328 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



deficient power of self-control, over-sensitiveness in all directions, and 

 a very great many other unpleasant things, far too numerous to men- 

 tion here. This nervousness is commonly hereditary, but may be 

 greatly aggravated or counteracted by the conditions of life, especially 

 in youth. Such a constitution is a great curse to a woman, and ren- 

 ders her liable to many diseases. It means a brain wanting in reserve 

 or surplus energy. Such a brain is like a galvanic battery that does 

 not work steadily, but gives out too much power at one time, then sud- 

 denly is exhausted, and is always needing replenishing. There can be 

 but little doubt that the tendency of our modern life is toward the de- 

 velopment of the nervous type of constitution, or diathesis. American 

 physicians and socialists are unanimous that this constitution is very 

 common in their country. I think there can be little doubt that, if we 

 wish our descendants to multiply and cover the earth, we should try by 

 all means and counteract this tendency to the nervous constitution in a 

 morbid degree. It is most hereditary in all its forms. There are few 

 families among the educated classes nowadays free from some taint 

 of it, and it is easily increased. In the families that are now free there 

 is much risk of its being developed in the period of adolescence in the 

 girls, through the present system of education. All our modern ways 

 of looking at life help to develop nerves in a bad sense. The ideal of 

 man and woman has changed from strength to culture, from body to 

 brain. The great brawny-muscled man, who knows nothing of sick- 

 ness, but has few ideas, is looked down on ; the rosy mother of a dozen 

 healthy children, who has .no taste for books, is little thought of. It 

 may be that the time will come when such people will be more highly 

 appreciated. Out of the nervous diathesis may arise all the forms of 

 nervous disease, when their exciting causes are put in operation. 



Strongly connected with nervousness is the tendency to suffer 

 from pain without any actual disease being present to account for 

 it ; that is, to be the subject of headaches and neuralgias. Head- 

 ache is the most common thing suffered by school-girls, and originated 

 by the conditions of school-life. Dr. Truchler found that in Darm- 

 stadt, Paris, and Nuremburg, one third of the pupils in the schools 

 suffered more or less from headaches. I think we should find this 

 proportion in our advanced girls' schools in Edinburgh. He concludes 

 that it is caused by the intellectual exertion, combined with bad air, 

 with the annoyances and excitements and worries, the wasting and 

 rasping anxieties of school-life. Nothing is so terrible as severe neu- 

 ralgia, and beyond a doubt girls acquire it often enough by the condi- 

 tions of school-life. Headaches in a school-girl usually mean exhausted 

 nerve-power through overwork, over-excitement, over-anxiety, or bad 

 air. Rest, a good laugh, or a country walk, will usually cure it readily 

 enough to begin with. But to become subject to headaches is a very 

 serious matter, and all such nervous diseases have a nasty tendency to 

 recur, to become periodic, to be set up by the same causes, to become 



