Early in the war, some of the superannuated medical authorities expressed grave fears about pneumonia and rheumatism among the soldiers in the wet, cold trenches. In every belligerent country, the actual observation was that the soldiers remained exceptionally free from such diseases, less susceptible to them than people living at home. The outdoors, after all, is not.

I am a specialist, raising Cain; I am forty-seven, a mother of three grown children. My blood pressure is 100. I have some kind of kidney trouble, they tell me. Slight traces of albumin appear once in a while in the urinalysis. I am very anxious about my high blood pressure. There is a heating and a noise in my head as if I had taken a lot of urine. My family physician does not believe in blood pressure, but every specialist I have consulted tells me it is dangerously high, and it frightens me almost to death. Is it not possible to reduce this enormously high pressure somehow?

MRS. C. R.
Answer. Follow your family doctor's directions. One hundred and ninety isn't high at all. I know many a middle-aged person with a pressure of 210 or 225 who manages to keep going and get considerable joy out of life. I don't believe in blood pressure either. A doctor can take any healthy individual who is impressionable, like a woman; and, by talking for a few minutes about the seriousness of blood pressure, etc., raise the  pressure from twenty to thirty millimeters above normal. Take a nice long walk every day, but give the specialist's vicinity a wide berth. 