in. Cut the telegraph wire, the nerve, and no
amount of injury to the finger can cause pain. It is equally true that
a misbehaving brain can report sensations that have no external
cause, that have not come in through the regular channel along the
nerve. The pain feels just the same, is every bit as uncomfortable as
though its cause were external.

Sometimes, instead of reporting false pains, the brain misbehaves in
other ways. It seems to lose its power to decide, to concentrate, or
to remember. Then the patient is almost sure to fancy himself going
insane. But insanity is a physical disease, implying changes or toxins
in the brain cells. Functional disorders tell another story. Their
cause is different, even though the picture they present is often a
close copy of an organic disease.

=Distorted Pictures.= It should not be thought, however, that the
symptoms of functional and organic troubles are identical. Hysteria
and neurasthenia closely simulate every imaginable physical disease,
but they do not exactly parallel any one of them. It may take a
skilled eye to discover the differences, but differences there are.
Functional troubles usually show a near-picture of organic disease,
with just enough contradictory or inconsistent features to furnish a
clue as to their real nature. For this reason it is important that the
treatment of the disease be solely the province of the physician; for
only the carefully trained in all the requirements of diagnosis can
differentiate the pseudo from the real, the innocuous from the
disastrous.

False or nervous neuritis may feel like real neuritis (the result of
poisons in the blood), but it gives itself away when it localizes
itself in parts of the body where there is no nerve trunk. The
exhaustion of neurasthenia sometimes seems extreme enough to be the
result of a dangerous physical condition; but when this exhaustion
disappears as if by magic under the proper kind of treatment, we know
that the trouble cannot be in the body. Let it be said, then, with all
the emphasis we can command, "nerves" are not physical. Laboratory
investigation, contradictory symptoms, and response to treatment all
bear witness to this fact. Whatever symptoms of disturbance there may
be in pure nervousness, the nerves and organs can in no way be shown
to be diseased.

THE POSITIVE SIDE

="Nerves" not Imaginary.= "But," some one says, "how can healthy
organs misbehave in this way? Something must be w