Wear and tear, or, Hints for the overworked / by S. Weir Mitchell.

  • Silas Weir Mitchell
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Wear and tear, or, Hints for the overworked / by S. Weir Mitchell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    of need, so that its owner feels amazed at the ease of its processes and at the sense of wide-awake- fulness and power that accompanies them. It is only after very long misuse that the brain begins to have means of saying, I have done enough ; and at this stage the warning comes too often in the shape of some one of the many symptoms which indicate that the organ is already talking with the tongue of disease. I do not know how these views will be generally received, but I am sure that the personal expe- rience of many scholars will decide them to be correct; and they serve to make clear why it is that men may not know they are abusing the organ of thought until it is already suffering deeply, and also wherefore the mind may not be as ruthlessly overworked as the legs or arms. Whenever I have closely questioned patients or men of studious habits as to this matter, I have found that most of them, when in health, recog- nized no such thing as fatigue in mental action, or else I learned that what they took for this was merely that physical sense of being tired, which arises from prolonged writing or constrained posi-