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The housewife has not time to form habits of her own; she engages a maid and expects her to fall at once into the family ways, when the family has no ways. In the sociological sense, shelter may mean protection from noise, from too close contact with other human beings, enemies only in the sense of depriving us of valuable nerve-force.
Between the Park and the transcontinental road there are many climbs short but severely steep; up-shoots like the humps on a scenic railway. To tackle them with her uncertain motor was like charging a machine-gun nest. She spent her nerve-force lavishly, and after every wild rush to make a climb, she had to rest, to rub the suddenly aching back of her neck.
One of the causes of the failure of nerve-force in age, which lies behind so much of these miseries, is that people who have lived at all active lives cannot bring themselves to realise their loss of vigour, and try to prolong the natural energies of middle age into the twilight of elderliness.
Was it a fainting fit coming on, epilepsy, paralysis possibly even death? No, the mind was too much alive, though physically I felt an absolutely passive instrument, operated upon by some powerful external agent, as if the current of nerve-force within seemed forcibly drawn together and focussed on a spot in front of me. I gazed motionless, as though fascinated, on what was no longer vacant space.
This is one of the evils of all work done under excessive moral stimulus, and when the excitation comes from the emotions the expenditure of nerve-force becomes doubly dangerous, because in this case not only is the governing power taken away from the group of faculties which make up what we call common sense, but also because in women overtaxing the emotional centres is apt to result in the development of some form of breakdown, and in the secondary production of nervousness or hysteria.
Independently of the three conditions where excessive menstruation is connected with vaso-motor paralysis, a fourth may be found directly in the excitement of the ovarian plexus of nerves. This evolution of nerve-force which accompanies the maturation of the ovule, is the immediate cause of the afflux of blood to the utero-ovarian vessels.
Let her watch its evolution, and not with such apparent watchfulness as shall suggest the perils she is to look out for. We are all organized with a certain capital of nerve-force, and we cannot spend it with equal recklessness in all directions.
Clarke has pointed out, be followed by paralysis in the ovarian plexus itself, with consequent cessation of ovulation, and amenorrhea, or absence of menstruation. This habitual predominance or irregularity of the ganglionic nerves implies, as has been seen, a relatively deficient innervation or generation of nerve-force in the cerebro-spinal system.
It is notorious that one of the great difficulties in the cure of epilepsy is the habit which is acquired by the nerve-centres of having at intervals attacks of convulsive discharge of nerve-force. Some years since I saw in consultation a case which well illustrates this point. A boy was struck in the head with a brick, and dropped unconscious.
Last of all, when the other channels for the escape of the surplus nerve-force have been filled to overflowing, a yet further and less-used group of muscles is spasmodically affected: the head is thrown back and the spine bent inwards there is a slight degree of what medical men call opisthotonos.
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