A woman of the labouring class presented herself at a country hospital for treatment. She declared herself to be afflicted with severe pain in one leg, rendering it almost helpless, and preventing her from accomplishing her daily work. The medical gentlemen to whom she addressed herself could find nothing wrong with the limb, and harshly told her that her complaint was “hysteria.” One would have thought that having discovered the disease and given it a name, they would have done something to cure it. Not at all. The woman was sent away unrelieved, to be a burden on her unhappy family or on the community, as the case might be. Yet these gentlemen had probably heard of such things as nerves, and knew them to be an even more essential part of the body than the legs. Their refusal to treat the patient in question would have been excusable had they systematically excluded all nervous cases, but this does not appear to have been their practice. The poor woman went home and struggled to do her work, but failed from weakness. In despair she consulted a quack, who put her on an efficacious course of treatment and cured her triumphantly. A member of the Hospital Committee, having these facts brought under his notice, attended the next meeting, and moved that that quack should at once be taken on to the staff to assist the medical gentlemen with his valuable advice. The motion was lost. Another woman, suffering from severe nervous exhaustion, applied for relief at a large hospital in London, and received the same answer--“Only hysteria.” One would really have thought that a disease so widely recognised, and causing so much perplexity, would be a bad enough thing to have without more being expected of one. However, the woman was told that her complaint was all sham and nonsense, and she was sent about her business. She went in despondency, for she was in a fearfully exhausted condition. Soon afterwards a painful malady made its appearance of the description usually considered “interesting,” and the same hospital, which had closed its doors on the invalid, now opened them wide, received her with kindness, and studied the disease diligently. They failed to cure it, but that is a detail. Indeed, I think they would have cured it if they could, but perhaps it was incurable. This hospital admits itself to have been mistaken. It says it was wrong in crediting the patient with “hysteria;” she was really suffering, the doctors say, from the exhaustion preceding this particular form of disease. In short, if they could have cured the neurasthenia, which was the woman’s sole disease when she went to the hospital in the first instance, she need never have contracted the disease which was found so interesting. Lower the vitality of the whole organism, and the part originally weakest breaks down; or the patient may be exposed to some malign influence,--such as blood-poisoning, for example,--which, in health, she would have been able to withstand, but