There is one notably outstanding memory of Dr. Janeway which dates from
those earlier days in his office and which deals with that large class
of people who imagine they are ill--those people whose numbers are
directly proportionate to periods of so-called prosperity, who call
forth innumerable cults of curing, and who are the mainstay of much of
the mummery in medicine.
I shall never forget one day at lunch after Dr. Janeway had been seeing
some of these mentally mortgaged men and women. As he sat down at table
his face wore that expression of perplexity which one at times sees as
the outward sign of that inward sense of the futility of things in
general. I inquired how matters had been going in the office that
morning. His reply, "Neurasthenics!" as it came out with all his
characteristic bluntness, set me to asking questions. What I learned
that day from the Doctor, coupled with later observations of his methods
in dealing with these unfortunates, has never needed unlearning. He saw
in these patients, wholly free from organic disorder, yet a prey to
aches and obsessions, to fears and depressions, the unhappy results of
that conflict in the subconscious self between the natural order of life
and the socially ordered life. He saw it and I am sure sorrowed over it.
Yet he never entered into a compact to treat them for what he knew they
did not have. He never left a stone unturned to prove to himself that
they suffered from no physical fault, and with his positive terseness he
rarely failed to prove that fact to them--freeing them, oftentimes for
good and all, from the fears and symptoms which assailed them, and
giving them in few and frank terms the key to their unconscious
calamity.