ble organic
disease. Why such people should sometimes be so hard to cure I cannot
say. But the sad fact remains. Iron, acids, travel, water-cures, have
for a certain proportion of them no value, or little value, and they
remain for years feeble and forever tired. For them, as for the whole
class, the pleasures of life are limited by this perpetual weariness and
by the asthenopia which they rarely escape, and which, by preventing
them from reading, leaves them free to study day after day their
accumulating aches and distresses.

Medical opinion must, of course, vary as to the causes which give rise
to the familiar disorders I have so briefly sketched, but I imagine that
few physicians placed face to face with such cases would not feel sure
that if they could insure to these patients a liberal gain in fat and in
blood they would be certain to need very little else, and that the
troubles of stomach, bowels, and uterus would speedily vanish.

I need hardly say that I do not mean by this that the mere addition of
blood and normal flesh is what we want, but that their gradual increase
will be a visible result of the multitudinous changes in digestive,
assimilative, and secretive power in which the whole economy inevitably
shares, and of which my relation of cases will be a better statement
than any more general one I could make here.

Such has certainly been the result of my own very ample experience. If I
succeed in first altering the moral atmosphere which has been to the
patient like the very breathing of evil, and if I can add largely to the
weight and fill the vessels with red blood, I am usually sure of giving
general relief to a host of aches, pains, and varied disabilities. If I
fail, it is because I fail in these very points, or else because I have
overlooked or undervalued some serious organic tissue-change. It must be
said that now and then one is beaten by a patient who has an
unconquerable taste for invalidism, or one to whom the change of moral
atmosphere is not bracing, or by sheer laziness, as in the case of a
lady who said to me, as a final argument, "Why should I walk when I can
have a negro boy to push me in a chair?"

It will have been seen that I am careful in the selection of cases for
this treatment. Conducted under the best circumstances for success, it
involves a good deal that is costly. Neither does it answer as well, and
for obvious reasons, in hospital wards; and this is most true in regard
to