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A contemporary book owes its immediate reputation to its contemporary critics; hence the value of an initial criticism in the form of a foreword by an eminent contemporary godfather. An old book, however, is sponsored so to say by godsons, by later men who discover in the older writer elements on which to base an identification. Whytt's book is called to our attention by certain psychiatrists of the nineteenth century who share with him a neurophysiological point of view concerning the neuroses. These psychiatrists, Krafft-Ebing, Schüle, Arndt, rate Whytt's view of "the Disorders which have been common called nervous, hypochondriac, or hysteric" very highly, as the forerunner of Beard's and the modern (to them) neuro-physiological conception of neurasthenia. Krafft-Ebing singles Whytt out from among a round dozen other older writers to credit him with the first attempt to differentiate neurasthenia from the vapores, as the nervous disorders had been vaguely termed. "Die ersten Versuche, die Neurasthenie von ihnen abzugrenzen, machte Whytt (1765), der sie als 'Nervousness' schilderte." (Die Nervosität, p. 33.)
Whytt's notion of neural function was in keeping with the physiology of the time, yet within this range he remains acute and objective. The theory that the nerves are little tubes for the conduction of "animal fluid" he keeps sub judice, and he confines his formulation of nervous function to empirical statements. In the absence of any histology, any idea of the division of nerves into sensory and motor, or theory of reflex or integrative action, the conception which does yeoman duty for all is that of sympathy or consent. Sympathy (of which "consent" is the latinized form) is a general statement of the inference that somehow through the action