, or whether the mind created the brain and nervous
system, or, as it has been epigrammatically put in a recent work on
psychology, "whether the mind has a body, or the body has a mind," I
merely call attention to the fact that this confusion of meanings
exists, and that its injection into the field of medicine and pathology,
at least, has done an enormous amount of harm in the way of confusing
problems and preventing a proper recognition of the actual facts.

The more carefully and exhaustively and dispassionately we study the
disorders of the nervous system which come in the field of medicine, the
more irresistibly we are drawn to the conclusion that from neurasthenia
and hysteria to insanity and paralysis they are every one of them the
result of some definite morbid change in some cell or strand of the
nervous system. The man or woman who is nervous has poisoned
nerve-cells, either from hereditary defect, or direct saturation of the
tissues with toxic substances. The patient who has an imaginary disease
is suffering from some kind of a hallucination produced by poison-soaked
nerve-cells, such as in highest degree give rise to the delirium of
fevers, and the horrid spectres of delirium tremens.

Even the man who is suffering from a "mind diseased," and confined in
one of our merciful asylums for the insane, is in that condition and
position on account of physical disease, not merely of his brain, but of
his entire body. The lunatic is insane, in the for once correct
derivative sense of unhealthy, to the very tips of his fingers. Not
merely his mind and his brain, but his liver, his stomach, his skin, his
hair and fingernails, the very sweat-glands of his surface which control
his bodily odor, are diseased and have been so usually for years before
his mind breaks down.

Tell a competent expert to pick out of a crowd of a thousand men and
women the ten who are likely to become insane, and his selection will be
found almost invariably to include the two or three who will actually
become so.

In fact, from even the crudest and scantiest knowledge of the actual
growth of our own bodies from the ovum to the adult, it will be
difficult to conceive how this relation could be otherwise, The
nerve-cells and their long processes, which form the nerve-trunks, are
simply one of a score of different specialized cells which exist side by
side in the body. Primarily all our body-cells had the power of
responding to stimuli, of di