RULES OF THE GAME It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be. BEN JONSON. It is a good thing to have a sound body, better to have a sane mind, but neither is to be compared to that aggregate of virile and decent qualities which we call character. THEODORE ROOSEVELT. The only effective remedy against inexorable necessity is to yield to it. PETRARCH. When I go about among my patients, most of them, as it happens, "nervously" sick, I sometimes stop to consider why it is they are ill. I know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness, some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the game. There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our transgression is a mistake or not, and whether we happen to be saints or sinners. There are laws also which have to do with the recovery of poise and balance when these have been lost. These laws are less well observed and understood than those which determine our downfall. The more gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable people who are relatively sound in the physical sense. It is true that nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for us now to make an artificial separation. Just what happens in the human economy when a "nervous breakdown" comes, nobody seems to know, but mind and body cooeperate to make the patient miserable and helpless. It may be nature's way of holding us up and preventing further injury. The hold-up is severe, usually, and becomes in itself a thing to be managed.