A merican Nervousness. 
"September, 
59 « 
its attention is always rivetted on what happened last. To 
it the last antecedent seems the cause of any event ; the 
arguments of the last speaker or author on any question 
appear the most convincing. In like manner it pities the 
just sufferings of the “poor” criminal, and totally forgets 
his victim. We are sometimes told that a very “ humane 
jurist ” expressed the opinion that the worst possible use to 
which a man could be put was to hang him. We demur to 
this view altogether. The worst use to which a criminal 
can be put is to let him loose upon Society, and they 
who urge such spurious mildness are in truth monsters of 
cruelty. 
II. AMERICAN NERVOUSNESS: 
ITS PHILOSOPHY AND TREATMENT* 
By George M. Beard, M.D., New York. 
t MERICAN nervousness, during the past half century, 
has expressed itself by a large variety of symptoms, 
a number of which are so frequent, so positive in 
their character, and so important that they have given 
names to disease, and are known as such. Among these 
symptoms and expressions of modern nervousness are 
neuralgia, sick headache, nervous dyspepsia, hay fever, and, 
above all, neurasthenia , or nervous exhaustion in all its 
various forms. These conditions, with others that might be 
mentioned, constitute a family of nervous diseases that have 
developed chiefly during the last half century, — at least, 
during the present nineteenth century, — and are most abun- 
dant, and most severe and most varied in their manifesta- 
tions, in the northern portion of the United States, although 
they are found in, and are now extending to, England and 
the Continent of Europe. 
The rise of this family of functional nervous diseases 
brings a new era into medicine and sociology, for it has no 
* Abstract of an Address delivered before the Baltimore Medical and 
Surgical Society. 
