NERVOUSNESS AND ITS INFLUENCE ON CHARACTER.


There are two questions often put to me which I desire to use as texts
for the brief essay or advice of which nervousness[4] is the heading. As
concerns this matter, I shall here deal with women alone, and with women
as I see and know them. I have elsewhere written at some length as to
nervousness in the male, for he, too, in a minor degree, and less
frequently, may become the victim of this form of disability.

[Footnote 4: Neither _nerves_ nor _nervousness_ are words to be found in
the Bible or Shakespeare. The latter uses the word nerve at least seven
times in the sense of sinewy. _Nervy_, which is obsolete, he employs as
full of nerves, sinewy, strong. It is still heard in America, but I am
sure would be classed as slang. Writers, of course, still employ nerve
and nervous in the old sense, as a nervous style. Bailey's dictionary,
1734, has nervous,--sinewy, strongly made. Robt. Whytte, Edin., in the
preface to his work on certain maladies, 1765, says, "Of late these have
also got the name of nervous," and this is the earliest use of the word
in the modern meaning I have found. Richardson has it in both its modern
meanings, "vigorous," or "sensitive in nerves, and consequently weak,
diseased." Hysteria is not in the Bible, and is found once in
Shakespeare; as, "Hysterica passio, down," Lear ii. 4. It was common in
Sydenham's day,--_i.e._, Charles II. and Cromwell's time,--but he
classified under hysteria many disorders no longer considered as of this
nature.]