fault.  Certain results will follow certain diseases and only proper care can keep such results from following.  Dropsy frequently follows even a light case of scarlet fever.  Why?  Simply because, on account of being a light case, the child is left to roam at will about the rooms and catches cold, takes la grippe.  If people would only take care of themselves this disease would not leave so many lifelong victims.  I have seen men and women who have just recovered from this disease stand on the street corners on a cold, damp day, and talk an hour, and the next day they wondered how they could possibly have taken cold.  We cannot disobey the laws of nature safely.  Persons who are subject to neuritis or rheumatism should be especially careful on cold, damp, wet days and of over-exertion.

[280 Mothers’ remedies]

General and functional brain diseases.  Nervous
prostration.  Nervous exhaustion. 
Neurasthenia.

Nervous prostration.—­Is a condition of weakness or exhaustion of the nervous system, giving rise to various forms of mental and bodily inefficiency.

Causes. 1.  Hereditary causes.—­Some children are born of parents who are weak themselves, and who have led fast lives through business or pleasure and these parents have given their offspring a weakened body, and the children are handicapped with a nervous predisposition and furnish a considerable proportion of “nervous” patients.

2.  Acquired.—­It is acquired by continual worry and overwork, sexual indiscretion, excesses, irregular living and indiscretion in diet.  A great many business men, teachers and journalists become “neurasthenics.”  It may follow infectious diseases, particularly influenza, typhoid fever and syphilis.  It also follows operations sometimes.  Alcohol, tobacco, morphine may produce a high grade of the disease, if their use is abused.

Symptoms.—­These are varied.  The most prominent symptom is fatigue.  The patient feels so tired and complains of being unable to do any mental labor.  It is almost impossible to put the mind on one subject for any length of time.  There are headache, dizziness, want of sleep, and there is great depression of spirits; patient is gloomy, irritable in temper with manifestations of hysteria.  Sometimes there are marked symptoms of spinal trouble.  Pain along the spine with spots or areas of tenderness.  Pains simulating rheumatism are present.  There is frequently great muscular weakness, great prostration after the least exertion, and a feeling of numbness, tingling, and neuralgic pains.  In spinal symptoms, there is an aching pain in the back, or in the back of the neck, which is a quite constant complaint.  Then there are the anxiety symptoms in many cases.  There may be only a fear of impending insanity or of approaching death, or of apoplexy, in simple cases.  More frequently the anxious feeling is localized somewhere