Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/368

364 lectures was given last summer extending over three weeks, for which a small fee was charged.

Such is, in brief, the theory of the practise of the Emmanuel movement, so-called. It attempts to relieve certain disorders, which have a mental or moral origin, by the use of suggestion, reinforced by an appeal to the patient's religious faith, and it invokes the aid of medical science to eliminate those disorders which have a purely physical organic basis. Except for this appeal for the help of science and the recognition of science which it contains, there is absolutely nothing in the movement that is new.

In the first place, these so-called functional diseases do really exist; although it is true that the class has been growing constantly smaller under the influence of scientific investigation and discovery. Still, it is also true, now, as in the middle of the eighteenth century when Dr. John Atkins wrote, that “many distempers, especially of women that are ill all over, or know not what they ail, have been cured, I am apt to think, more by a fancy to the physician than his prescription.”

Every doctor is familiar with the patient whose physical ailments are quite insignificant when compared with the exaggerated importance with which his mind or imagination has invested them. Every medical man recognizes how little physical basis there is for the worry, fear, doubt and melancholy with which so many of his patients are obsessed. We all appreciate how often that symptom-complex, which goes to make up what we call the neurotic temperament, is found in cases in which the most rigid physical examination fails to reveal any indication of organic disease.

In this class we find kindred conditions, which have at different times borne a great variety of names, such as nervous prostration, neurasthenia, psychasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria, or melancholia, while in other cases we are content with the simpler definition of disturbed mental equilibrium or deviation.

It seems impossible to classify these cases accurately, because there is no really scientific basis upon which a classification can be made; and the invention of new names to define certain types is not as important or as progressive as it seems.

In speaking of these names, Dubois says: “The name neurasthenia is on everybody's lips; it is the fashionable disease. But I am mistaken, the disease is not new, it is the name by which it is known that is changed. We now designate by this name, a combination of symptoms known through all time.” What we must not lose sight of is that there are diseases of the mind, or imagination, or nervous system, in which no physical deviation from the normal can be found, but which are none the less real, none the less distressing, and that they tax the skill, resources and patience of the attending physician almost to the breaking point.