Besides this fear of cold, he was suffering from a hypersensitiveness of several other varieties.  So sensitive was his skin that he had his clothes all made several sizes too big for him so that they would not make pressure.  He was so aware of the muscles of the neck that he believed himself unable to hold up his head, and either propped it with his hands or leaned it against the back of a chair.

He had been working on the eighth edition of his book, a scientific treatise of nation-wide importance, but his eyes were so sensitive that he could not possibly use them and had to keep them shaded from the glare.  He was so conscious of the messages of fatigue that he was unable to walk at all, and he suffered from the usual trouble with constipation.  All these symptoms of course belonged together and were the direct result of a wrong state of mind.  When he had changed his mind, he took off his extra clothes, walked a mile and a half at the first try, gave up his constipation, and went back to work.  Later on I had a letter from him saying that his favorite seat was an overturned nail-keg in the garden and that he was thinking of sawing the backs off his chairs.

Miss Y——­ had worn cotton in her ears for a year or two because she had once had an inflammation of the middle ear, and believed the membrane still sensitive to cold.  There was Miss E——­, whose underwear always reached to her throat and wrists and who spent her time following the sun; and Dr. I——­, who never forgot her heavy sweater or her shawl over her knees, even in front of the fire.  The procession of “cold ones” is almost endless, but always they find that their sensitiveness is of their own making and that it disappears when they choose to ignore it.

=Fear of Light.= Fear of cold is no more common than fear of light.  Nervous folk with half-shut eyes are very frequent indeed.  From one woman I took at least seven pairs of dark glasses before she learned that her eye was made for light.  A good example is furnished by a woman who was not a patient of mine at all, but merely the sister of a patient.  After my patient had been cured of a number of distressing symptoms—­pain in the spine, sore heels, a severe nervous cough, indigestion and other typical complaints,—­she began to scheme to get her sister to come to me.

This sister, the wife of a minister in the Middle West, had a constant pain in her eyes, compelling her to hold them half-shut all the time.  When she was approached about coming to me, she said indignantly, “If that doctor thinks that my trouble is nervous, she is much mistaken,” and then proceeded to get well.  Once the subconscious mind gets the idea that its game is recognized, it is very apt to give it up, and it can do this without loss of time if it really wants to.

=Pain at the Base of the Brain.= Of all nervous pains, that in the back of the neck is by all odds the most common.  It is rare indeed to find a nervous patient without this complaint, and among supposedly well folk it is only too frequent.  Indeed, it almost seems that in some quarters such a pain stands as a badge of the fervor and zeal of one’s work.