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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    mental state (melancholy, aboulia, phobias, auto- suggestions), the type of which is the association of hysteria with neurasthenia—hystero-neuras- thenia. But even in those cases in which neuras- thenia is complicated by secondary and associated disorders, it retains its fundamental and essential character of an exhaustion disease. This view, according to which the totality of the disorders that make up the affection is due, at any rate on final analysis, to a special state of weakness and irritability of the nerve elements, has not been accepted by all clinical observers ; it has been sought to make the different symptoms of the malady depend on certain visceral derange- ments. Thus some have tried to recognise disorder of the digestive functions as the origin of tlie neu- ropathic state, and have thought that dyspepsia, by the perturbation of nutrition that it causes, may be the primary and fundamental cause of the ner- vous exhaustion. Others have incriminated lesions of the genito-urinary system and genital excesses. Finally, it has been held that the weakness of the nervous centres may be the consequence of a state of poverty of the blood, as if nervous asthenia were necessarily associated with anaemia. We shall have to discuss later these diverse theories which aim at elucidating the still obscure patho- geny of the neurosis; we shall then see how much truth they may contain. But we may say at once that in the majority of cases these patho-