OUR NERVOUS FRIENDS Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness

BY

ROBERT S. CARROLL, M.D. Medical Director Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina

Author of "The Mastery of Nervousness," "The Soul in Suffering"

NEW YORK 1919

HEARTILY--TO THE HOST OF US

CHAPTER I

OUR FRIENDLY NERVES Illustrating the Capacity for Nervous Adjustment

CHAPTER II

THE NEUROTIC Illustrating Damaging Nervous Overactivity

CHAPTER III

THE PRICE OF NERVOUSNESS Illustrating Misdirected Nervous Energy

CHAPTER IV

WRECKING A GENERATION Illustrating "The Enemy at the Gate"

CHAPTER V

THE NERVOUSLY DAMAGED MOTHER Illustrating the Child Wrongly Started

CHAPTER VI

THE MESS OF POTTAGE Illustrating Nervous Inferiority Due to Eating-Errors

CHAPTER VII

THE CRIME OF INACTIVITY Illustrating the Wreckage of the Pampered Body

CHAPTER VIII

LEARNING TO EAT Illustrating the Potency of Diet

CHAPTER IX

THE MAN WITH THE HOE Illustrating the Therapy of Work

CHAPTER X

THE FINE ART OF PLAY Illustrating Re-creation Through Play

CHAPTER XI

THE TANGLED SKEIN Illustrating a Tragedy of Thought Selection

CHAPTER XII

THE TROUBLED SEA Illustrating Emotional Tyranny

CHAPTER XIII

WILLING ILLNESS Illustrating Willessness and Wilfulness

CHAPTER XIV

UNTANGLING THE SNARL Illustrating the Replacing of Fatalism by Truth

CHAPTER XV

FROM FEAR TO FAITH Illustrating the Curative Power of Helpful Emotions

CHAPTER XVI

JUDICIOUS HARDENING Illustrating the Compelling of Health

CHAPTER XVII

THE SICK SOUL Illustrating the Sliding Moral Scale

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BATTLE WITH SELFIllustrating the Recklessness that Disintegrates

CHAPTER XIX

THE SUFFERING OF SELF-PITY Illustrating a Moral Surrender

CHAPTER XX

THE SLAVE OF CONSCIENCE Illustrating Discord with Self

CHAPTER XXI

CATASTROPHE CREATING CHARACTER Illustrating Disciplined Freedom

CHAPTER XXII

FINDING THE VICTORIOUS SELF Illustrating a Medical Conversion

CHAPTER XXIII

THE TRIUMPH OF HARMONY Illustrating the Power of the Spirit

A REMARK

Vividly as abstractions may be presented, they rarely succeed in revealing truths with the appealing intensity of living pictures. In Our Nervous Friends will be found portrayed, often with photographic clearness, a series of lives, with confidences protected, illustrating chapter for chapter the more vital principles of the author's The Mastery of Nervousness.

CHAPTER I

OUR FRIENDLY NERVES

"Hop up, Dick, love! See how glorious the sun is on the new snow. Now isn't that more beautiful than your dreams? And see the birdies! They can't find any breakfast. Let's hurry and have our morning wrestle and dress and give them some breakie before Anne calls."

The mother is Ethel Baxter Lord. She is thirty-eight, and Dick-boy is just five. The mother's face is striking, striking as an example of fine chiseling of features, each line standing for sensitiveness, and each change revealing refinement of thought. The eyes and hair are richly brown. Slender, graceful, perennially neat, she represents the mother beautiful, the wife inspiring, the friend beloved. Happily as we have seen her start a new day for Dick, did she always add some cheer, some fineness of touch, some joy of word, some stimulating helpfulness to every greeting, to every occasion.

The home was not pretentious. Thoroughly cozy, with many artistic touches within, it snuggled on the heights near Arlington, the close neighbor to many of the Nation's best memories, looking out on a noble sweep of the fine, old Potomac, with glimpses through the trees of the Nation's Capitol, glimpses revealing the best of its beauties. It was a home from which emanated an atmosphere of peace and repose which one seemed to feel even as one approached. It was a home pervaded with the breath of happiness, a home which none entered without benefit.

The husband, Martin Lord, was an expert chemist who had long been in the service of the Government. Capable, worthy, manly, he was blest in what he was, and in what he had. They had been married eight years, and the slipping away of the first child, Margaret, was the only sadness which had paused at their door. Mrs. Lord had been Ethel Baxter for thirty years. Her father was an intense, high-strung business man, an importer, who spent much time in Europe where he died of an American-contracted typhoid-fever, when Ethel was ten. Her mother was one of a large well-known Maryland family, fair, brown-eyed too, and frail; also, by all the rights of inheritance, training and development, sensitive and nervous. In her family the precedents of blue blood were religiously maintained with so much emphasis on the "blue" that no beginning was ever made in training her into a protective robustness. So, in spite of elaborate preparation and noted New York skill and the highest grade of conscientious nursing, she recovered poorly after Ethel's birth. Strength, even such as she formerly had, did not return. She didn't want to be an invalid. She was devoted to her husband and eager to companion and mother her child. The surgeons thought her recovery lay in their skill, and in