CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.


For some years I have been using with success, in private and in
hospital practice, certain methods of renewing the vitality of feeble
people by a combination of entire rest and excessive feeding, made
possible by passive exercise obtained through the steady use of massage
and electricity.

The cases thus treated have been chiefly women of a class well known to
every physician,--nervous women, who, as a rule, are thin and lack
blood. Most of them have been such as had passed through many hands and
been treated in turn for gastric, spinal, or uterine troubles, but who
remained at the end as at the beginning, invalids, unable to attend to
the duties of life, and sources alike of discomfort to themselves and
anxiety to others.

In 1875 I published in "Séguin's Series of American Clinical Lectures,"
Vol. I., No. iv., a brief sketch of this treatment, under the heading
of "Rest in the Treatment of Nervous Disease," but the scope afforded
me was too brief for the details on a knowledge of which depends success
in the use of rest, I have been often since reminded of this by the many
letters I have received asking for explanations of the minutiæ of
treatment; and this must be my apology for bringing into these pages a
great many particulars which are no doubt well enough known to the more