the body, even a change in the temperature of the food may set loose
the most extreme reactions in the gastro-intestinal tract--motor,
sensory, or secretory. It is not an accident that so often the mucous
diarrhoea, which may have afflicted an excitable child in London for
many months, and which a visit to the seaside, with all its healthy
activities, may seem to have completely cured, relapses within a day
or two of the return to the restricted environment and uninteresting
routine of life in London. The child who was happy and busy and at
peace with himself, at play in the open air, resents the sudden
cessation of all this, and the nervous unrest returns. To attempt
treatment by dietetic restrictions alone is to deal only with a
symptom. The gastro-intestinal reactions are so violent that the
parents are generally voluble on the subject of the many foods which
cannot be taken and the few which are not suspect. To prescribe rigid
tables of diet is to add to the alarm of the mother, and to sustain
her in the belief that the child is in daily danger of being poisoned
by a variety of common articles of diet. Only by lowering the
excitability of the nervous system, by occupying the mind and giving
strength to the child's powers of control can we effectively combat
the hyperaesthesia. If necessary the personnel of the management of
the child will have to be altered. There may be no other way to
achieve certain and rapid improvement in a condition which is causing
grave danger to the child and very genuine distress and suffering to
the parents. A violent reaction to intoxications of all sorts is a
further stigma of nervous instability. Sudden and even inexplicable
rises of temperature are frequent complaints, and the constitutional
effects of even trivial local infections are apt to be
disproportionately great.

Fatigue is easily induced and is exhibited in all varieties of
activity--mental, physical, or visceral. Mental work may produce
fatigue with extreme readiness even although the quality of the work
may remain of a high standard. To Darwin and to Zola work for more
than three hours daily was an impossibility, and yet their work done
under these restrictions excites all men's admiration. The palpitation
and breathlessness which follows upon trivial exertion, such as
climbing a flight of stairs, is a good example of visceral fatigue.

Among adult neuropaths we recognise the harm which may be done by
unwise speeches o