Two Short Reviews1:

Review of Averbeck's Die Akute Neurasthenie2

How little the so-called clinical education acquired in our hospitals suffices for the needs of practical physicians is most strikingly shown, perhaps, from the example of ‘neurasthenia’. That pathological condition of the nervous system may comfortably be described as the commonest of all the diseases in our society: it complicates and aggravates most other clinical pictures in patients of the better classes and it is either still quite unknown to the many scientifically educated physicians or is regarded by them as no more than a modern name with an arbitrarily compounded content. Neurasthenia is not a clinical picture in the sense of textbooks based too exclusively on pathological anatomy: it should rather be described as a mode of reaction of the nervous system. It would deserve the most general attention on the part of physicians who are working scientifically-no less attention than it has already found among physicians who are working as therapists, among directors of sanatoria, etc. A recommendation to wider circles is therefore the due of the present short work, with its felicitous, though intentionally high-pitched, descriptions and its proposals and observations touching on social conditions. These, as its author suspects, will not always meet with his colleagues' agreement, though it will everywhere arouse their interest. His remark on compulsory military service as a cure for the evils of civilized life and his proposal that periodic recuperation should be made possible for the working middle-class in times of good health by State assistance-these are open to manifold objections. It must be admitted, however, that the booklet treats of important questions of medical care in an imaginative manner.

Dr. Sigm. Freud