Another form of evil to be encountered in these cases is less easy to deal with.  Such an invalid has by unhappy chance to live with some near relative whose temperament is also nervous and who is impatient or irritable.  Two such people produce endless mischief for each other.  Occasionally there is a strange incompatibility which it is difficult to define.  The two people who, owing to their relationship, depend the one on the other, are, for no good reason, made unhappy by their several peculiarities.  Lifelong annoyance results, and for them there is no divorce possible.

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.

I need hardly say that I do not mean by this that the mere addition of blood and normal flesh is what we want, but that their gradual increase will be a visible result of the multitudinous changes in digestive, assimilative, and secretive power in which the whole economy inevitably shares, and of which my relation of cases will be a better statement than any more general one I could make here.

Such has certainly been the result of my own very ample experience.  If I succeed in first altering the moral atmosphere which has been to the patient like the very breathing of evil, and if I can add largely to the weight and fill the vessels with red blood, I am usually sure of giving general relief to a host of aches, pains, and varied disabilities.  If I fail, it is because I fail in these very points, or else because I have overlooked or undervalued some serious organic tissue-change.  It must be said that now and then one is beaten by a patient who has an unconquerable taste for invalidism, or one to whom the change of moral atmosphere is not bracing, or by sheer laziness, as in the case of a lady who said to me, as a final argument, “Why should I walk when I can have a negro boy to push me in a chair?”