We are most of us so far enlightened concerning our nervous systems as to regard our nerves as a very useful means of communication between the various parts of our machinery. The network of telegraph wires in this country, with their chief offices, have frequently been compared to our network of nerves with their chief offices, the brain and the spinal centres. Yet this comparison gives a totally inadequate conception of the functions of the nervous system. Many of us fail to realise that not only do the nerves bear messages from one part of the machinery to another, but that, without their co-operation, we can receive no impressions from the outside world at all, and can perform no function whatever. Without their aid, the eyes and ears are valueless, the muscles refuse to do their work, the digestive and respiratory processes cannot be carried on. If the nerve-centres are seriously injured, we become paralysed or die. If they be impaired, the whole body is enfeebled, and disease or incapacity of some particular organ may be occasioned. But, we may ask, how does it come about that, without external injury of any kind, the nervous systems of good people, leading good lives and given to good works, become impaired wholesale, and often remain impaired in spite of all efforts to restore them? Medical men tell us that, in such cases, the waste in the body exceeds the nutritive supply; but this assertion may be made with equal truth in regard to diseases of a different order, and, unfortunately, increase of the nutritive supply does not necessarily cure nervous exhaustion; it is the actual _nerve-waste_ that we have to put a stop to. Even where a patient has purposely starved herself, mere feeding up does but bring her back to the point at which she began to starve. And if we could know the truth (if we would even try to know it), we should probably find that loathing of the food, and incapability to assimilate it, were the beginning of the seeming craze which, singularly enough, seems to afford so much amusement to the average nurse. We therefore still have the original disease to tackle. A long series of observations have convinced me, that though this original disease is not often satisfactorily cured, it can be cured, and ought to be cured. The reasons of so much failure seem to me to be evident enough, and later on I hope to state them fully. Let me give some interesting and instructive instances of failure. A few months ago I was told that a remarkable cure had been effected by means of a well-known treatment, in which isolation, massage, and electricity were the chief agents. I accepted an invitation to meet the patient--a lady--at a friend’s house, and on asking for details of the case, I was told that she had been for years prostrate on her couch, but had been entirely restored to health and activity by the above treatment.