An eminent New York physician, Doctor J. J. Walsh, who has given special thought to this aspect of the problem of nervousness, states the case more fully, as follows:
"If something has particularly attracted a patient's attention to some part of his anatomy, and if his attention is concentrated on it and allowed to dwell long on it, his feelings may be so exaggerated as to tempt him to think that they are connected with some definite pathological condition, and he may even translate them into serious portents of organic disease. If a patient once begins to waste nervous energy on himself because of solicitude with regard to these symptoms, then it will not be long before feelings of tiredness, incapacity for work, at times insomnia and certain disturbances of memory, are likely to be noted. Then the neurasthenic picture seems to be complete.
"This is the process so picturesquely called 'short-circuiting,' by which nervous energy exhausts itself upon the individual himself instead of in the accomplishment of external work. Many of the worst cases of so-called neurasthenia have their origin in this process. It is true that this set of events is much more likely to occur among people of lowered nervous vitality, but, under certain conditions, it may develop in those who are otherwise in good health up to the moment when the attention happened to be particularly called to certain feelings. The physician can start these patients off anew, after improving their physical condition, if he can only bring them to see how much their concentration of mind upon themselves is the cause of their symptoms."[9]
Now, of all people likely to be thus afflicted, the selfish man or woman is by all means the likeliest, simply because his or her every mode of thinking revolves about self. It is the selfish man's wishes, his pleasures, his grievances, his reverses, that are of supreme importance to him. When, moreover, his early upbringing has been such as to leave him sadly short in emotional control, any passing disturbance in the workings of his internal organs may easily hold disastrous consequences for him. He worries over little ailments--as, for example, a slight attack of indigestion--to which people of less self-centred nature would give little or no thought. And, by his persistent worrying and his persistent over-attention to the way his stomach works, it may not be long before he has become a victim of chronic nervous dyspepsia.