THE ADRENAL GLANDS 79 



for an old condition, observed particularly in Americans abroad 

 to rest from the fatigues of the get-rich-quick games of industrial 

 speculators. In fact, the name of the American Disease was given 

 to it. Various theories about the effects of climate, sunlight per 

 square inch and unit of time, oxygen content of the air, and so 

 on, were offered up upon the altar of scientific explanation. Sir 

 Arbuthnot Lane, famous protagonist of Lane's intestinal kink, 

 said that all Americans were neurasthenic. Neurasthenia became 

 one of the most popular of diagnoses, and remains so today. 



Neurasthenia, regarded as a reaction of people to the stress 

 and strain of life, has without a doubt increased. The most 

 casual of observers will tell you that the generation of the Great 

 War is a neurasthenic generation. It takes its pleasures too 

 intensely, its pains too seriously, its troubles too flippantly. But 

 what is neurasthenia? Beard himself regarded it as a chronic 

 fatigue and loss of tone of the nervous system, a literal interpreta- 

 tion of his term. That the conception, as far as it goes, is valid 

 is proved by the fact that it is the neurasthenics who furnish 

 the majority of the clientele of the cujt^the Christian Scientists, 

 the osteopaths and the c hirnoracfe t& and who are the subjects 

 of the faith and miracle cures, like those of Lourdes. That is 

 because their particular disease, or what appears to them to be 

 their very own disease — and they certainly cherish their ail- 

 ments — is but an expression of, a compensation for, indeed a 

 consolation for, the underlying feelings of insufficiency or infe- 

 riority. Were there no moral code, were there no social system, 

 nor the consequent inculcated conscience to be responsible to, 

 there would be no such disguising symptom as the disease which 

 preoccupies the consciousness. The feeling of insufficiency would 

 be there, and would be recognized as in itself the disease. To the 

 physiologist and the psychologist, the feeling of insufficiency is 

 the disease, no matter how spectacular the overlaying phenomena 

 — a cripple on crutches or a man blind and speechless. Shell 

 shock is now acknowledged to belong to this group. 



Now one of the outstanding effects of disease of the adrenal 

 glands is the feelings of muscular and mental inefficiency. And 

 as a matter of fact, a good number of observations conspire for 

 the idea that a certain number of neurasthenics are suffering- 

 from insufficiency of the adrenal gland. The chronic state of the- 

 acute phenomenon, known as the nervous breakdown, really rep- 

 resents in them a breakdown of the reserves of the adrenals, 

 and an elimination of their factor of safety. In the light of that 



