Powerful as chloral is and useful in the thoughtful doctor’s hands in various emergencies, especially in fevers where there is cerebral excitement, it is a depressant, and he who contracts the chloral habit invariably wishes at the last that he had waited for damnation till after he was dead. Sulphonal, trional, veronal, paraldehyde, and those proprietary hypnotics whose composition is withheld from the public appear to be least harmful of all sleeping drugs. But they all inebriate or stupefy the fragile cells of the brain, none too solid in the best of us; and in the psychically weak or emotionally excitable they may even put the delicately constructed thinking organ altogether out of commission. FOOTNOTES [7] _Differential Diagnosis and Treatment of Disease_, 78, 355, 361, 457, 731. [8] _Popular Science Monthly_, September, 1905. THE REMOVAL OF ALL PHYSICAL CAUSES Though there may be no specific for insomnia in the drug store, the complaint can often be relieved when the cause is wholly physical by striking at its root. If the general practitioner fails to relieve disturbances of the digestion, the stomach specialist should be consulted. One of my patients, who had for two years suffered both from insomnia and other troubles which had exhausted the ingenuity and the resources of the local doctors he consulted, began to improve as soon as a stomach specialist of national repute to whom I sent him discovered by chemical analysis of the contents of his stomach an incredibly excessive acidity, for which the proper prescription and diet were at once suggested.[9] In cases where insomnia is evidently due to some physical ailment which cannot be at once located, a visit to the oculist, the dentist, and even the throat and nose specialist should as a matter of course be paid even if the patient has no conscious need of them. In at least two instances which have come under my observation, the insomnia disappeared after proper treatment of the eyes and teeth and throat, though two general practitioners had suspected nothing wrong in one case with the eyes, and in the other a visit to the throat specialist was never once suggested by the doctor who sent the case to me for the Emmanuel treatment. FOOTNOTES [9] As the proof comes, the patient in question writes me that his insomnia was of the fitful type. He had so much trouble in going to sleep promptly that he formed the habit of sitting up late and inducing the sleep mood by reading. Since his treatment ended, he writes me (Sept. 12th), “This summer I have retired at nine o’clock with few exceptions, gone to sleep immediately, and risen at half past six in the morning thoroughly refreshed.” GENERAL DIRECTIONS