pure
neurasthenia, or brain exhaustion, but that there is active congestion
of the gray matter of the brain. In these cases the disease is very
prone to end in serious organic affection of the brain.

[Illustration: Melancholy. ]

Severe brain exhaustion may be associated with good spirits, but usually
there is marked depression, and this perversion of function generally
goes on, if the disease be not checked, to decided melancholy. The will
power, like all the other functional activities of the brain, is prone
to be weakened, morbid fears may finally develop, and at last, that
which was at the beginning a single brain exhaustion, may end in
persistent hypochondria, followed by insanity.

Peculiar sensations are common in neurasthenia, such as chilliness,
unnatural itching, a feeling as though ants or other insects were
crawling on the skin. Eruptions are common. Attacks of neuralgia are
often frequent and sometimes severe, being usually worse in those
persons of nervous ancestry. In some cases there is a lack of proper
sensation, in others an unnatural sensitiveness. There is also in many
cases a peculiar tenderness over some portion of the spinal column,
especially in women.

IN WOMEN, with nervous disturbance of the sexual organs, there is
frequently great pain felt during menstruation; in others, ovarian
irritation and a so-called "irritable," or sensitive uterus, giving rise
to manifold nervous and hysterical symptoms, sometimes culminating in
convulsions or "fits." In not a small proportion of the uterine diseases
which are generally only locally treated by physicians, the local
disease is largely and sometimes solely the expression of a general
weakness of nervous origin.

SELF-ABUSE AND EXCESSES.

It is well known that Onanism, or masturbation, as well as sexual
excesses, produce an exhaustion of the nerve centres presiding over the
sexual functions. This is the common history of spermatorrhea or loss of
the virile fluid by nightly emissions, accompanied by lascivious dreams.

GENERAL NEURASTHENIA, or nervous exhaustion, may also produce a local
weakness of the sexual centres of the brain and spinal cord, with
symptoms at least resembling those of partial impotency and great
irritability of the sexual organs, or a complete impotence, with
premature seminal discharge whenever coition is attempted. Many times
this condition results from excessive intellectual labor, even with no
sexual excesses or abu