The record-union., 1894-02-17
a STARTLING MATTER OF NERVES.

a STARTLING MATTER OF NERVES.
DIR. S. Weir Mitchell holds that it is
proved beyond any dispute that nervous
ness is the characteristic malady of the
American people, and that it threatens
them with disasters, at no distant date,
which the mind shrinks from contem-
plating, such is the frightfully accelerated
ratio of its increase each year.
Most of us, perhaps, have thought all
along that dyspepsia is the national dis
ease; now it is nerves" The worst of it
is that in one respect we cannot help it,
because DIR. Mitchell charges the most po-
tent cause to be our climate, and that is
beyond our control.
After all, why did Columbus make the
mistake he did? For now we are told
that nervousness is SO swift of momen-
tum that in the busy centers it has, ac-
cording to the mortality tables, multi
piled more than twenty times in the last
forty years, and that to-day more than
one-fourth of all deaths recorded are what
the doctors term ''nerve Deaths"
This is startling. Multiplying twenty
times and over in forty years, with the
population increase great as it is, it will
not be long before we are all nerve
corpses or nerve lunatics. What is to be
done?
The eminent medical essayist gives US
some hope, however, if we will correct
these evils in our habits of life: 81. The
dollar devil. p The school fiend." For
it is not late hours, gay society, the dance
and fashionable display that are running
our women and making them nerve
wrecks, since the pleasure-seeking class
are more free from nervous diseases, says
| the doctor, than any other. But this is
the indictment the scientist formulates:
The flower of American womanhood is
wilted by over-culture before Ii comes fully
INTO bloom. The long hours, the multiplicity
OF studies, the number OF teachers-each striv-
ing 10 get the utmost out of the pupils-the
Iscraving rivalry 10 be well graded, the ail-de-
iliving, the hurried or neglected meals, the
want of exercise and the fatal egularity
that it entails, the gnaWing worry that muir
lders sieep-it is these, and these alone that
condemns tens OF thousands of American
women To a life Of misery and uselessness be-
fore they have ceased to be children. 1t is a
tremendous saying, that as much domestic
lunhapp1neSS is caused IN America by nerv-
business among women us by dram-drinking
among men; but il is true if girls are main
tanned in normal nervous condition until they
aro roftr hr,rd
as they please atterward without imperiling
their Woman's life But let there be no miSs
take about 1t. Overwork and unnatural
worry from eight or nine to seventeen mean
rum and WretchedneSs from seventeen TO
early death.
AS for the dollar devil" the charge is
summed up in the wide spread COM
plant that physicians call cerebral ex-
haustion."
The American male stands the racket of the
schools much better tnan the female. He
fakes more exercise, and he has not the
troubles of puberty to contend against. But
he meets his tate shortly afterward. He goes
to business far too young, and he straightway
consumes his vital energy till nothing is lett
but dust and ashes.
E Possibly there is exaggeration in all
this, but great deal more of truth. and
DR.. Cyrus Edison, another distinguished
authority, writing contemporaneously
this Month with DR.. Mitchell upon the
subject of early marriages, goes far to
confirm the opinion of his colleague by
protesting against American women
marrying while still quite young. He
insists that the interests of the race de-
mand that they shall not marry ur -
nature has stored up great amount of
reserve strength.
He refers incidentally to "the very
great pressure of American life upon all
of us" and later on to the fact that ''our
society is based on excitement and the
tax it puts upon our nerves and brains is
of the greatest" He adds in the same
paper:
Women feel this more than men, and they
show the effects in the constantly increasing
amount of nervous diseases to be found
among them. With men and women driven
in this way, the children are born with a pre-
disposition TO nervousness Under our sys-
tenn of educating them this tendency is stim-
uiated to the utmost.
DIR. II. NJ. BIGGs says in the Forum: