Dr. R. McNair Wilson has contributed Pygmalion; or, the Doctor
of the Future to Messrs. Kegan Paul's series, To-day and To-morrow. It is a discussion of the belief that symptoms instead of being " the sign of disease " are signs " not of reaction to disease, but of altered reaction to life, occasioned by the presence of disease. . . . Symptoms identical with those seen in sick men may merely indicate failures to make adequate counter charges against impossibly severe attacks.' The question _naturally arises whether the sick men are, by reason of their sickness, facing likewise impossibly severe attacks '—in short whelher the ordinary stimuli of life are, in their cases, exaggerated at the moment
when they receive them." • •
The cure for illness may lie, he thinks, in the future, in " desensitivizing " the irritated nerves so that their reaction to ordinary stimulation is not so painful.
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