There remains a class of cases desirable to fatten and redden,--cases
which are often, or usually, chronic in character, and present among
them some of the most difficult problems which perplex the physician. If
I pause to dwell upon these, it is because they exemplify forms of
disease in which my method of treatment has had the largest success; it
is because some of them are simply living records of the failure of
every other rational plan and of many irrational ones; it is because
many of them find no place in the text-book, however sadly familiar they
are to the physician.

The group I would speak of contains that large number of people who are
kept meagre and often also anæmic by constant dyspepsia, in its varied
forms, or by those defects in assimilative processes which, while more
obscure, are as fertile parents of similar mischiefs. Let us add the
long-continued malarial poisonings, and we have a group of varied origin
which is a moderate percentage of cases in which loss of weight and loss
of color are noticeable, and in which the usual therapeutic methods do
sometimes utterly fail.

For many of these, fresh air, exercise, change of scene, tonics, and
stimulants are alike valueless; and for them the combined employment of
the tonic influences I shall describe, when used with absolute rest,
massage, and electricity, is often of inestimable service.

A portion of the class last referred to is one I have hinted at as the
despair of the physician. It includes that large group of women,
especially, said to have nervous exhaustion, or who are defined as
having spinal irritation, if that be the prominent symptom. To it I must
add cases in which, besides the wasting and anæmia, emotional