Citation

Schwab SI. Am. Econ. Rev. 1911; 1(2): 265-270.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1911, American Economic Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Neurasthenia is a term devised many years ago by Beard, an American physician, to describe a condition of the nervous system which appeared to him to be peculiar to Americans. Nerve weakness is what he implied by its use; its causes, according to him, lay in habits and surroundings which, owing to his insular views, were typical of the American civilization. Overwork, alcoholism, worry, intense application, overeating, etc., were the important factors in causing this disease. Later it was found that other countries and other civilizations had the same kind of clinical entity. This paper concerns the condition among Russian Jews. Neurasthenia manifests itself by two groups of symptoms, one of which has reference to conditions of abnormal fatigue, the other to conditions of abnormal irritability.

Cited in: Burnham JC (2009). Accident Prone: A history of technology, psychology, and misfits of the machine age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08117-5. The book was favorably reviewed by David Hemenway in Injury Prevention (2011), doi: 10.1136/ip.2011.031658.



Special Thanks to Dr. Burnham for providing an electronic copy of the bibliographic notes that accompany each chapter. This greatly facilitated adding previously unidentified records to the SafetyLit database. SafetyLit users may obtain a listing of the book's references by searching using the following Textword(s) Exact query: "Burnham-Accident-Prone".

Language: en