A Doctor's Idle Hours. By "Scalpel." (Downey and Co.)— The
"Doctor" has much that is interesting to tell us. If we do not always accept his conclusions, we always recognise that he is suggestive and instructive. Perhaps there is a little tendency to paradox in him. He controverts, for instance, the statement that London is a healthy city. London, he says, presents a compara- tively low rate of mortality because it swallows up healthy lives. But the statement means not absolutely healthy as compared with the country, but as compared with other cities, with Liverpool, for instance, or Leeds. The papers on alcohol are full of good sense. Possibly here again there is something of paradox. "Alcohol is a sedative and a sedative only." That, we acknow- ledge, is its normal use. A man drinks a pint of claret or a glass of whisky-and-water with his dinner and feels more disposed to rest in consequence. (It might be well to avoid alcohol at any meal which has to be followed by work.) But that alcohol has a temporary use as a stimulant can hardly be denied. The common employment of it in faintness is an instance. Among other subjects discussed, and always to good effect, are "Athletics," "Recreation," "Railway Travelling," "Fashion," "Antipathies" (a matter on which doctors might profitably bestow more attention than they often do), and "Food." We do not quite share " Scalpel's " high estimate of "pig-meat." There is nothing which more frequently excites antipathy. Nor was it without some excellent reason that in two great religions it has been forbidden.
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