Outwitting Our Nerves | Page 5

investigation,

contradictory symptoms, and response to treatment all bear witness to
this fact. Whatever symptoms of disturbance there may be in pure
nervousness, the nerves and organs can in no way be shown to be
diseased.
THE POSITIVE SIDE
="Nerves" not Imaginary.= "But," some one says, "how can healthy
organs misbehave in this way? Something must be wrong. There must
be some cause. If 'nerves' are not physical, what are they? They surely
can't be imaginary." Most emphatically, they are real; nothing could be
more maddening than to have some one suggest that our troubles are
"mere imagination." No wonder such theories have been more popular
with the patient's family than with the patient himself. Many years ago
a physician put the whole truth into a few words: "The patient says, 'I
cannot'; his friends say, 'He will not'; the doctor says, 'He cannot will.'"
He tries, but in the circumstances he really cannot.
=The Man behind the Body.= The trouble is real; the organs do "act
up"; the nerves do carry the wrong messages. But the nerves are merely
telegraph wires. They are not responsible for the messages that are
given them to carry. Behind the wires is the operator, the man higher
up, and upon him the responsibility falls. In functional troubles the
body is working in a perfectly normal way, considering the perverted
conditions. It is doing its work well, doing just what it is told, obeying
its master. The troubles are not with the bodily machine but with the
master. The man behind the body is in trouble and he really has no way
of showing his pain except through his body. The trouble in nervous
disorders is in the personality, the soul, the realm of ideas, and that is
not your body, but you. Loss of appetite may mean either that the
powers of the physical organism are busily engaged in combating some
poison circulating in the blood, or that the ego is "up against"
conditions for which it has "no stomach." Paralysis may be due to a
hemorrhage into the brain tissues from a diseased blood vessel, or it
may symbolize a sense of inadequacy and defeat. Exaggerated
exhaustion, halting feet, stammering tongue, may give evidence of a
disturbed ego rather than of a diseased brain.

=All Body and no Mind.= At last we have begun to realize what we
ought to have known all along,--that the body is not the whole man.
The medical world for a long time has been in danger of forgetting or
ignoring psychic suffering, while it has devoted itself to the treatment
of physical disease.
By way of condoning this fault it must be recognized that the five years
of medical school have been all too short to learn what is needed of
physiology and anatomy, histology, bacteriology, and the various other
physical sciences. But at last the medical schools are realizing that they
have been sending their graduates out only half-prepared--conversant
with only one half of a patient, leaving them to fend for themselves in
discovering the ways of the other half. Many an M.D. has gone a long
way in this exploration. Native common sense, intuition, and careful
study have enabled him to go beyond what he had learned in his
text-books. But in the best universities the present-day student of
medicine is now being given an insight into the ways of man as a
whole--mind as well as body. The movement can hardly proceed too
rapidly, and when it has had time to reach its goal, the day of the
long-term sentence to nervousness will be past.
In the meanwhile most physicians, lacking such knowledge and with
the eye fixed largely on the body, have been pumping out the stomach,
prescribing lengthy rest-cures, trying massage, diet, electricity, and
surgical operations, in a vain attempt to cure a disease of the
personality. Physical measures have been given a good trial, but few
would contend that they have succeeded. Sometimes the patient has
recovered--in time--but often, apparently, despite the treatment rather
than because of it. Sometimes, in the hands of a man like Dr. S. Weir
Mitchell, results seem good, until we realize that the same measures are
ineffective when tried by other men, and that, after all, what has
counted most has been the personality of the physician rather than his
physical treatment.
No wonder that most doctors have disliked nervous cases. To a man
trained in all the exactness of the physical sciences, the apparent
lawlessness and irresponsibility of the psychic side of the personality is

especially repugnant. He is impatient of what he fails to comprehend.
=All Mind and no Body.= This unsympathetic attitude, often only half
conscious on the part of the regular practitioners, has led many
thousands of people to follow will-o'-the-wisp cults, which pay