“There is in truth no case in which muscular exercise should not figure under one shape or another.... There is a whole group of patients to whom it would seem at the first glance that all muscular work should be forbidden. Complete muscular inaction, however, would be as injurious to them as exaggerated work, and for them more than for all others the rule of progressive increase of work, of slow and methodical training, must be rigorously obeyed. They are perpetually on the verge of fatigue; their reserve of motor nerve-energy is, so to speak, _nil_, and the slightest _voluntary_ movement is enough to exhaust them. Hence the only muscular work that can be prescribed to them, at first at least, is that effected by _passive_ movements and _massage_, by which a whole series of muscular, tendinous, and cutaneous stimuli are transmitted by the sensory nerves to the cells of the centres ... these stimuli gently arouse the motor centres, and even the mental image of the movement aids in the same result, that is, in preserving the functional activity of the centres without tiring the patient. Besides, passive exercise and massage promote the peripheral circulation.” Dr. Weir Mitchell includes these, with faradic electricity, all three to be increased gradually, in his famous treatment for nervousness. [*] “The Treatment of Neurasthenia.” (Published by Henry Kimpton.) [18] “The need for exercise is one of the numerous sensations which lead human beings to perform actions necessary for the preservation of life or health. The need for repose is called fatigue; the need for exercise has not received a special name, but deserves one quite as much as hunger, thirst, &c. Under the influence of deficient exercise, certain materials which should be used up each day by work, accumulate in the human machine, the wheels of which they encumber, and the working of which they clog.... It is necessary, for the perfect balances of nutrition, that the reserve materials should be used up as fast as they are formed.” Dr. Fernand Lagrange, in “The Physiology of Bodily Exercise.” [19] “The fatigue which is due to dearth of albumens (proteid) in the blood is always absent so long as sufficient food is taken and digested; in the condition of dyspepsia mentioned in the previous chapter it was not digested.... If a man who has had a sufficient supply of albumens put in, and who has a good digestion, yet falls out in the early stage of a contest, long before those albumens can be exhausted, we must conclude that his fatigue is due to uric acid in the blood.” Dr. Alexander Haig. [20] “Similarly excessive exercise increases the amount of uric acid in the body.”--_Text-book of Physiology_ (Schäfer), Vol. I., page 595. [21] _Uric Acid_ (Dr. A. Haig). End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Daily Training, by E. F. Benson