The Way with the Nerves.
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM. :Author: Joseph Collins, M.D. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911, pp. 313.
Dr Joseph Collins is a distinguished neurologist, and the wide experience he has necessarily had during twenty-five years’ practice in the treatment of nervous diseases makes anything he may have to say on the subject particularly valuable. Dr Collins’s book, however, is written more for the layman than for the physician, as much for the healthy as for the sick, and most of all, perhaps, for the student of human nature. It is written in the form of letters, intimate, self-revealing letters from the patient, and very understanding, sane, frank and helpful replies from the physician. The ailments treated include sick headache, neurasthenia, psychasthenia, epilepsy, depression, hysteria, dipsomania, dual personality, and mental retardation in children. Those who have strong convictions on the moderate or immoderate use of alcohol will be especially interested in the letters treating of this subject. Dr Collin’s ability to put himself in the patient’s place and sympathize with his point of view is as unusual as it is interesting, and in none of the letters is this more noticeable than in the first one in the volume, written apparently by a sufferer from migraine, who has had many physicians, experiences and disappointments, but who, through it all, has retained her sense of humor.
That the author is also keenly alive to certain flaws, foibles, and mannerisms on the part of his own profession, is amusingly shown in the letters on the “Bedside Manner.”
The letters dealing with the ill effects upon the human being of idleness and riches gives emphasis to what we all know in a vague way but which we are apt to smooth over and forget. Dr Collins gives an instance of the idle rich woman suffering from ennui, and the idle rich young man who becomes a victim to alcoholism.
If the average reader has been lucky enough to escape any or all of the nervous and mental diseases described in this book, he is sure to have a relative or friend who has been less fortunate. As Dr Collins says in his preface, “The ordinary individual has an intense interest in all that concerns his health,” and he might add, “or the health of his friends and family.” There is nothing which so arouses mutual interest and sympathy as a similarity of symptoms or remedies. I remember a sudden and enthusiastic intimacy which sprang up between two women whose tasts and beliefs were as opposite as the poles?merely because they had both been put on a strict diet. The discussion of those two diets, where they differed and where they agreed, meant more to these two women at that time than pictures and poetry and the music of the spheres. Even without the other excellent qualities of the work, this extremely human appeal is bound to obtain for Dx1. Collins’s book a wide and deserved popularity. E. E. W.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.