How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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child was a veritable ray of sunshine in the hospital wards, and was the most thoroughly cheerful and good- natured child we have ever known. On the other hand we have seen a young girl brought tp a psychiatric clinic in the early stages of dementia prsecox who dated her depression and discouragement to the use of her brother’s cold cream and the consequent appearance of a few innocuous pimples on her otherwise very pretty face. So it is that exceptional fatness or thinness, birth¬ marks, red hair, albinism, extreme hairiness or relative hairlessness, an abnormally shaped nose, difference in the colour of the eyes, protruding teeth, cleft chin or receding chin, scrawny necks or abnormally fat necks, sloping shoulders, enlarged breasts or differences in the size of the breasts, large waistlines, wide hips or abnormally narrow hips, long legs and short legs, bow legs and knock knees, large feet or very small feet, baldness or facial hair, acne, freckles, vasomotor instability (as the tendency to blush too easily, or to perspire too freely), feminine bodies in men and masculine bodies in women, and a host of other variations from the physiological norm, may become the basis of an inferiority complex, and thus lead to misanthropy, isolation, and fear because of their social rather than their medical importance. Beauty and Ugliness There is no doubt that most people find it easier to get along with a good-looking person than with an ugly person, but on the other hand, nowhere in the world is physical beauty so over-rated as in the English-speaking countries. It has been our custom to console those who are not beautiful with the helpful thought that the world’s progress has not been made by chorus girls and show¬ men. Without exception the men and women who have really contributed most to human happiness have been ugly, misshapen, physically unattractive people. You have only to look at portraits of Socrates, with his saddle nose and pot belly, at Beethoven, writh his brutal butcher’s face, at Daniel Webster with his rachitic frohtal bosses,