g8 English and American Physique . [January, 
Italy emerging from the entombment of ages and reappear- 
ing in a higher evolution in the Western Hemisphere. 
Certain Nervous Diseases peculiar to America. 
A new crop of diseases has sprung up in America, of 
which Great Britain until lately knew nothing, or but little. 
A class of functional diseases of the nervous system, now 
beginning to be known everywhere in civilisation, seem to 
have first taken root under an American sky, whence their 
seed is being distributed through the world. A fleet of 
Great Easterns might be filled with hay-fever sufferers 
alone ; and not Great Britain, nor all Europe, nor all the 
world, could assemble so large an army of sufferers from 
this distinguished malady ; while our cases of nervous 
exhaustion would make a standing army as large as that of 
Russia. Of all the fads of modern sociology, this rise and 
growth of functional nervous disease in the northern part of 
America is one of the most stupendous, complex, and sug- 
gestive ; to solve it in all its interlacings, to unfold its mar- 
vellous phenomena and trace them back to their sources 
and forward to their future developments, is to solve the 
problem of sociology itself. # 
A thousand causes have been assigned the task ol 
accounting for this. Among the chief of these acci edited 
causes are fast and excessive eating. Although the 
Americans are fast eaters, or used to be a quarter or half a 
century ago, yet in the quantity both of food and drinking 
they are surpassed both by the English and Germans. 
Europeans eat oftener than Americans, and eat more, in 
some cases having four or five meals a day, where the 
American has but two or three ; and consume not only more 
alcoholic liquors of all kinds, but more fluids of every kind. 
The American of the higher class, and these remarks 
refer only to that class, uses but little fluid of any kind. 
The enormous quantity of alcoholic liquors, including beer, 
used in the United States, is used to. a large extent by Ger- 
mans and Irish, and those who live in the distant West and 
South. There are thousands of Americans who from year 
to year drink no tea or coffee, and but very little water. 
Long since I have surrendered the custom of asking my 
nervous patients whether they drink coffee, for most of them 
been forced to drop the pleasant habit long before they 
consult me. Through all the Northein States the biain 
working classes find coffee in some respecTs more poisonous 
than whisky or tobacco, and thousands are made wakeful 
