Affectedness

“ But it is none the less true that always some disorder results from excess or defect, that it influences every function, bodily and mental, and that it constitutes a lowering of the life for the time being. ”

“ And as the value of health is never truly and feelingly understood except in sickness, contemplate for a moment what the want of order is. Think of disorder in things remote, and then as it approaches thee. ”

“ If we go back to primeval times, and try to imagine the first sickness or the first injury suffered by humanity, does one instinctively feel that it must have been the man’s business to seek means of healing, to try the virtues of various herbs, or to apply such rude remedies as might occur to one unused to the strange spectacle of human suffering? ”

“ In regard to the decay of bodily or mental faculties, much more can be done to prevent or retard them than is generally supposed, and some methods for this end which have been gained by observation or experience will be presented. ”

“ Will the theory of physical disease account for the instantaneous plunging of a man or woman into the deepest anguish who, scarce ten seconds before, were in the enjoyment of perfect health of spirit, soul and body? ”

“ And hence, by the way, it may perchance be why grief, and love, and envy, and anxiety, and all affections of the mind of a similar kind are accompanied with emaciation and decay, or with disordered fluids and crudity, which engender all manner of diseases and consume the body of man. ”

“ While watching the progress of my malady, seeing day by day the advancing steps of the disease that never sleeps, I recognise in myself a strange adaptation in my mind and feelings to the more developed condition of my illness. ”

“ Let us then suppose that a man by some such mischance has contracted a disease. He may not be sure that it is caused by a spirit, but if he has reason to suspect that such is the case he will send to the home of a mudang, describing his symptoms and asking her what spirit it is that is causing it. She may reply by naming some spirit, or she may declare that she must see the patient first. ”

“ But by and by the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is, again,
To live, and lack the thing should rid my pain. ”

“ But illness, appearing to be but the ghastly vehicle of death, clothed in such fearful pain that no control, even of reason and strong will, can check its agonized expression, till at last, reason itself succumbs beneath it, and bears the mind from the tortured frame, this is a trial of no ordinary suffering, even when such illness has been brought about by what may be termed natural causes. ”

“ Fear is the foundation of all sickness. Some image of disease is frightening the sick. Their mental state, you call a material state. Whatever you cherish in mortal mind is imaged forth on the body, which is the substratum of mortal mind. ”

“ Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shall not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better. ”

“ The moment one ceases to do its work, or appropriates more than its share of the juices elaborated, or more than it needs to fit it for the performance of its appointed use, that moment comes disease—disease to itself and disease to all the rest. ”

“ The special suffering which first arrests attention may suddenly arise, but this is always preceded, and for a considerable time, by sensible deviations from that equable and temperate performance of function which can alone constitute sound health. ”

“ But there are more disorders of the mind than of the body, and they are of a more dangerous nature; ”

“ Why a new disorder expelled the old one in a marvelous manner; as it is accustomed to do, when the pain of the afflicted side, or the head, is turned upon the stomach; as it is with a man in a lethargy, when he turns boxer, and attacks his physician. ”

“ The higher possibility called life entails the correlative evils called death and disease. The possibility of keen sensation, which permits pleasure, also involves capacity for the corresponding penalty called pain: but the pain is in ourselves, and is the result of our sensitiveness combined with imperfection. ”

“ The reparative process which Nature has instituted and which we call disease, has been hindered by some want of knowledge or attention, in one or in all of these things, and pain, suffering, or interruption of the whole process sets in. ”

“ MANY of the forms of disease previously detailed may be induced by other causes than worry or mental strain. They may be the effects of the unrestrained influence of certain of the passions. I say certain of the passions, because all do not seem to act with the same intensity. ”

“ We may therefore broadly conclude that the only circumstance, within the range of those by which persons of similar conditions of life are affected, capable of producing a marked effect on the character of adults, is illness or some accident which causes physical infirmity. ”

“ Every physician knows that physical maladies are daily produced or aggravated in individuals by their disorders of mind and life; as by self-indulgence and intemperance, but, what is still more striking, by the immediate operation of evil passions. ”

“ He will see the healthy taken, and the sickly left. If, then, it be disease, and whether mental or bodily, such disease and its causes must be latent indeed; and we confess we look for no 'coming man' who is to solve the mystery. ”

“ Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. ”

“ Whatever can cause, or help to cause, discomfort, pain, sickness, death, vice, or crime—and whatever has a tendency to avert or destroy, or diminish such cases—are matters of interest to the sanitarian ”

“ How do we find them loaded with Diseases, contract early Infirmities? How does exhausted Nature feel the secret Defects, and how hard do they find it to recover the Vigour and Strength which they have push'd to the utmost, in a thoughtless Excess? ”

“ Our body, which is the means of attaining the four aims of life, viz., virtue, worldly pursuits, pleasure, and liberation, is subject to diseases which emaciate and weaken it, deprive the senses of their functions, and cause extreme pain. ”

“ To suffer from intelligence in such an atmosphere as this is a disease—the silent sickness—of which such symptoms as the lips tight bound, the heart heavy, and an aching void behind the eyes, are common to all its victims. ”

“ Long suffering, through years of unmitigated tribulation, had already introduced disease into her delicate frame; and increased persecution gave it strength and root. As it continued to press upon her, she gradually grew feebler and more feeble ”

“ But if he be once sick, then it is a death unto him and a grief insupportable, which doth aggravate his malady, to have one at his bedside sounding ever in his ears; See what comes of your drunkenness, your idleness, your surfeiting and gluttony, your wenching and lechery, these are the causes of your disease. ”

“ But there is a disease which sometimes affects the body, and afterwards communicates its baneful influence to the mind, over [308] which it hangs such a cloud of horrors as renders life absolutely insupportable. ”

“ But on the appearance of an illness or disorder, either in the body as a whole or in many of its parts, a contrary course should be taken, and every means used to nurse the body, or the part of it which is affected, and to spare it any effort; for what is ailing and debilitated cannot be hardened. ”

“ And now, one final word in conclusion, for the purpose of drawing together, as it were, the multiplicity of threads which constitute the complex skein of causes and effects, with their remedial measures which cover the wide range of human life's vicissitudes—the interruptions of its would-be harmonies—which take the forms, all too common in these times of stress, of physical disturbance and of mental strain which come to us in the combined and threatening guise of suffering and disease. ”

“ XIII. Even as there may be, with respect to the body, a disease, a sickness, and a defect, so it is with the mind. They call that a disease where the whole body is corrupted; they call that sickness where a disease is attended with a weakness, and that a defect where the parts of the body are not well compacted together ”

“ But though the various accidents and disorders happen ing to the body, are the certain causes of disorders and irregular operations in the mind; yet causes that are internal affect it still more; I mean the stimulations of ambition, revenge, lust, and avarice. These are the great causes of the several irregular and vicious pursuits of men. ”

“ Disease is what follows the disturbance of the mind or spiritual matter. When I speak of disease I do not mean to confine the word to any particular phenomenon or disturbance of the mind, but that mind is disturbed like the soil of the earth ready to receive the seed. ”

“ In estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take into account a more important factor—the merciful paralysis or partial paralysis of any center of sensibility—that is insistently assaulted. ”

“ Illness, always illness! Pale faces, disordered nerves, dyspepsia, melancholia, anæmia, all the troop of ills that afflict humanity, marching for ever into his room! What company for a man to keep! What company! ”

“ Seek not to have things happen as you choose them, but rather choose them to happen as they do, and so shall you live prosperously.
2. Disease is a hindrance of the body, not of the Will, unless the Will itself consent. Lameness is a hindrance of the leg, not of the Will. ”

“ Let people who have to observe sickness and death look back and try to register in their observation the appearances which have preceded relapse, attack, or death, and not assert that there were none, or that there were not the right ones. ”

“ By infirmity is meant disease accompanied by weakness; and by disease is meant a fond imagining of something that seems desirable. And as in the body there are tendencies to certain maladies such as colds and diarrhoea, so it is with the soul, there are tendencies like enviousness, pitifulness, quarrelsomeness, and the like. ”

“ In a word, the condition of the greatest mental distress becomes the condition of the greatest bodily sickness.
The soul is informed of the threatened ruin of the organs that should have been her good and willing servants by a thousand obscure sensations, and is filled with an entire sensation of pain, associating itself to the primary mental suffering, and giving to this a sharper sting. ”

“ At the dawn of the Nineteenth Century, to examine a sick person's pulse, to inspect his tongue, to observe his breathing, to interrogate his skin by our sense of touch, and to try to make his statements and those of his friends fit in with some tenable theory of the nature of his ailment, were about all we could do. ”

“ As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath Receives the lurking principle of death; The young disease that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength: So, cast and mingled with his very frame, The mind's disease, its ruling passion came; ”

“ It must have been caused by the suffering you endured at the time of your various injuries. I have noticed that suffering frequently unnerves one, and that a person who has once been badly hurt lives in nervous terror of being hurt again. ”

“ The relaxed and debilitated body and nerves are at once rebraced, restored, enlivened, and built up. The mental and physical symptoms of all disease vanish together under its influence—the stooping trembling victim of depression or debility becomes a new man ”

“ It is true, some who have enjoyed uninterrupted health and have felt none of these, may make light of them, and wonder that sickness or pain of body, should bring heaviness upon the mind. And perhaps, one in a thousand is of so peculiar a constitution, as not to feel pain, like other men. ”