H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/January 16, 1911

A Friendly Warning

Let the United Railways beware. If it continues to put pay-as-you-enter cars in service there will be a rising of smokers and maybe a shedding of blood. The custom of smoking on car platforms goes back to 1858. It has attained in Baltimore to the dignity of a vested right. Upon what theory does the railways company presume to abolish it? Smoking, it may be admitted, is a filthy and immoral habit, but we smokers are not disposed to be taught morals by a corporation. It is the duty of such a corporation to make its service accord with the customs of the town. It has no right to mutilate and butcher those customs to make them fit its cars. Let it take a warning from a sincere well-wisher. On the day the last smoker is driven inside murder will be done.  

A Baltimorean Makes Good

George Bronson Howard, that electric ex-Baltimorean, has two new plays awaiting production. His first play, “The Only Law,” was not much of a success in the theatre, perhaps because it came too soon after “The Easiest Way,” but it revealed a very decided capacity for play-building, and those critics who could separate its structure from its morals gave a lot of praise to it. That was two years or more ago. Since then Howard has been writing other plays and doing miscellaneous literary work. His book reviews in the New York Telegraph have attracted a good deal of attention, chiefly on account of their vigorous protest against namby-pambyism, and he has written short stories and songs, not to mention a novel, “Owls’ House,” done in collaboration with Leo Crane, another ex-Baltimorean who has fast come to the front. 

One of Howard’s new plays is a piece called “The Snobs,” in which Frank McIntyre, who is now starring in “The Traveling Salesman,” will probably appear in the spring. It will be put forth as the work of “Howard Fitzalan.” Howard has been using this pseudonym for some time. 

The Attack on Surgery

“Scientists are demonstrating that nearly 50 per cent of our bodily ills are caused by mental worries and hysteria.” So says H. Addington Bruce in the American Magazine, or, at any rate, he’s made to say so in a press sheet issued by that magazine. Scientists, as a matter of fact, are demonstrating nothing of the sort. What they are actually demonstrating is this: That 99 per cent of the so-called mental and nervous diseases have a purely physical origin. Fifty years ago insanity was still regarded as a disease apart from all other diseases. Today we know that it is often caused by a certain nasty little spirillum. Fifty years hence we may know that it is always caused by some such tiny devil. Who hears anything of “brain fever” today? It is out of fashion, even in best-sellers. Today we call it meningitis and go for the germ. 

In the same press sheet Dr. Pierre Janet, “the world’s foremost authority on hysteria,” is made to say that imaginary tuberculosis of the lungs, simulating the real malady in every detail, is common. Humor ill becomes a “world’s foremost authority.” He is also made to say that arms are often cut off and neck muscles incised for mere cricks, bones broken for mere cramps and abdomens (he uses a less refined word) cut open for phantom tumors. Let him produce one arm that was cut off for a “crick’”; let him point to one bone that was broken for a cramp. 

These silly attacks upon surgery are constantly being made. We are told that the surgeons are frenzied butchers who chop aimlessly and incessantly and kill their thousands every month. Well, let us have a list, or a partial list, of those they have killed since December 15. Let us descend from the general to the particular. Let us see the proofs!  

Adorning a Bald Head

According to the Boston Evening Transcript, balditue, once a sore affliction, has been lately transformed by the ingenuity of German orthopedists into a source of keen aesthetic delight, not alone to the bald-headed man himself, but also connoisseurs in general. The smooth hemisphere of glistening epidermis need be no longer an unsightly desert, devoid alike of fertility and of beauty. The artist of the electric needle and graining comb now deals with it as the brush artist deals with his canvas, giving variety of tint and texture to its surface and making it the background of his exquisite designs. 

The fashionable finish for bald-heads this autumn, says the Transcript, in a leading article, is known as the mat or ground glass. It is soft and velvety and entirely eliminates the glitter which is so trying to the eyes. The production of this finish, if it is to be permanent, requires the services of an expert vivisectionist and the use of a whole battery of needles, rollers, rubber brushes and files; but most prefer the equally artistic if less lasting surface produced by ordinary violinist’s rosin. Pass the slab of rosin over the scalp two or three times on arising in the morning and then remove the loose globules with a few deft swishes of a Shropshire towel. The result is a beautiful salmon-pink tone, with halftones of russet and gold and a surface having the depth and softness of a Japanese print. 

Many baldheaded men are now having curls tattooed upon their domes by professional tattooers of the merchant marine. The illusion thus effected is complete, but there is a difficulty in the fact that fashions in combing the hair change frequently, while tattooed locks must needs be permanent. Some men are getting around that difficulty by having their heads “grained,” as the trade phrase has it, by house painters. The resultant waves and convolutions of apparent hair may be removed later on with benzine or sandpaper. The toupee is now entirely out of fashion, for besides being hideous in aspect it is known to harbor bacilli, dust confetti and other bearers of disease.