Note 17 — Chapter X · REMEDIAL.
Reading edition
Of the value of exercise as a cure, the French nerve-specialists, Professors Proust and Ballet,[*] speak most emphatically. What they say about neurasthenics will apply in general to those who feel disinclined to move:—
“There is in truth no case in which muscular exercise should not figure under one shape or another.... There is a whole group of patients to whom it would seem at the first glance that all muscular work should be forbidden. Complete muscular inaction, however, would be as injurious to them as exaggerated work, and for them more than for all others the rule of progressive increase of work, of slow and methodical training, must be rigorously obeyed. They are perpetually on the verge of fatigue; their reserve of motor nerve-energy is, so to speak, nil, and the slightest voluntary movement is enough to exhaust them. Hence the only muscular work that can be prescribed to them, at first at least, is that effected by passive movements and massage, by which a whole series of muscular, tendinous, and cutaneous stimuli are transmitted by the sensory nerves to the cells of the centres ... these stimuli gently arouse the motor centres, and even the mental image of the movement aids in the same result, that is, in preserving the functional activity of the centres without tiring the patient. Besides, passive exercise and massage promote the peripheral circulation.”
Dr. Weir Mitchell includes these, with faradic electricity, all three to be increased gradually, in his famous treatment for nervousness.
[*] “The Treatment of Neurasthenia.” (Published by Henry Kimpton.)