to be diseased.


THE POSITIVE SIDE

="Nerves" not Imaginary.= "But," some one says, "how can healthy
organs misbehave in this way? Something must be wrong. There must be
some cause. If 'nerves' are not physical, what are they? They surely
can't be imaginary." Most emphatically, they are real; nothing could
be more maddening than to have some one suggest that our troubles are
"mere imagination." No wonder such theories have been more popular
with the patient's family than with the patient himself. Many years
ago a physician put the whole truth into a few words: "The patient
says, 'I cannot'; his friends say, 'He will not'; the doctor says, 'He
cannot will.'" He tries, but in the circumstances he really cannot.

=The Man behind the Body.= The trouble is real; the organs do "act
up"; the nerves do carry the wrong messages. But the nerves are merely
telegraph wires. They are not responsible for the messages that are
given them to carry. Behind the wires is the operator, the man higher
up, and upon him the responsibility falls. In functional troubles the
body is working in a perfectly normal way, considering the perverted
conditions. It is doing its work well, doing just what it is told,
obeying its master. The troubles are not with the bodily machine but
with the master. The man behind the body is in trouble and he really
has no way of showing his pain except through his body. The trouble in
nervous disorders is in the personality, the soul, the realm of ideas,
and that is not your body, but _you_. Loss of appetite may mean either
that the powers of the physical organism are busily engaged in
combating some poison circulating in the blood, or that the ego is "up