The muscular system may be affected in an equally striking manner. Contractures often occur in which a man’s fist may be immovably clenched for months; or his back may be bent almost at right angles to his lower limbs, there being in neither case any bodily change discoverable by the neurologist which can account for such a condition. These contractures, though curable, often prove very obstinate, and at present their nature remains somewhat of a mystery. Other distressing and long continued disturbances take the form of muscular twitchings and tremors or loss of power in the limbs. Not every nerve-case, however, presents such striking and objective signs as those which we have just been describing. The _subjective_ disturbances, which are apt to go undiscovered in a cursory examination of the patient, are frequently more serious than the objective,[12] and are experienced by thousands of patients who to the mere casual observer may present no more signs of abnormality than a slight tremor, a stammer, or a depressed or excited expression. These afflictions: loss of memory, insomnia, terrifying dreams, pains, emotional instability, diminution of self-confidence and self-control, attacks of unconsciousness or of changed consciousness sometimes accompanied by convulsive movements resembling those characteristic of epileptic fits, incapacity to understand any but the simplest matters, obsessive thoughts, usually of the gloomiest and most painful kind, even in some cases hallucinations and incipient delusions—make life for some of their victims a veritable hell. Such patients may have recovered from sensory or motor disturbances and yet may suffer from any or all of these afflictions as a residuum from the original “shock-complex;” they may suffer from them as a complication of the discomfort attending upon a wound or an illness, or, on the other hand, they may have no overt bodily disorder: their malady then being usually given the simple but all-inclusive (and blessed) description “neurasthenia.”