spaces and to the rest of the body, its activity is functionally of
service. Then, also, the vessels, unaided by changes of posture and by
motion, lose tone, and the distant local circuits, for all of these
reasons, cease to receive their normal supply, so that defects of
nutrition occur, and, with these, defects of temperature.

"I was struck with the extent to which these evils may go, in the case
of Mrs. P., æt. 52, who was brought to me from New Jersey, having been
in bed fifteen years. I soon knew that she was free of grave disease,
and had stayed in bed at first because there was some lack of power and
much pain on rising, and at last because she had the firm belief that
she could not walk. After a week's massage I made her get up. I had won
her full trust, and she obeyed, or tried to obey me, like a child. But
she would faint and grow deadly pale, even if seated a short time. The
heart-beats rose from sixty to one hundred and thirty, and grew feeble;
the breath came fast, and she had to lie down at once. Her skin was
dry, sallow, and bloodless, her muscles flabby; and when, at last, after
a fortnight more, I set her on her feet again, she had to endure for a
time the most dreadful vertigo and alarming palpitations of the heart,
while her feet, in a few minutes of feeble walking, would swell so as to
present the most strange appearance. By and by all this went away, and
in a month she could walk, sit up, sew, read, and, in a word, live like
others. She went home a well-cured woman.

"Let us think, then, when we put a person in bed, that we are lessening
the heart-beats some twenty a minute, nearly a third; that we are
causing the tardy blood to linger in the by-ways of the blood-round, for
it has its by-ways; that rest in bed binds the bowels, and tends to
destroy the desire to eat; and that muscles at rest too long get to be
unhealthy and shrunken in substance. Bear these ills in mind, and be