Baltimore Evening Sun (5 April 1912): 6.

Meanwhile, there are connoisseurs of invective in this town who would rejoice to hear the Hon. David H. Carroll in rebuttal of Right Hon. James McC. Trippe.

The dependence of the passion of love upon katzenjammer and other such obscure and complex pathological states, to which I alluded incidentally the other day, is a matter which deserves to be investigated with thoroughness by metaphysicians and morbid anatomists. The direct connection between physical disturbance and psychic disturbance has been noted, of course, for many centuries, but the tendency has always been to mistake the cause for the effect and the effect for the cause. This error is reinforced and dignified at the present day by all the current rumble-bumble about the influence of mind upon matter—a delusion chiefly propagated by faith healers and other such mountebanks, but also nursed absurdly by medical men who should know better. The fact is that, save in rare and unsatisfactory cases, no such influence is demonstrable. But the contrary influence—i. e., that of matter upon mind, or, more specifically, of metabolism upon emotion—is susceptible of easy and overwhelming proof.>

That a man in love is not an entirely sound man we all know. As he is described by the poets, he is pale and jumpy and suffers a considerable diminution of his normal appetite. His ordinary vocation, whether tending bar or writing fugues, grows difficult and distasteful, and he is beset by insomnia. To this picture add a sudden repugnance to alcohol and tobacco and you have the classical lover. What ails the poor fellow? The common answer is that he is in love. That answer, I believe, is a dangerous half-truth. It is true in so far as it presumes a casual relationship between the two groups of phenomena, but is untrue in so far as it puts the psychic cart before the physical horse.

The real truth lies deeper. To get at it we must examine the two states, as it were, spatially and temporally, noting acutely how they overlap. When this is done upon a grand scale and with instruments of precision, it will be foumd, I am convinced, that the physical stigmata of love, far from being mere consequences and echoes of the underlying psychic state, are really forerunners of that state. That is to say, it will be found that the moment of incidence of the first sentimental delusion does not precede, but actually follows, the moment of incidence of circulatory and nervous disarrangement.

Assuming this to be so, what does it teach us? Obviously, it teaches us that the romantic (and psychotherapeutic) view of love is all wrong. An effect cannot precede its cause, but must follow after.† Of two related phenomena, separated in time, the first and not the second must be the causal one. Therefore, to get to the point at once, it must necessarily follow that a man who is both bilious and in love (the classical picture) is not bilious because he is in love, but in love because he is bilious. So speaks logic. And so, too, speaks the common experience of man—at all events if it be intelligently interpreted.

But this physical malaise, to produce the psychic disturbance commonly denominated love, must be of a peculiar quality. If it is too severe it fails to do so, and if, on the contrary, it is too mild or too local, it fails again. A man with sciatica or hydrophobia is not fit for wooing—and neither is a man who has just cut his lip with a razor. The first two disorders are too serious and the third is too trivial. What is needed, to inflame the mind with delusions of beauty and amiability, is some disturbance that is both general and depressing, and yet neither fatal nor wholly incapacitating. For example, the lassitude following typhoid fever. For example, surgical shock, at least in its secondary phases. For example, katzenjammer.

I place katzenjammer last, but in reality it should go first—not because it is better fitted for the work than the other malaises named, but simply because it is more widely dispersed in civilization. After all, comparatively few young men have typhoid fever, even in Baltimore, and many of those who do have it die of it, and are thus lost to love. Again, surgical shock is not a common disorder, for the plain reason that surgery itself is still held to be deviltry by the vulgar. But katzenjammer, in its chronic or circular forms, invades the arteries of at least 80 per cent. of all civilized white men. And beside being endemic and almost universal, it is also well-nigh ideally adapted to the production of slightly abnormal psychic states, for it floods the brain with toxins and yet does not interfere with either locomotion or speech. In brief, a. man suffering from katzenjammer, supposing the attack to be of average virulence, is perfectly able to go into society and to converse with the persons he meets there,†† and yet remains unable to differentiate clearly between cosmetics and the epidermis, or between native kindness of heart and a deliberate effort to ensnare him. Thus he falls in love.

At once I hear a criticism. If katzenjammer thereby produces sentiment, what about the traditional disorders of the man definitely in love—for example, his continued paleness, his progressive loss of appetite? Katzenjammer lasts but a few days, and the man who falls in love usually swears off drinking at once. Isn’t it true, then, that love, whatever its origin in an effect, eventually becomes a cause—that it produces malaise as it was itself produced by malaise—that the poets and mental healers, whatever the hastiness of their generalizations, have always touched. truth?

An apparently sound criticism, to be sure, but in it there is a fallacy, and that is the fallacy of assuming that katzenjammer is a merely temporary disorder, like sunburn or a black eye. The truth is, of course, that its effects last far longer than they are commonly believed to last. Accordingto Knortz they may be detected 60 days after the last drink; According to Lauterbacher††† they may persist for six or seven months, or even for a year. I am unable to go into the evidence supporting this doctrine, but it may be accepted as perfectly sound. Obviously, it gives stout legs to my own theory of amorgenesis. It not only shows how and why a man may fall in love a whole week after he has taken a drink, but it also shows how and why be may continue to show the external symptoms of love fully six months after he has been actually snared.

Zoepprits: Die Metabolismus; vol. II, p. 354. †Aristotle: Sophistical Refutations; lib. I, cap. 7. Reports of Baltimore Health Department, 1875-1911. ††Himmelheber: Der Katzenjammer; Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, Nr. 496. Zentralblatt fuer Trinkwissenschaft, Nr. 54, Feb. 23, 1907. †††Fliegende Blaetter, Nr. 2,435, Aug. 31, 1904.