick of time.