I am disposed to think that the variety of work done by lawyers, their long summer holiday, their more general cultivation, their usual tastes for literary or other objects out of their business walks, may, to some extent, save them, as well as the fact that they can rarely be subject to the sudden and fearful responsibilities of business men.  Moreover, like the doctor, the lawyer gets his weight upon him slowly, and is thirty at least before it can be heavy enough to task him severely.  The business man’s only limitation is need of money, and few young mercantile men will hesitate to enter trade on their own account if they can command capital.  With the doctor, as with the lawyer, a long intellectual education, a slowly-increasing strain, and responsibilities of gradual growth tend, with his out-door life, to save him from the form of disease I have been alluding to.  This element of open-air life, I suspect, has a share in protecting men who in many respects lead a most unhealthy existence.  The doctor, who is supposed to get a large share of exercise, in reality gets very little after he grows too busy to walk, and has then only the incidental exposure to out-of-door air.  When this is associated with a fair share of physical exertion, it is an immense safeguard against the ills of anxiety and too much brain-work.  For these reasons I do not doubt that the effects of our great civil war were far more severely felt by the Secretary of War and President Lincoln than by Grant or Sherman.

The wearing, incessant cares of overwork, of business anxiety, and the like, produce directly diseases of the nervous system, and are also the fertile parents of dyspepsia, consumption, and maladies of the heart.  How often we can trace all the forms of the first-named protean disease to such causes is only too well known to every physician, and their connection with cardiac troubles is also well understood.  Happily, functional troubles of heart or stomach are far from unfrequent precursors of the graver mischief which finally falls upon the nerve-centres if the lighter warnings have been neglected; and for this reason no man who has to use his brain energetically and for long periods can afford to disregard the hints which he gets from attacks of palpitation of heart or from a disordered stomach.  In many instances these are the only expressions of the fact that he is abusing the machinery of mind or body; and the sufferer may think himself fortunate that this is the case, since even the least serious degrees of direct exhaustion of the centres with which he feels and thinks are more grave and are less open to ready relief.