Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/844

824 Though education must for ever work within limits, and can never go beyond the capacity of the individual nature, one can, by strict watchfulness over self, and exercising the will in the required direction, insensibly bring about such a habit of thought, feeling, and action, as he may wish to attain to, his ideal being only a foreshadowing of his own possibilities. To assist one to so train his mind and to furnish him with noble and suitable objects of study is one of the highest offices of a wise education; and that women especially need the help afforded by such training is evidenced by the long list of female patients, suffering from some form of neuropathic disease, that the busy physician carries on his books.

To the uninitiated, hysteria stands for simple foolishness; to the physician, it represents a hydra, hundred-headed, and the parent of yet more serious disorders. There is scarcely a type of disease that it will not simulate. It will even take on the forms of articular rheumatism and spinal disease, and will cause syncope apparently as profound as that induced by organic disease of the heart. It does not limit itself to one attack, for the tendency the automatic apparatus of the body has to repeat its acts will cause the second expression of excitement to be more easily induced, more ungovernable, and more prolonged than the first. And, the hysterical diathesis established, the patient may yield to such seizures till morbid processes set up in the brain and spinal cord. Its effects do not stop with the individual. Lack of voluntary direction of the thoughts and feelings, and yielding to melancholy and depressing passions in the mother, in her resulting in neuropathic states, may exhibit remote effects in her offspring as chorea, epilepsy, or an appetite for spirituous liquors. And it is not too much to say that these diseases and even insanity are often but differing results of a weakening of the nerves and nerve-centers, having ultimately in the mother a psychic cause. For the cure of hysteria and allied complaints physicians declare that skillful mental treatment is better than all the drugs in the pharmacopoeia. The recoveries that take place through sympathy, mesmerism, and miracle mongers, are easily explained when one discovers that diseases, whose remote causes are nervous, often yield instantaneously to appropriate psychical treatment. But better than any remedy is prevention, and, if the mind can exercise a curative influence over an unstrung nervous system, there is no doubt that, by means of proper physical, mental, and moral training, the predisposition to neuropathic complaints, which specialists declare universal in women, may be very nearly extinguished.

A family that came specially under my notice will illustrate the effect of the psychic states of the parent upon the offspring. The father, a full-blooded animal of a man, had a most brutal temper. The mother, a delicate woman of nervous temperament and submissive disposition, used up her nervous energy keeping her husband