FAITH REQUIRED IN GOD AND MAN 47 THE SPECIFIC TREATMENT 53 SOME IMMEDIATE RESULTS 64 THE CO-OPERATION OF THE PATIENT 67 THE ULTIMATE EFFECT 72 ILLUSTRATIVE CASES 74 The Art of Natural Sleep OUR NATIONAL DISEASE Neurasthenia is now our national disease. Nervousness, nervous exhaustion, nervous prostration, and kindred names are given to it by the doctors. Whatever they may chance to call it, the doctors usually agree as to its causes, symptoms, consequences. Even the laity are now thoroughly informed as to the effect of neurasthenia on the nerves and on the mind. It wears the nerves threadbare and robs the mind of all serenity. It steals the zest from work, the joy from play. It frequently reduces its unhappy victim to the single occupation of worrying by day because he fears he will not sleep at night, of worrying at night because he knows that worn and haggard he will have no buoyancy and poise to play a man’s part in the day to come. The day’s work is done, when done at all, with the feverish inquietude of the unrested brain. The evening’s pleasures, when infrequently he ventures to take part in them, are clouded by the listlessness the lack of sleep invariably brings. The silent night, when by any reach of the imagination it can be thus described, Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill, is rendered hideous by the flitting of attention like a bird from bough to bough, by the random running of the memory down each unhappy recollection of the past, by the deflection of the mental vision till it loses all perspective and disqualifies the sufferer to think straight concerning even the trivial occurrences of everyday existence. No wonder that in Kipling’s story _At the End of the Passage_, when Spurstow finds his sleepless friend in the last stage of insomnia, he sadly but severely says, “Sleeplessness of your kind being very apt to relax the moral fibre in little matters of life and death, I’ll just take the liberty of spiking your guns;” and then as a safeguard, robs Hummil of his rifle and revolver. THEORIES OF SLEEP Various theories have at one time or another been suggested to account for sleep. Some are both bewildering and absurd. There was a time when it was seriously urged that sleep has in the thyroid gland its special organ, but when someone in the interest of the theory excised the thyroid gland, only to increase in certain instances the tendency to go to sleep and stay asleep, the theory was at once abandoned even by its staunchest advocates.