Clinical lectures on neurasthenia / by Thomas Dixon Savill.

  • Thomas Dixon Savill
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Clinical lectures on neurasthenia / by Thomas Dixon Savill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    It is a source of satisfaction to find that neurasthenia is now receiving more attention and occupying a worthier place in current works on Systematic Medicine. The studies and observations on which these lectures were based were initiated at the Paddington Infirmary at a time when the disorder had received but scant attention, between 1885 and 1892, and they were continued at the Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System, Welbeck Street. The view that a large proportion of cases of neurasthenia are dependent on some specific auto-infective process, which I beheve I was the first to put forward, in i8g6 and 1897, was then at variance with the current teaching of the day. Most of the highest authorities then held that neurasthenia was purely and primarily a nervous exhaustion to be met by nerve tonics and other remedies directed solely to the nervous system. Since that date my conclusions have received the support of several contemporary writers. There are, however, stiU many observers who adhere to the old view. Some regard it as a mild form of in- sanity. There are also quite a number who consider that “ neurasthenia is essentially an affection of the mind,” and that it can only be treated satisfactorily by psychological methods. This hardly embodies my conception of neu- rasthenia, which presents in most instances both mental and physical symptoms. Undoubtedly mental symptoms may predominate, but the clinical picture of the disease II