Now the happiness and welfare of such men obviously is bound up to no small extent with the character of the hospital or hospitals (for the plural number is commonly to be used in writing the history of these patients) to which they are sent. In the general military hospitals the medical officers have neither the time nor, in many cases, the special knowledge, necessary to deal with cases of this kind. Such patients may recover of themselves without any treatment, but a large number of them tend to get worse, and if they are left without attention their symptoms are apt to become stereotyped into definite delusions and hallucinations. Moreover, in a general ward such men may become a constant source of disturbance and annoyance to other patients and to the nurses. One of the symptoms of their illness is a morbid irritability; they tend to become upset and to take offence at the merest trifles[13]—and this leads to trouble with patients, nurses, and the medical officers responsible for discipline. But if special consideration is shown them by the nurses the other patients are apt to misunderstand it and even to complain of favouritism. In other words, when mixed with wound-cases in a general hospital, these nervous patients are apt to be regarded as a nuisance—which is bad for them and for the proper working of the hospital. Another consideration, too, is that the subjection of such men to irksome regulations of military discipline, and the usual penalties for infringing them, is often so potent a factor in producing disturbances as to be quite fatal to any hope of amelioration. These considerations have led the military authorities to establish special hospitals for nerve-cases.[14] In such institutions the patients can be nursed and attended to by a staff which, being used to the idiosyncrasies of such illnesses can make conditions more suitable to them. A man’s particular nervous malady is likely to be of common occurrence in the nerve-hospital; it does not render him conspicuous, and therefore an object of fussy solicitude, galling pity, or suspicious contempt, as is too often the case in other institutions. If unwounded, he need not suffer the taunt of “having nothing to show” as his reason for staying in hospital. Further, while in the special hospital, more importance is attached to some of the patient’s symptoms, less disturbance is produced by others. The occurrence of a “fit” is viewed by the rest of the men in this class of hospital in a truer perspective, and the patient does not find himself a nine-days’ wonder, as he so easily may do in a small auxiliary hospital full of straightforward wound cases.