Our Nervous Friends

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Our Nervous Friends

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Title: Our Nervous Friends Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
Author: Robert S. Carroll
Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5994] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 9, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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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