their lives will be long and miserable, and they may end by nearly exhausting their families and friends. Death is not the worst thing in the world, and to help a man to a happy and useful career may be more of a service than the saving of life. What is the matter with all these patients? Technically, most of them come under the broad heading of the “psychoneuroses”; but for practical purposes many of them may be regarded as patients whose subjective symptoms are due to disturbances of the physiologic activity of one or more organs or systems. These symptoms may depend on an increase or a decrease of a normal function, on an abnormality of function, or merely on the subjects becoming conscious of a wholly normal function that normally goes on unnoticed; and this last conception indicates that there is a close relation between the appearance of the symptoms and the threshold of the patient’s nervous reactions. The ultimate causes of these disturbances are to be found, not in any gross structural changes of the organs involved, but rather in nervous influences emanating from the emotional or intellectual life, which, directly or indirectly, affect in one way or another organs that are under either voluntary or involuntary control. All of you have had experiences that have brought home the way in which emotional reactions affect organic functions. Some of you have been nauseated while anxiously waiting for an important examination to begin, and a few may even have vomited; others have been seized by an attack of diarrhea under the same circumstances. Some of you have had polyuria before making a speech, and others have felt thumping extrasystoles or a pounding tachycardia before a football game. Some of you have noticed rapid shallow breathing when listening to a piece of bad news, and others know the type of occipital headache, with pain down the muscles of the back of the neck, that comes from nervous anxiety and fatigue.