160 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The falling off of the hair is too frequent a result of anxiety, or 

 other depressing emotion, to escape common observation. A case re- 

 ported in the Lancet, of May 4, 18G7, forms an excellent illustration : 



" A man of nervous temperament began business as a draper in 1859. At 

 that time he was twenty-seven years of age, in good health, though not very 

 robust, unmarried, and had the usual quautity of (dark) hair, whiskers, and 

 beard. For two years he was in a state of perpetual worry and anxiety of 

 mind., and his diet was very irregular. Then his hair began to come oft', lie 

 declares that it literally fell off", so that when he raised his head from his pillow- 

 in the morning, the hair left on the pillow formed a kind of cast of that part of 

 his head which rested on it. In a month's time he had not a single visible hair 

 on any part of his body no eyebrows, no eyelashes; even the short hairs of 

 his arms and legs had gone ; but on the scalp there could be seen, in a good 

 light, patches of very fine, short down. This was in 1861. Medical treatment 

 proved of no avail, and he was finally advised to do nothing. So long as his 

 anxiety continued, the hair refused to grow, but by the latter part of 1805 his 

 business became established, and, coincidently, his hair reappeared ; and when 

 Mr. Churton, of Erith, reported the case, he had a moderately good quantity 

 of hair on the head, very slight whiskers, rather better eyebrows, and the eye- 

 lashes pretty good." 



The influence of painful emotions in causing gray or white hair and 

 alopecia has been sufficiently illustrated, and it would have been inter- 

 esting to adduce a reverse series showing the opposite effects of joy. 

 But it is a very different thing to restore to its healthy habit the func- 

 tion of a tissue whose pigment has been removed by slow mal-nutri- 

 tion, or by sudden shock. I may adduce such a circumstance as the 

 following, however, to show that hair, which has turned gray in the 

 natural course of life, may, by the stimulus of specially-favorable 

 events, become dark and plentiful again : 



" An old man (aged seventy-five), a thorough out-and-out radical even the 

 cancelli of his bones were so impregnated with a thorough disgust of the Govern- 

 ment of George IV. that he threw up a lucrative situation in one of the royal 

 yards, and compelled his youngest son to follow his example insisted that his 

 wife, also aged (about seventy), toothless for years, and her hair as white as the 

 snow on Mont Blanc, should accompany them to the land where God's creatures 

 were permitted to inhale the pure, old, invigorating atmosphere of freedom. 



obvious that the opacity of the white portion was due to a vast accumulation of air- 

 globules, packed closely together in the fibrous structure of the hair, as well as in the 

 medulla. There was no absence of pigment, but the accumulation of air-globules veiled 

 the normal color and structure. Mr. Wilson observed that, as the alteration in structure 

 which gave rise to the altered color evidently arose in a very short period, probably less 

 than a day, the occurrence of a similar change throughout the eutire length of the shaft 

 would explain those remarkable instances, of which so many are on record, of sudden 

 blanching of the hair ; and he ventured to suggest that, during the prevalence of a violent 

 nervous shock, the normal fluids of the hair might be drawn inward toward the body, 

 in unison with the generally contracted and collapsed state of the surface, and that the 

 vacuities left by this process of exhaustion might be suddenly filled with atmospheric 

 air. Lancet, April 20, 1867. 



