An _adagio_ may set a gouty father to sleep, and a _capriccio_ may operate successfully on the nerves of a valetudinary mother. A slight indisposition may be removed by a single air, while a more obstinate case may require an overture or a _concerto_. The tastes of the patient should be consulted. Country squires, when kept indoors by stress of bad weather, will experience much relief in a hunting-song, while young gentlemen of the town will perhaps prefer an old English derry-down. Hospital inmates will usually be content with hurdy-gurdies, and the poorer classes may be supplied with ballads at their own homes. Some patients will recover with all the rapidity of a jig, while others will mend in minuet-time. And surely the public welfare will be eminently promoted, when our physicians' prescriptions are printed from music-type, and when we have nothing more nauseous to swallow than the words of a modern opera.[192:1] According to the Dutch physician Lemnius (1505-1568), music is a chief antidote against melancholy; it revives the languishing soul, affecting not only the ears, but the vital and animal spirits. It erects the mind, and makes it nimble. The Reverend Sydney Smith graphically described the effect of enlivening music upon an audience, who had been manifestly bored and were gaping with ennui during the execution of an elaborate fugue, by a skilled orchestra. Suddenly there sprang up a lively little air, expressive of some natural feeling. And instantly every one beamed with satisfaction, and was ready to aver that music affords the most delightful and rational entertainment. And such is doubtless the opinion of the great majority of people of culture and refinement, especially those of a jovial or mercurial temperament. According to Martin Luther, the Devil is a saturnine person, and music is hateful to him. Many and sundry are the means, says Robert Burton, which philosophers and physicians have prescribed to exhilarate a sorrowful heart, to divert those fixed and intent cares and meditations, which in this malady so much offend; but in my judgment, none so present, none so powerful, none so apposite as mirth, music and merry company.[193:1] During recent years the influence of music in disease has been the subject of renewed attention. In London Canon Harford, an enthusiastic believer in the efficacy of this method of treatment, organized bands of musicians, under the auspices of the Order of Saint Cecilia, who visited certain hospitals, where permission had been given, and there exercised their art with results highly encouraging and beneficial. And in Boston Dr. John Dixwell has for many years been active in providing music for hospital patients. His admirable enterprise has been successful, and has received the endorsement of the medical fraternity. A wise discrimination is essential in the selection of music especially adapted to benefit any particular class of cases.