he underlying cause has been
carefully studied out and removed.

"Nerves," "neurasthenia," "psychasthenia," and "hysteria," are all the
names of _symptoms_ of _definite bodily disease_. The modern physician
regards it as his duty to study out and discover the nature of this
disease, and, if possible, remove it, rather than to give high-sounding,
soul-satisfying names to the symptoms, and advise the patient to "cheer
up"; which advice costs nothing--and is worth just what it costs.

"But," some one will say at once, "if nervous diseases are simply the
reflection of general bodily states, as sanitary conditions improve
under civilization, should they not become less frequent? And yet, any
newspaper will tell you that nervous diseases are rapidly on the
increase." This is a widespread belief, not only on the part of the
public, but of many scientists and a considerable number of physicians;
but it is, I believe, unfounded.

In the first place, we have no reliable statistical basis for a positive
statement, either one way or another. Our ignorance of the precise
prevalence of disease in savagery, in barbarism, and even under
civilization up to fifty years ago, is absolute and profound. It is only
since 1840 that vital statistics of any value, except as to gross deaths
and births, began to be kept. So far as we are able to judge from our
study of savage tribes by the explorer, the army surgeon, and the
medical missionary, the savage nervous system is far less well balanced
and adjustable than that of civilized man. Hysteria, instead of
occurring only in individual instances, attacks whole villages and
tribes. In fact, the average savage lives in a state alternating between
naive and childish self-satisfaction and panic-stricken terror, with
their resultant cowardice and cruelty on the one hand, and unbridled
lust and delusions of grandeur on the other. The much-vaunted strain of
civilization upon the nervous system is not one-fifth that of savagery.

Think of living in a state when any night might see your village raided,
your hut burned, yourself killed or tortured at the stake, and your wife
and children carried into slavery. Read the old hymns and see how
devoutly thankful our pious ancestors _were every day_ at finding
themselves alive in the morning,--"Safely through another night,"--and
fancy the nerve-strain of never knowing, when you lay down to sleep,
whether some one of the djinns, or voodoos, or vampires would