the hospital
and in the sick-room, not only that the nerve-tissues are usually
poisoned by defect of other tissues of the body, but that they are among
the very last of the body-stuffs to succumb to an intoxication. The
complications of a given disease involving the nervous system are almost
invariably the last of all to appear. This is one of the things that has
given nervous diseases such a bad name for unmanageableness and
incurableness, and that for years made us regard their study as so
nearly hopeless, so far as any helpful results were concerned.

When a disease has, so to speak, soaked into the inmost core of the
nerve-fibre, it has got a hold which it will take months and even years
to dislodge. And before your remedies can reach it, it will often have
done irreparable damage. An illustration of the care taken to spare the
nervous system is furnished by its behavior in starvation. If a man or
an animal has almost died of starvation, the tissues of the body will be
found to have been wasted in very varying degrees, the fat, of course,
most of all; in fact this will have almost entirely disappeared, all but
three per cent. Then come the liver and great glands, which will have
shrunk about sixty per cent; then the muscles, thirty per cent; then the
heart and blood-vessels. Last of all, the nervous system, which will
scarcely have wasted to any appreciable degree. In fact, it is an
obvious instance of jettison on the part of the body, throwing overboard
those tissues which it could most easily spare, and hanging on like grim
death to those which were absolutely essential to its continued
existence, viz., the heart and the nervous system. To use a
cannibalistic and more correct illustration, it is killing and eating
the less useful and valuable members of its family, in order that their
flesh may keep alive the two or three most indispensable.

Another illustration is the actual behavior of the nerve-stuff in
disease. This is most clearly shown in those clear-cut disturbances
which are definitely known to be due to a specific infection; in other
words, invasion of the body by a disease-organism, or germ.

First of all, it may be stated that physicians are now substantially
agreed that two-thirds of the general diseases of the nervous system are
due to the extension of one of these acute infections to the
nerve-tissue; and this extension almost invariably comes late in the
disease. The only exceptions to this rule