er. I have pointed out what I mean by rest,
how it hurts, and how it seems to help; and, as I believe that it is
useful in most cases only if employed in conjunction with other means,
the study of these becomes of the first importance.

The two aids which by degrees I learned to call upon with confidence to
enable me to use rest without doing harm are massage and electricity. We
have first to deal with massage, and I give some care to the description
of details, because even now it is imperfectly understood in this
country, and because I wish to emphasize some facts about it which are
not well known, I think, on either side of the Atlantic.

Massage in some form has long been in use in the East, and is well known
as the _lommi-lommi_ of the slothful inhabitants of the Sandwich
Islands. In Japan it is reserved as an occupation for the blind, whose
delicate sense of feeling might, I should think, very well fit them for
this task. It is, however, in these countries less used in disease than
as the luxury of the rich; nor can I find in the few books on the
subject that it has been resorted to habitually as a tonic in Europe, or
otherwise than as a means of treating local disorders.

It is many years since I first saw in this city general massage used by
a charlatan in a case of progressive paralysis. The temporary results he
obtained were so remarkable that I began soon after to employ it in
locomotor ataxia, in which it sometimes proved of signal value, and in
other forms of spinal and local disease. At first I had to train nurses
to use it, but I soon found that, although it was of some service to
their patients, no one could use massage well who was not continually
engaged in doing it. Some men do it better than any woman; but I prefer,
nevertheless, for obvious reasons, to reserve men for male patients,
except that in cases where _strength_ is of moment, as in the forced
movements and the very hard rubbing needed for old articular adhesions,
in which force must be exercised without violence, it is usually
impossible to secure the necessary power in a feminine manipulator.

A few years later I resorted to it in the first cases which I treated by
rest, and I very soon found that I had in it an agent little understood
and of singular utility.

It will be necessary, in pursuance of my plan, to describe as minutely
as the limits of a chapter will allow how and why this means is
employed. The process and order of what is