Portage Sentinel

CHARLES LAMB ON DISEASE.-Charles Lamb in one of his letters to his friend Carfon, gives him the following advice.- There is much more truth than poetry in it:

"You are too much apprehensive about your complaint I know many that are always ailing of it, and live on to a good old age I know a merry fellow, (you partly know him) who, when his medical adviser told him he had drunk away that part, congratulated himself-now that his liver was gone-that he should be the longest liver of the two. The best way in these cases is to keep yourself as ignorant as you can-as ignorant as the world was before Galen-of the entire inner constructions of the animal man; not to be conscious of a midriff, to hold kidneys (save of sheep and swine) to be an agreeable fiction; not to know whereabouts the gall grows; to account the circulation of the blood a mere idle whim of Harvey's; to acknowledge no mechanism not visible.- For once, fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like so many bad humors. Those medical gentry choose each his favorite part-one takes the lungs, another the aforesaid liver, and refers to that whatever in the animal economy is amiss. Above all, use exercise, take a little more spirituous liquors, learn to smoke, continue to keep a good conscience, and avoid tampering with hard terms of art- viscosity, serrhosity, and those bugbears by which simple patients are scared into their graves. Believe the general sense of the mercantile world, which holds that, desks are not deadly. It is the mind, good B., and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting Think of the patience of tailors- think how long the Lord Chancellor sits; think of the brooding hen."