824 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Though education must for ever work within limits, and can never 

 go beyond the capacity of the individual nature, one can, by strict 

 watchfulness over self, and exercising the will in the required direc- 

 tion, insensibly bring about such a babit of thought, feeling, and ac- 

 tion, as he may wish to attain to, his ideal being only a foreshadowing 

 of his own possibilities. To assist one to so train his mind and to 

 furnish him with noble and suitable objects of study is one of the 

 highest offices of a wise education ; and that women especially need 

 the help afforded by such training is evidenced by the long list of 

 female patients, suffering from some form of neuropathic disease, that 

 the busy physician carries on his books. 



To the uninitiated, hysteria stands for simple foolishness ; to the 

 physician, it represents a hydra, hundred-headed, and the parent of 

 yet more serious disorders. There is scarcely a type of disease that it 

 will not simulate. It will even take on the forms of articular rheuma- 

 tism and spinal disease, and will cause syncope apparently as profound 

 as that induced by organic disease of the heart. It does not limit 

 itself to one attack, for the tendency the automatic apparatus of the 

 body has to repeat its acts will cause the second expression of excite- 

 ment to be more easily induced, more ungovernable, and more pro- 

 longed than the first. And, the hysterical diathesis established, the 

 patient may yield to such seizures till morbid processes set up in the 

 brain and spinal cord. Its effects do not stop with the individual. 

 Lack of voluntary direction of the thoughts and feelings, and yielding 

 to melancholy and depressing passions in the mother, in her resulting 

 in neuropathic states, may exhibit remote effects in her offspring as 

 chorea, epilepsy, or an appetite for spirituous liquors. And it is not 

 too much to say that these diseases and even insanity are often but 

 differing results of a weakening of the nerves and nerve-centers, hav- 

 ing ultimately in the mother a psychic cause. For the cure of hys- 

 teria and allied complaints physicians declare that skillful mental 

 treatment is better than all the drugs in the pharmacopoeia. The re- 

 coveries that take place through sympathy, mesmerism, and miracle- 

 mongers, are easily explained when one discovers that diseases, whose 

 remote causes are nervous, often yield instantaneously to appropriate 

 psychical treatment. But better than any remedy is prevention, and, 

 if the mind can exercise a curative influence over an unstrung nervous 

 system, there is no doubt that, by means of proper physical, mental, 

 and moral training, the predisposition to neuropathic complaints, 

 which specialists declare universal in women, may be very nearly ex- 

 tinguished. 



A family that came specially under my notice will illustrate the 

 effect of the psychic states of the parent upon the offspring. The 

 father, a full-blooded animal of a man, had a most brutal temper. 

 The mother, a delicate woman of nervous temperament and submis- 

 sive disposition, used up her nervous energy keeping her husband 



