The wear, tear and strain of modern life are concentrated upon the nervous system. The care and consequent fret, worry and labor of this age are greater than ever before known.
The result of this extreme activity, is exhaustion and weakness. Physical bankruptcy is the result of drawing incessantly upon the reserve capital of nerve force.
We extract the following from an article which recently appeared In the New York Tribune:
AN AGE OF NERVOUSNESS.
The stone age, the bronze age and the iron age, we have heard of; likewise of the Dark Ages, and other self-marking eras in human history. As for the present, it might with fitness be known as the age of engineering, or of electricity, both of which proud titles it has won by its achievements. Yet there is also a less roseate view to be taken of it, and another title to be given to it, based upon its too-evident frailties; namely, that it is an age of nervousness.
Such is the view taken by the famous psychologist, Dr. William Erb, of the University of Heidelberg. Nervousness, he says, meaning nervous excitement, nervous weakness, is the growing malady of the day, the physiological feature of the age. Hysteria, hypochondria and neurasthenia are increasing with fearful rapidity among both sexes. They begin in childhood, if not indeed inherited. Minds are overburdened in school, with too much teaching or misdirected teaching. The pleasures of social life follow, overexerting the already enfeebled nervous system. Business life is made up of hurry and worry and shocks and excitements. Society, science, business, art, literature, even religion, are all pervaded by a spirit of unrest, and by a competitive zeal which urges its victims on remorselessly. No man knows repose. The result is, wreckage. The pharmacopoeia is overcrowded with nerve tonics, nerve stimulants, nerve sedatives. The medical profession devotes its best energies to the treatment of neuropaths. And as a people we are, or are becoming, excitable, irritable, morbid, prone to sudden collapse through snapping of the overtense chord of the nervous vitality.
Nowhere are the rush and hurry and overstrain of life more marked than in this much-achieving Nation. The comparative youth and freshness and vigor of the American people enable them to do and to endure what would be beyond the power of an older and more worn-out community. Yet there is no disguising the fact that the pace tells even here, and often tells to kill. True, all the tendencies of the age are in that direction. Inventions, discoveries, achievements of science, all add to the sum of that which is to be learned, and widen the field in which there is work to be done. What we need to learn is, however, that all these things are for man, not man for them. If knowledge has increased, we should take more time for acquiring it, knowing that, with the consequent increase of power, we shall be able to achieve as much afterward in the shorter time as our predecessors did in the longer time their briefer study afforded. Greater ability should mean not only greater results wrought, but fuller repose as well. For it would be a sorry ending of this splendid age of learning and of labor to be known as an age of unsettled brains and shattered nerves.
A distinguished medical authority says:
"It is proved beyond any dispute that nervousness is the characteristic malady of the American Nation, growing upon them in a frightfully accelerated ratio every year, and threatening them with disasters at no distant date which the mind shrinks from contemplating."
He continues as follows: "The number of deaths from this cause is already appalling and is steadily and rapidly increasing. In some of the busy centres the tables of mortality show that the proportion of nerve deaths has multiplied more than twenty times in the last forty years, and that now the nerve deaths number more than one-fourth of all the deaths recorded. What is most shocking in these returns, this fearful loss of life occurs mainly among young people of both sexes."
"This means that the Americans are fast becoming a very short-lived people; and that if they were shut in on themselves for only a few years, without any influx of vitality by immigration, the publication of the census would send a pang of horror and alarm throughout the land."
The annual report of the State Board of Charities of the State of New York for 1894, shows that while the increase in the State's population from 1880 to 1892 was 28 per cent., the increase of the insane in State institutions for the same period was 83 per cent.!
The enjoyment of the fruits of fortune, earned at the expense of the nerve cells, is an impossibility. The quiet and harmony of the nerve centres and nervous system are gone. Rest is impossible, continuance of work only causes increased jarring and discord of that many stringed and wonderful mechanism.
Symptoms. It is well nigh impossible to give the symptoms of this disease in an orderly manner, as the affection gives rise to a thousand and one varying and ofttimes vague symptoms. The particular part of the nervous system affected, and also the cause and character of the attacks modify the symptoms. The eminent Dr. Wood says: "Nervous exhaustion may, in the beginning, affect the whole of the nervous system, or it may be at first purely local, and co-exist with lack of general nervous strength."