RUNNING TO CATCH THE TRAIN.
PROBABLY few persons who travel much do not occasionally find themselves obliged to run to catch a train. This is particularly true of those who go to and fro from the great cities to the suburban towns daily, living in one and doing business in the other. It is said that heart disease has greatly increased in London, and the same is no doubt true of other cities, since this custom has grown into such proportions. “There are,” says Dr. Richardson, “few acts of a physical kind performed by men in their regular course of life, which so demonstrably produce physical disease of the heart and great blood-vessels as this one act of running or hastening to catch a train. There is more in the act than the mere haste; there is the attendant excitement; the looking out for the signs that the train is still there; the breathless mode of inquiry how long it will be before the train starts; the hurry to get past people on the platform; the trepidation, perchance, to get a ticket; the numberless little irritations which come in the way; the fits and starts of temper, if any obstacles give trouble and annoyance; and other anxieties which I need not wait to describe. These all add their quota to the general disturbance and to the strain which cripples or to the strain which kills.” The evils arising from haste to catch a train are most frequent in persons who have passed their fortieth year, and, as a rule, they are brought about by physical injury affecting either the heart or the great arterial blood-vessels which spring from the heart. The heart becomes enlarged, dilated; the openings to which its valvular appendages are attached become too large; the valves themselves become distended and pouched; the great arterial vessel which rises from the left side of the heart becomes dilated and loses its contractile power, or the muscular walls of the heart become deficient in tone. The heart affected in any of these ways may work under ordinary circumstances so well that it may give to its owner no indications of its failures unless it be severely taxed. It might, indeed, go on working, under fair circumstances, for years, and carry its owner into the possession of a long life, if it were not overtried. But then occurs one of these great strains, and it succumbs. The heart is so important an organ that its hygiene should be carefully attended to, in order that it may do its work as long as the constitution has vigor to live.—Journal of Hygiene.