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.

    8/294 (page 6)
    The nervous system is strong enough, and would give no trouble were it not poisoned by the abnormal prod- ucts of digestion that enter the blood and circulate freely through every tissue of the body. Now, while protesting against the too indiscriminate diagnosis of neurasthenia, I would by no means have it understood that I am not a firm believer in the propriety of clas- sifying under this head that great family of symptoms which the late Dr. Beard was the first to distinctly formulate and label. In many cases it is true, the neurotic and the hepatic types are so combined in the same individual as to give rise to the expressive term neurasthenic lithsemia, but in other cases, the symp- toms, while in many respects similar, depend upon en- tirely different causes, and justify a distinct nomencla- ture. Dr. Beard quite overlooked this important point in the present work, although in Sexual Neurasthe- nia, the MSS. of which he left unfinished, but which I completed and edited some years ago, the subject is simply alluded to. In reissuing this book I have, besides various other additions, called attention to some of the differential points of diagnosis between neurasthenia and that functional disturbance of the digestive system that we term lithaemia, two conditions demanding methods of treatment radically diverse. The editor's notes and additions are indicated by brackets [ ], pages 85 to 87; 138 to 146; 207 to 212; 236 to 238 and sundry foot notes. A. D. Bockwell.