Nevertheless, though their resolution was right and praiseworthy, their conclusion was wrong. If we are unduly conscious of any part of our bodies, that part is not in a healthy state. Wherever there is pain, there is disintegration--disease, and because the medical advisers in this instance could not find the disease, it by no means followed that it was not there. “The fact is, we know very little about nerves,” said a medical man the other day. His candour merits our respect. To say that a patient can fancy pain is absurd. Pain is but a condition of the nerves. If it is not there, we cannot feel it. It is objected that, if we take a patient’s thoughts off her aches and pains, she ceases to feel them, consequently the pain must be imaginary. But if we cut a finger while in a state of excitement, we feel no pain. Not because the pain is there and we are unconscious of it, but that while nervous energy is diverted into another channel, there can be no pain. Read the account of the burning of the martyrs of Valenciennes at the time of the Spanish persecution in the Netherlands.[5] Those brave people were in a state of ecstasy in which pain was impossible. If there is one thing certain in past history, it is that they suffered absolutely nothing. The contemporary evidence on the subject is overwhelming. But, as far as the neurasthenic are concerned, the practice of taking their attention off their pains has its dangers. The process is apt to be fatiguing, so that the patients only have more pain as soon as the distraction ceases. This fact is very exasperating to the more ignorant of their attendants. “She was well enough as long as she was thinking of something else,” the disappointed folks will tell you with an aggrieved air. One woman, possessing many good qualities, informed me that what such patients wanted was a “thrashing.” This nurse was a _masseuse_ in the habit of “Weir Mitchelling” patients. Without supposing that her views ever took a practical form, their existence could hardly conduce to a kindly consideration for suffering invalids. One very favourite notion about the nervous is, that they ought not to be sympathised with. If any one will try this treatment for a little while himself, even in health, he will find it necessary to fly pretty quickly to people possessing natural human feeling, in order to avoid drifting into permanent lunacy. In disease the danger is still greater. I have always found that when I sympathised cordially with real causes of distress, and simply disregarded unmistakably simulated ones, the simulated ones died a natural death without more ado.