Fat and blood : an essay on the treatment of certain forms of neurasthenia and hysteria / by S. Weir Mitchell.

Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Fat and blood : an essay on the treatment of certain forms of neurasthenia and hysteria / by S. Weir Mitchell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    be tested by the fact that at the thirtieth day of rest in bed, and after five years of failure to menstruate, to her surprise she had a normal monthly flow. This continued with regularity until eighteen months later, when she became pregnant. The only drawback to her perfect use of all her functions lay in asthenopia, which lasted nearly a year after she left my care. Fa- tigue of vision for near work is a common con- dition of the cases I am now describing, and is apt to persist long after all other troubles have vanished. When there is no asthenopia I usually think well of the general chance of recovery; but in no case of feeble vision do I omit at some period of the treatment to have the optical appa- ratus of the eye looked at with care, because pure asthenopia, apart from all optical defects, is a somewhat rare symptom. Neither am I always satisfied with the ophthal- mologist’s dictum that there is a defect so slight as to need no correction, being well aware, as I have elsewhere pointed out, that even minute ocular defects are competent mischief-makers when the brain becomes what I may permit my- self, using the photographer’s language, to call sensitized by disease.