After I had heard this plaint over and over for about a week, I said:  “Perhaps you ought not to have had that little daughter, the little ewe-lamb.  Maybe she was one too many.”  “Oh, no,” came the quick response.  “I couldn’t have spared her.”  Then I went down the line of the fine stalwart sons.  Perhaps she could have spared John or Tom or Fred?  Finally she saw the whole matter in a different light,—­saw herself as a queen among women, the mother of such a family.

As to the husband, I tried to show her that she was not very clever to live with a man all those years without discovering that he was not likely to change.  “You can’t change him but you can change your reaction to him.  If something keeps hurting your hand, you don’t keep on being sore.  You grow callous.  Isn’t it about time you grew a moral callous, too?”

I put her on the roof to sleep, on account of her fear of light.  Only once did she start a headache, which I quickly nipped in the bud by making her get up and dress.  She had come to stay “three months or four,—­if I get along well.”  At the end of four weeks she left, an apparently well woman.  The last I heard of her she was stumping the state for temperance, the oldest of an automobile party of speakers, and the sturdiest physically.  With the emotional grievance, disappeared also the physical effects in stomach and head.

Miss S., a very brilliant woman, ambitious to make the most of her life, had been shelved for twenty-five years because of violent sick-headaches which made it impossible for her to undertake any kind of work.  She had not been able to read a half-hour a day without bringing on a terrible headache.  I insisted on her reading, and very soon she was so deep in psychological literature that I had difficulty in making her go to bed at all.  After learning the cause of her headaches and gaining greater emotional control, she succeeded so well in freeing herself from the old habit, that she now leads the busiest kind of useful life with only an occasional headache, perhaps once in six months.

A certain minister suffered constantly from a dull pain in his head, besides having violent headaches every few days.  He started in to have a bad spell the day after his arrival at my house.  As I was going out of the door, he caught my sleeve.  “Doctor,” he said, “would it be bad manners to run away?” “Manners?” I answered.  “They don’t count, but morals, yes.”  He stayed—­and that was his last bad headache.  Both chronic and periodic pains disappeared for good.

One woman who had suffered from bad headaches for eighteen years lost them completely under a process of re-education.  On the other hand, I have had patients who were not helped at all.  The principles held good in their cases, but they were simply not able to lose the old habit of tightening up the body under emotion.

=Hysterical Nausea.= Sometimes nausea is merely the physical symbol of a subconscious moral disgust.  We have already told the stories of “the woman with the nausea” (Chapter V) and of Mrs. Y. (Chapter VII).  These cases are typical of many others.  Their bodies were perfectly normal, and when, through psycho-analysis and re-education, they were helped to make over their childish attitudes toward the sex-life, the nausea disappeared.