Another view almost universally advocated, is to avoid drugs. The importance of this and its union with right exercise have been demonstrated in the impressive language of fable. "There is a story in the 'Arabian Nights' Tales'," says Addison, "of a king who had long languished under an ill habit of body, and had taken abundance of remedies to no purpose. At length, says the fable, a physician cured him by the following method: he took a hollow ball of wood, and filled it with several drugs; after which he closed it up so carefully that nothing appeared. He likewise took a mallet, and, after having hollowed the handle and that part which strikes the ball, he inclosed in them several drugs after the same manner as in the ball itself. He then ordered the sultan, who was his patient, to exercise himself early in the morning with these rightly prepared instruments, till such time as he should sweat; when, as the story goes, the virtue of the medicaments perspiring through the wood, had so good an influence on the sultan's constitution, that they cured him of an indisposition which all the compositions he had taken inwardly had not been able to remove. "This Eastern allegory is finely contrived to show us how beneficial bodily labor is to health, and that exercise is the most effectual physic." Another illustration is furnished us by Sir William Temple:-- "I know not," he says, "whether some desperate degrees of abstinence would not have the same effect upon other men, as they had upon Atticus; who, weary of his life as well as his physicians by long and cruel pains of a dropsical gout, and despairing of any cure, resolved by degrees to starve himself to death; and went so far, that the physicians found he had ended his disease instead of his life." Of all the methods advocated, possibly one of the most universally recognized is joyousness,--a hopeful attitude toward life, a cheerful, kindly relationship with one's kind. According to Galen, AEsculapius wrote comic songs to promote circulation in his patients. "A physician," says Hippocrates, "should have a certain ready wit, for sadness hinders both the well and the sick." We know, too, that Apollo was not only the god of music and poetry but also of medicine. The poet, John Armstrong, has explained this: "Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, Expels disease, softens every pain; And hence the wise of Ancient days adored One power of physic, melody and song." Sir Charles Clark, one of the greatest physicians of modern times, exercised a most exhilarating influence over his patients by his cheerfulness and jollity. It was probably one of the chief means of his wonderful success. "Cheerfulness," says Sir John Byles, "is eminently conducive to health both in body and mind."