"It's My Nerves"

Modern man worries so much about his ability to measure up to the challenges of his environment that he often, literally, worries himself sick. So believes Sir Charles Bickerton Blackburn, chancellor of Sydney University and grand old (78) man of Australian medicine, who sees patients when other doctors have not been able to decide what ails them. Most alarming, Physician Blackburn feels, is the fact that for the first time in history, man may have reached the point where he admits defeat in the face of great odds.

In "strenuous and difficult times" in the past, he writes, the emphasis was upon the necessity for the individual to adjust to his environment and meet his difficulties. Many laggards were brought to a higher level of accomplishment by "mass suggestion," while the few who did not rise in this way were despised or even executed. This, of course, was unfair. But since Freud, so much emphasis is put upon the hazards surrounding the individual that he may lose the stimulus to make a fight. He is encouraged in this by the widely held idea that "the conditions of life today are such that it is difficult for any but the most exceptional nervous system to stand up to them."

"How completely the patient's attitude towards nervous instability has changed is best appreciated," says Sir Charles, "by doctors who can look back 20 or 30 years to a time when it was almost regarded as an insult to suggest to a man that his 'nerves' were his trouble, and who now see one after another coming to tell him that 'his nerves have gone' or that he has just had, or fears that he is 'on the verge of,' a nervous breakdown."

Sir Charles does not feel that patients alone are to blame. While he regrets that more stress is not put on the need for facing up to difficulties, he admits: "In this age of anxiety and frustration, there is an increase in the number of those who, facing or fearing ill health, are in urgent need of sympathetic and understanding medical advice." Are they likely to get it? "Unfortunately, many of the changes that are taking place in ... medical practice tend to weaken rather than strengthen the traditional tie between the doctor and his patient."

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