LAUGH AND BE WELL.

Waipukurau Press, Issue 4, 5 January 1906, Page 2

LAUGH AND BE WELL.

The laughing cure is now being recommended by fashionable oldworld doctors as the latest panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to. And even the gravely scientific Lancet says that “ there is no doubt about langhing being conducive to health. But the question is, What; is the patient going to laugh at? When his temperature goes up to over a hundred and four in the shade, and he feels as if seventeen demons had hold of every b me in his body with seventeen screw wrenches, and his longue had been turned into a red-hot brii k, he does not always feel much in the humor for merriment. It may seem somewhat funny to see, a doctor under such circumstances, when he might say in honest English, “ Send j;o the chemist for six-penny-worth-of antipyriu, divide it

into four parts, and swallow one of them in half a wine-glass of water every four hours,” writing out in dog Latin a long prescription the effect of which is that the man of drugs is to put the same amount of antipyrin into an eight-ounce bottle, and charge, accordingly. Bui the difficulty is that the patient never gets the benefit of the joke, for if once its true inwardness was revealed to him ah the fun would fade out of it, and, as a laughing cure, it would not work. Ihr laughing cure, as a matter of fact, is very much like the rest euro: it can only be applied to people who don’t want any cure. When, a man has enough money to make him indifferent as to whether it rains or shines for the remainder of Ins days, he suffers from nothing that rest will remove. When he does suffer from anything of that kind, rest is the one thing that he can’t get. And when a man breaks out into a loud guflaw, it is safe to lay any odds that there is nothing the matter with him to require the laughing cure or any other cure. Laughing may be conducive to hilarity. Fashionable cures, however, like fashionable diseases, are, of course, not intended to he serious, except at the time when the doctor’s bill comes in, aud then if the man who pays does not take a hand, and restore the patient to perfect health, it is his own fault.