Ian extracted the following quote, which follows - with remarkable similarity - much of today's thinking about CFS/ME. "It is seldom that one sufferer presents all - at least, not all at one time - though in the course of this variable disease, with dropping out of one symptom and creeping in of another, even one neurasthenic may run through the list; perhaps, more accurately, the list runs through him." " One having all these is surely deserving of pity He is a wreck, but not, perhaps, a hopeless one."

Dr Foote proposes the causes of Neurasthenia as being overwork, worry, sudden shock, acute fevers or other exhausting diseases, as well as some other quite bizarre suggestions which will be left to the imagination.

The chapter mentions a Dr G. Beard who studied the same symptoms of Neurasthenia in 1879 and had written - "It is the common belief that patients suffering from this form of disease magnify - create symptoms which really never existed. This belief is an erroneous one; there are more persons who overlook many of their symptoms,... than those who create symptoms that do not exist...". He described many who drag along, never knowing what real health is, handicapped unnecessarily by a variety of troublesome symptoms.

The chapter seems to lend weight to the view that some researchers have, that CFS/ME is an illness that has been described many times in the historic medical literature.

Ian F. 1991