ABSTRACT
UP to the close of the nineteenth century the great clinical group known as Functional Nervous Disorders occupied a sort of no-man’s land between organic diseases of the nervous system and the true insanities. It was made up of two divisions: in one was placed every morbid state that corresponded more or less closely to the classical descriptions of Hysteria, and everything that did not so correspond was relegated to the other under the label Neurasthenia. Sufferers from these disorders did not receive much sympathy or understanding from the medical men of those days and were often made to feel that their disabilities were the outcome of reprehensible weakness and hardly merited the serious attention of scientific men.
