A practical treatise on nervous exhaustion (neurasthenia) : its symptoms, nature, sequences, treatment / by George M. Beard ; edited, with notes and additions, by A.D. Rockwell.

  • Beard, George M. (George Miller), 1839-1883.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on nervous exhaustion (neurasthenia) : its symptoms, nature, sequences, treatment / by George M. Beard ; edited, with notes and additions, by A.D. Rockwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    coming more aud more evident, through the revela- tions of physiological chemistry and bacteriology, that it is a most important etiological factor, and a more general recognition of this fact would, I am confident, do much toward the initiation of better therapeutic methods. It may be safely asserted that a large proportion of all aches and pains and abnormal mental phenomena are due directly or in- directly to the imperfectly transformed products of digestion. Mankind is stupid in many directions, but its stupidity in the direction of eating and drinking passes comprehension, and has given rise to the say- ing that gluttony kills more people than intem- perance. For one case of insanity or neurasthenia, with their profound and varying conditions of mental and physical derangement, there are thousands of cases of transient but ever-recurring disturbances of mind and body due to toxic causes. Man habitually overeats, and the resultant end products cause, by their irritation, a long train of familiar symptoms—heaviness of head, dullness of intellect, vertigo, confusion of ideas, cold extrem- ities, etc. It is not, then, a cause of surprise that the phy- siological functions of the body are so frequently disturbed by autoinfection. When one considers the chemical complexity of the human economy, and how tissue metabolism is subject to hindrance and derangement because of disturbed digestive pro-