The will to make life useful for others rather than to follow a selfish, comfortable, easy existence is the secret of health and happiness for a great many women who are almost invalids or at least constantly complaining in the midst of idle lives. A woman who has nothing better to occupy her time than the care of a dog or two cannot expect to have any interests deep enough to divert her attention from the pains and aches of life that are more or less inevitable. The opportunity to dwell on them will heighten their intensity until they are almost torments. Many more of the feminine ills can be explained in this way than by learned pathological disquisitions. Every physician has seen the bitterest complaints disappear before some change of life that necessitated occupation and gave the patient other things to think about besides self. The will to face nature's obligations of maternity straightforwardly is probably the greatest preventive against the psycho-neuroses that prove so seriously disturbing to a great many women. Their affections, given a proper opportunity to develop, impel their {284} wills to such activity as prevents the development of morbid states. The dreads for themselves and their children, which so often make the excuse for a different policy in life than this, have proved unfounded on more careful study. Now that war activities no longer call women, it must not be forgotten that home duties are the only ones that can serve as a universal antidote for the poison of self-indulgence, which is much more productive of symptoms of disease than the autointoxications of which we have heard so much, but for which there is so little justification in our advancing science. The assumption of serious duties is the best possible panacea for the ills of mankind as well as womankind, only unfortunately in recent years women have succeeded in shirking duties more and have paid the inevitable price which nature always demands under such circumstances, when the dissatisfaction in life is much harder to bear than the work and trials involved in the pursuit of duty. {285} INDEX A Achylia Gastrica, 216 Activity, intestinal, 220 Adirondacks, 183 Agoraphobia, 27 Akrophobia, 27 Alcohol, narcotics, 191; in pneumonia, 190; in snake bite, 193 Alcoholic craving and food, 159 Algiers, 182 Angina pectoris, 230 Anthony, Saint, the Hermit, 21 Arctic regions, 205 Aridity, office building, 206 Aristotle, 71 Arnold, Matthew, 219 Arthritis, rheumatoid, 242 Ascesis, 77 Asceticism, 92 Asthma dread, 211 Attention, concentration of, 127 Auto-intoxication, 36 Autotoxemia, 226 Avalanche, Law of, 123 B Babinski, 261 Bailey, Dr. Pearce, 261, 269 Bain, Professor, 51 Bell, Alexander Graham, 280 Bernheim, 252 Betel nut, 45 Birth control, 282 Bismarck, 10 Brakes on energies, 19 Bright's disease, 102 C