NOT only is music, as a Greek author says, a great and lasting pleasure to all who have learned it or know anything about it, but it is a friend to health and a foe to disease. It is both a recreation and a medicine. No one has ever thought of giving it a place in the pharmacopoeia, but it can boast for all that of marvellous health sustaining and health restoring properties. There may be a little scepticism on the point backed by the old proverb that Music is no cure for the toothache, but from a particular instance it is as well not to infer a general conclusion. When Art comes in the guise of a physician, though she may work wonders, we must not look for her doing everything. Music does not pretend to cure all ailments, and it will be doing quite enough if we can show in this paper that her curative influence extends to some. To assign a reason for the medicinal properties of music is a problem we may let alone. Perhaps as more than one authority has supposed the body is mechanically affected by sound and to come under the spell of a quartet or symphony may be only to undergo a sort of ethereal shampooing. What is more certain however is that music powerfully influences the mind and the mind in its turn has always powerfully influenced the body. “Patience and tranquillity of mind contribute more to cure our distempers than the whole art of medicine,” was written by Mozart in the album of one of his English admirers. Now nothing is more favourable to mental tranquillity than this most fascinating of the fine arts. It drives away that cart which is an enemy to life, and whilst its soothing sounds refresh the languid, if they do not always remove mountains of anxiety, they at any rate hardly ever fail to charm them into molehills. Lucentio, in the Taming of the Shrew, knew something about it when he said, “Preposterous ass that never read so far/ To know the cause why music was ordained/ Was it not to refresh the mind of man/ After his studies or his usual pain?”
Fantastic information about a fantastic tool for dungeonmasters from a fantastic blog about an incredibly interesting historical aspect of an interesting hobby.
Nixon and Kissinger: principled international realist thinkers.
Actually this is not so far off from what Russian de-urbanist avant-garde architecture theorists thought would happen except they basically
As someone that’s been at plastic gunpoint, I agree with Julian Sanchez that even actual groups of young criminals are not that scary.
I mean this isn’t surprising.
I guess neither is this.
An interesting rundown of the Freakonomics thing from someone who regrets that they may have had a part in popularizing it.
Is this some kind of actual charity or are people just supposed to directly give money to Breitbart’s kids?
Tags: fox news, grognardia, Leisure hour, nixon, plastic firearms