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.

Date:
1890
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 Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    10/292 (page 6)
    grasp whenever we have attempted to seize them and bring them into science; and in discouragement and disgust, and in a spirit of skepticism, which is the highest form of creduUty, physicians, imitating the unscientific example of the laity, have denied the ex- istence of such symptoms, just as they formerly denied the existence of diphtheria and hay fever. Neuras- thenia, indeed, has been the Central Africa of medicine —an unexplored territory into which few men enter, and those few have been compelled to bring reports that have been neither credited nor comprehended. The present work is the result of the experience and study of my entire professional life in the subject to which it relates. The term neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion) is of Greek derivation [veupov nerve, a privative, and ff^evo? strength], and literally interpreted means lack of nerve strength. My first paper on this subject, based on the study of thirty cases, was prepared in 1868, was read before the New York Medical Journal Association, and was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Jour- nal, April 29th, 1869, and subsequently appeared in the first edition of Beard and Eockwell's Electricity. This was, so far as I loiow, the first systematic treat- ise on neurasthenia ever pubhshed. At first the subject excited absolutely no interest in the profession of this country. In Europe the effect was somewhat different. In England, Dr. Hugh Campbell shortly after published