Neurasthenia / Tr. from the 3d French ed. by P. Campbell Smith.

  • Ballet, Gilbert, 1853-1916.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Neurasthenia / Tr. from the 3d French ed. by P. Campbell Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    61/448 (page 27)
    men and women. Those who go out much, and especially women, have their whole day taken up by the duties that convention and the vain care of their reputation impose on them : visits, dinners, balls, and evening parties make their life one of continual constraint, and of obligations without respite. Fashion, which has introduced among us for the present a tendency to copy English habits, and which has momentarily (for every fashion is short-lived) caused a taste for passing the morning in open-air walks and athletic sports to enter into the manners of select people,mitigates in a certain measure, it must be said, the serious disadvantages of a style of existence contrary to all the rules of hygiene. It mitigates, but does not abolish them. If one reflects on the conditions of life in society, as it is led among us (and M. Melchior de Vogue has shown that in this respect Russia is not behind us), on the excitements of all sorts that it occasions, on the physical fatigues that it brings on, and that almost inevitably result from the habit of too long and too copious meals in rooms that are often over-heated, on late hours, and on insufficiency of sleep, at least of sleep at the proper times, one will not be astonished that it frequently causes the development of nervous as- thenia. This is all the more easily understood because such a wholly artificial and fictitious exist- ence almost necessarily brings in its train a sort of moral over-pressure, due to the paltry efforts