In a smaller number of cases, which have less tendency to emotional
disturbances, the phenomena are more simple. You have to deal with a
woman who has lost flesh and grown colorless, but has no hysterical
tendencies. She is merely a person hopelessly below the standard of
health and subject to a host of aches and pains, without notable 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.
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