d about his
life. The slightest irritant causes him to go off the handle. As
he works himself up into his hysterical state as a reaction to a
disagreeable person or problem, irregular blotches may appear on
his face and neck. Generally, his hands and feet are clammy and
perspiring, his face is abnormally flushed or pallid, the eyes are
worried or starey, unwonted wandering sensations involving now this
area of the body, or now that obsess him. As the blood pressure is
too low for the age, the circulation is nearly always inadequate and
palpitation of the heart is a frequent complaint. So frequent, that
attention is often centered upon the heart, a diagnosis of heart
disease is made, and the unfortunate is doomed for life--to brood
over horrible possibilities. The brooding over themselves and their
troubles is one of the distinctive features of the whole complex.
Neurasthenia may masquerade as any organic disease. An individual with
a soil for a neurasthenic reaction to life will become neurasthenic
when confronted by any stone wall, including a serious ailment within
himself.

Beard's Neurasthenia leaped at once into the limelight. It was seized
upon and applauded in Europe as a good new name 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 interpretation 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 cults, the Christian Scientists, the osteopaths and th