In discussing the question of treatment we do not propose to deal with general therapeutic measures which every physician in charge of nervous or mental patients is hardly likely to neglect.[24] The importance of a generous and easily digested dietary is generally recognised: as also is the need for quiet and congenial surroundings, and for shielding patients from disturbances, such as noises and the sight of wounded, which are likely to evoke painful emotions and vivid memories of their experiences at the front. It is also obviously important that the physician should deal promptly and discreetly with any bodily ailments from which the patient is suffering, being careful neither to minimise their gravity and so give him any reason for the grievance that he is not receiving proper attention, nor by exaggerating them to add this anxiety to his other troubles.[25] These are questions which may confidently be left to the discretion of the physician in charge. _Firmness and Sympathy._ But there are certain other therapeutic measures commonly recommended in text-books for application in the cases of patients suffering from neurasthenic and hysterical troubles, which cannot be thus summarily dismissed. As many of these patients are irritable and childishly peevish, it is necessary that they should be treated with sympathetic firmness, tact and insight. But, unfortunately, the words “firmness” and “sympathy” are interpreted in a great variety of ways. While it is important, for purely therapeutic reasons, that discipline should be maintained, and that when the physician has decided what he considers the proper treatment for the patient this should be rigorously carried out, it is manifestly disturbing and injurious in many cases for the officer to insist upon all the exacting details of military rules and regulations. For the mentally healthy soldier, obedience to stern and even harshly rigid regulations is often vitally important; but an attempt by a medical officer to treat a ward of neurasthenic patients in this way usually has disastrous results.