Neurasthenia / by Gilbert Ballet ; translated from the third French edition by P. Campbell Smith.

Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Neurasthenia / by Gilbert Ballet ; translated from the third French edition by P. Campbell Smith. 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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    methodic training, must be rigorously obeyed. The neurasthenics with whom we are deahng are perpetually on the verge of fatigue; their reserve of motor nerve energy is, so to speak, nil, and the slightest voluntary movement is enough to exhaust them. Hence the only muscular work that can be prescribed to them, at first at least, is that effected by passive movements and massage; though the patient is at rest, the movements communicated to him bring about (like those produced by voluntary muscular contraction, but without any expenditure of motor nerve-energy and consequently without functional fatigue of the nerve centres) a whole series of muscular, tendinous, and cutaneous stimuli, which are transmitted by the sensory nerves to the cells of the centres. These peripheral stimuli caused by massage, which is only a form of passive move- ment, or by communicated movements properly so-called, tend to arouse the physiological activity of the motor nerve-centres; they stimulate them gently; and even the mental image of the movement accomplished aids in the same result, that is, in preserving the functional activity of the centres without tiring the patient. Passive exercise and massage offer the further valuable advantage of promoting the peripheral circulation; hence they constitute the mode of gymnastics to be preferred in the grave forms of nervous exhaustion and notably in those cases in which 1