Of all the mental attributes the emotions are the most exhausting. A woman can spend more of her strength in five minutes of unnatural excitement than in a day of calm, steady brain work. A perfect temper is not only a prime requisite for a club president, but for every man and woman in this hard workaday world, with its fierce competitions, its petty jealousies, and the stiletto practices of the cowardly, and it is one of the greatest preventives of indigestion, insomnia, and nervous prostration. Forget your grievances. Every time that one repeats them to herself or to a friend she lives them over again, and the original trouble was but the merest moiety of suffering compared to a wound torn open afresh every day. To cherish a vindictive spirit does a vast amount of injury to the possessor of that spirit. In view of the facts of the beneficial effects of fighting upon small boys, and that the combative propensities of the Irish peasant commonly evaporates with his shillelagh, it would seem commendable to introduce boxing matches among women as a way to settle their differences. From the standpoint of health, the intense excitement attendant on playing for high stakes, the loss of sleep, the unnatural life, the loss of money that one can ill afford to lose, must eventually lead to a serious if not to a fatal breakdown. It is not the natural and reasonable intellectual work that injures the brain, but the various emotions—ambition, anxiety, disappointment, the hopes and fears, the loves and hatreds of our lives—that wear out the nervous system and endanger the balance of the brain. Powerful emotion is like concentration attended with dissociation, it occupies the mind to the exclusion of all else, even to the dictates of self-preservation and reason. The will is more or less suspended and held in abeyance during the emotional states. The too great concentration of the attention on one’s business or occupation is a self-indulgence that often ignores the importance of the lighter side of life and the legitimate claims of family and friends. Less ambition and more philosophy would greatly lessen the number of cases of nervous prostration and allied neuroses. All of one’s fortune is not staked on one throw of the dice; if the woman fails in one direction, there are other resources left. Concentration of the mind on the physical suffering leads to the so-called habits in disease; there may have, in the first place, been a real physical cause. For example, in case of injury to a limb followed by severe pain in that member it has happened that after amputation of the limb the consciousness of pain persisted in the brain. In the functional neuroses, the first cause may have been a real physical one, but the individual becomes so self-centered, it is with difficulty that the mind can be withdrawn from the ego, and a cure can only be effected by supplanting the intense egotism by new interests.