und,
there is nothing the matter with a nervous person's nerves. The
faithful messengers have borne the blame for so long that their name
has gotten itself woven into the very language as symbolic of disease.
When we speak of nervous prostration, neurasthenia, neuroses,
nervousness, and "nerves" we mean that body and mind are behaving
badly because of functional disorder. These terms are good enough as
figures of speech, so long as we are not fooled by them; but accepting
them in their literal sense has been a costly procedure.

Thanks to the investigations of physiologist and psychologist, usually
combined in the person of a physician, "nervousness" has been found to
be not an organic disease but a functional one. This is a very
important distinction, for an organic disease implies impairment of
the tissues of the organ, while a functional disorder means only a
disturbance of its action. In a purely nervous disorder there seems to
be no trouble with what the nerves and organs are, but only with what
they do; it is behavior and not tissue that is at fault. Of course, in
real life, things are seldom as clear-cut as they are in books, and
so it happens that often there is a combination of organic and
functional disease that is puzzling even to a skilled diagnostician.
The first essential is a diagnosis as to whether it be an organic
disease, with accompanying nervous symptoms, or a functional
disturbance complicated by some minor organic trouble. If the main
cause is organic, only physical means can cure it, but if the trouble
is functional, no amount of medicine or surgery, diet or rest, will
touch it; yet the symptoms are so similar and the dividing line is so
elusive, that great skill is sometimes required to determine whether a
given symptom points to a disturbance of physical tissue or only to
behavior.

If the physician is sometimes fooled, how much more the sufferer
himself! Nausea from a healthy stomach is just as sickening as nausea
from a diseased one. A fainting-spell is equally uncomfortable,
whether it come from an impaired heart or simply from one that is
behaving badly for the moment. It must be remembered that in
functional nervousness the trouble is very real. The organs are really
"acting up." Sometimes it is the brain that misbehaves instead of the
stomach or heart. In that case it often reports all kinds of pains
that have no origin outside of the brain. Pain, of course, is
perceived only by the bra