The history of attitudes toward nerve and mental disorders is a remarkable illustration of the vicissitudes of ignorance playing with words. The Greeks, swayed and dazzled as they were by the magic of words which they discovered, yet never permitted themselves to be fooled by them. As an explanation for the phenomena of hysteria in women, that benign mental disorder par excellence, they had the theory of a wandering about of the womb in the organism as a cause. That provided an image of something material happening as an explanation. With the triumphs of anatomy after the Renaissance, that naïve view had to be discarded. In its place the humoral theory held sway, with its good humors and its bad humors, and their bilious, lymphatic, nervous and sanguine admixtures. But that, too, went the way of all flesh. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a popular phrase, "nerves," paraphrased by practitioners of medicine as neuroses, then came into vogue as the efficient cause of these troubles. "Nerves" indeed today have filtered everywhere into the common consciousness. Because of the irritant effects of light, food and social conditions, America has come to swarm with neurotics of every type, especially the sexual. A rich field was created for cults of treatment, which spring up like weeds periodically all over the country. We have seen how the American, Beard, was inspired by the idea that "nerves" represented a loss of tone, a flabbiness, weakness and softness of the nerves, to coin the word neurasthenia. Nerve exhaustion he believed was the cause of the nerve weakness. Weir Mitchell, another American, introduced the rest cure combined with overfeeding as a treatment for it. An analytical French neurologist, Charcot, was not to be satisfied by words of Latin-Greek derivation. Insisting upon the significance of the individual mental workings of each case, he and his pupil Janet began to unravel a tangle which has led to the present revolution in psychology. For Freud, Jung and Adler took up the story where Janet left off. Janet elaborated the ideas of a subconscious and an unconscious, a dissociation of the components of the mind, and a splitting of the personality. Lumping the phenomena of amnesia, somnambulism, hypnotism, anesthesia, obsession and hysteria into the grand group of mental dissociations and disintegrations, he achieved a unification never considered possible before him. Suggestion as a mode of cure was also emphasized and elaborated by him to an undreamed-of degree.