Chicago Tribune
GOSSIP AND THE VASO-MOTOR SYSTEM.
Thanks to the explanations of science, many things which before were inexplicable or reprehensible are now furnished with satisfactory motives or made to seem good and necessary. Prof. Thomas has show us that the habit we call gossip, and for which womankind has been blamed throughout the ages, is not only something for which she is not responsible but is almost necessary to her nature, as it were, an antidote for ennui.
According to the professor it is a survival from primitive times. In the good old days of the stone age, and even later, our ancestors were defended from ennui by encounters with the auroch and other wild beasts. They also kept off the blues by hitting each other on the head with axes. These things provided shocks to the vaso-motor system. Our ancestors didn’t know they had a vaso-motor system, but they had it just the same, and so have we in a much more sensitive state.
The startling personal new which passes by word of mouth in our times or exhibits itself in the scare heads of newspapers acts upon your vaso-motor system just as the blow of a stone ax did to your ancestors, and the shocks these things provide serve to keep off the blue devils. Do not be afraid of gossip. It is a bulwark against ennui.
