Publisher's Synopsis
General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1921 Original Publisher: The Century Co. Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Science Fiction / General Medical / Neurology Psychology / General Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis Psychology / Psychotherapy / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II In which we learn what " nerves " are not, and get a hint of what they are THE DRAMA OF NERVES An Exploded Theory " Nerves " not Nerves. Pick up any newspaper, turn over a few pages, and you will be sure to come to an advertisement something like this: Tired man, your nerves are sick! They need rest and a tonic to restore their worn-out depleted cells! No wonder people have believed this kind of thing. It has been dinned into their ears for many years. They have read it with their breakfast coffee and gazed at it in the street cars and even heard it from their family physicians, until it has become part and parcel of their thinking; yet all the time the fundamental idea has been false, and now, at last, the theory is exploded. So far as the modern laboratory can discover, thenerves of the most confirmed neurotic are perfectly healthy. They are not starved, nor depleted, nor exhausted; the fat-sheath is not wanting, there is no inflammation, there is nothing lacking in the cell itself, and there is no accumulation of fatigue products. Paradoxical as it may sound, there is nothing the matter with a nervous person's nerves. The faithful messengers have borne the blame for so long that their name has gotten itself woven into the very language as symbolic of disease. When we speak of nervous prostration, neurasthenia, neuroses, nervousness, and " nerves " we mean...
