Depletion

“ The imperfect recovery of such patients from their first attack, and, which is attributed to the depletion, arises from the disease which is left by it, and to the injudicious means, perhaps, that are employed by the too anxious attendants, with the view of restoring the strength. ”

“ Some practitioners, from having observed that the action of the heart frequently becomes enfeebled on these occasions, have unconditionally insisted upon the necessity of cordials; while others, reasoning upon the state of the brain, have with equal confidence advocated the propriety of immediate and copious depletion by the lancet. ”

“ I cannot agree with the Court's decision that a lessee of mineral lands, whose total investment may consist merely of a promise to pay a small royalty for minerals produced, is entitled to the full allowance for depletion and that no share of this allowance is to be apportioned to a mining company with substantial investment in digging and maintaining a particular coal mine. ”

“ Do you wish to know what is taking place?—Sometimes, when endurance is at an end and strength exhausted, bending beneath the weight of misery, without shoes, without bread, without clothing, without a shirt, consumed by fever, devoured by vermin, poor artisans torn from their workshops, poor husbandmen forcibly taken from the plough, weeping for a wife, a mother, children, a family widowed or orphaned, also without bread and perhaps without shelter, overdone, ill, dying, despairing,—some of these wretched beings succumb, and consent to "ask for pardon!" ”

“ The loss of health and the loss of character are the certain consequences; and the debauch of the evening is followed by pains and sickness in the morning, when that which was before poison, is administered as the cure! Practice becomes habitual, and thus a whole life is frequently wasted in debauchery ”

“ Poverty, disease, disgrace, misery, and too often an untimely death, are the consequences of sloth and indolence. Yield not to idleness; if you indulge it, you will find it grow upon you. Therefore, be diligent and industrious in your lawful callings. It is written in the Bible, and confirmed by experience and observation, The idle soul shall suffer hunger, but the soul of the diligent shall be made fat. ”

“ We left our miserable habitation in the morning, with hopes that the wretched spectacle that we presented, weak and emaciated as we were, would move some to pity and induce them to impart that relief which our situations so much required—it would however be almost endless to recount the many rebuffs we met with in our attempts to crave85 assistance. Some few indeed were more merciful, and whatever their opinion might be of the cause of our misery, the distress they saw us in excited their charity, and for their own sakes were induced to contribute a trifle to our wants. ”

“ For dejection causes sickness; and when the body is exhausted and enfeebled, and remains in a neglected condition, deprived of the assistance of physicians, and of a wholesome climate, and an abundant supply of the necessaries of life, consider how great an aggravation of distress is occasioned thereby. ”

“ A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. ”

“ Labourers thrown out of employment, and consequent increase of pauperism and crime. Extreme depression takes place. The usual healing courses have to be followed. After some years of suffering things settle down pretty much as they were. ”

“ To visit beds of pain and death,
Of restless limbs, and quivering breath,
And sorrowing hearts, and patient eyes
That see, through tears, the sun go down,
But never more shall see it rise.
The poor in body and estate,
The sick and the disconsolate.
Must not on man's convenience wait. ”

“ Griefs and the Cares have set their couches down–
The vengeful Cares. There pale Diseases dwell,
Sad Eld and Fear and loathsome Poverty
And Hunger, that bad counsellor,–dire shapes–
And Death and Toil, and Sleep brother of Death
And soul-corrupting joys. ”

“ After the endurance of a week's delirium, madness, and unconsciousness, they generally find themselves, when robbed of the greater portion of their hard-got earnings, thrust upon the world penniless, wretched, dispirited, and sick, to seek employment and re-enact the same scenes of solitary penance and wild debauchery. ”

“ Let us, therefore, labour whilst we can to secure our being admitted into this happy rest. What do we behold in this perishable life, if not grief and mourning, and what ought above all to afflict the faithful,—a too great abandonment and contempt of the law of God. ”

“ For I now suffered, for upwards of sixteen weeks, the physical anguish of hunger in various degrees of intensity; but as bitter, perhaps, as ever any human being can have suffered who has survived it. I would not needlessly harass my reader’s feelings by a detail of all that I endured; for extremities such as these, under any circumstances of heaviest misconduct or guilt, cannot be contemplated, even in description, without a rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness of the human heart. ”

“ I must be pardoned for giving these distressing details; but how otherwise can I depict the misery, moral and physical, which we are enduring? And with it all, I dare not venture to hope that we have reached the climax of our sufferings. ”

“ The screaming rage of the sick man in his pain, the whining complaints of the poor man in his destitution -- what will they avail these people, except increase their unhappiness and bring them no relief? ”

“ The disposition of body which is habitual to a man in health, makes his stomach easily keep time, if I may be allowed so coarse an expression, with the one, and not with the other. 27 We can sympathize with the distress which excessive hunger occasions when we read the description of it in the journal of a siege, or of a sea voyage. We imagine ourselves in the situation of the sufferers, and thence readily conceive the grief, the fear, and consternation, which must necessarily distract them. ”

“ The measure of our miseries is already full; our condition begins to be insupportable, and the life we lead is worse than that of beasts of burden. When these have gone their day's journey, their load is taken off, food is given them, and they are allowed to take rest; we, on the contrary, are always under arms, nor do we ever take our clothes off. ”

“ At the same time that we should preserve the health of those unfortunates, we should prevent serious disorders. On the days of relaxation it often happens, that a convict, desirous of a debauch, pledges his allowance for a fortnight for the present advances of some comrades. ”

“ Add to this labor lessons to prepare in the evenings, a constant feeling of inanition, especially during winter, cold feet and thin clothing, with no object in the world in my lessons to interest me, and it may well be conceived how the state of sin and misery brought on man by the fall was to me a palpable, undeniable, experienced reality. A few explanations will throw light on the causes of these sufferings. Too much cerebral action, and a close, ill-aired bedroom, with three besides myself in it, made me in the morning low, listless, irritable, and without appetite. ”

“ And thus it is impossible to deny that an unsuspected source of discomfort, which in time may become disease, sometimes threatens the head of the household—a source which I would gladly pass over if duty did not compel me to notice it, owing as it is to the sedulous and tender care taken by the devoted, anxious partner of his life, who in secret has long noted and grieved over her lord's declining health and force. ”

“ A still more striking illustration of the position I am now supporting is afforded in another action of these agents. The tendency of their action is, as a rule, toward premature physical death: the tendency is also toward premature mental death. A sudden excess of indulgence by any one of them, save perhaps arsenic, is all but certain to lead to some form of acute mental derangement or stupor, more or less decisive and prolonged. A gradual excessive indulgence is almost as certain to lead to a confirmed condition of aberration more or less determinate. ”

“ This condition of nervous exhaustion renders them, of course, the very negation of the negative pole of sympathy, and the first person approaching them, who possesses the ordinary Odic conditions of health, is clutched hold of by their famine-struck vitality, in the agonised plea for life! life! ”

“ It is useless for me to describe it—it is a complete bundle of rags; and by adding to these troubles grim starvation, which all along has been gnawing at our bowels, we have a summary of our calamities, the details of which would be sickening. But, thank God! we are now in reality on the point of surmounting or ending our wretchedness and misery. ”

“ Come between me and the gates of the grave, to which I am ready to be hurried." When we recover from sickness, the divine pity does, as it were, beg a day for us, and undertakes we shall be forthcoming another time and answer the debt in full. ”

“ To suffer them to remain unemployed? the sentiment of conscious merit, which made me consider myself as suffering injustice, was some kind of reparation, and caused me to shed tears which with pleasure I suffered to flow.
These were my mediations during the finest season of the year, in the month of June, in cool shades, to the songs of the nightingale, and the warbling of brooks. Everything concurred in plunging me into that too seducing state of indolence for which I was born, and from which my austere manner, proceeding from a long effervescence, should forever have delivered me. ”

“ The tired labouring man, the household drudge shut up in city courts refreshed by no pleasant sight or cheering voice, by its aid can leave fretted [344] nerves and aching limbs and dull care behind, and taste, if it be only for a feverish moment, of the joy of bounding life. Can such cravings be hindered from seeking their relief? ”

“ The inflexible decree of Providence happily condemns these wretches to a life of unmitigated suffering. Their short span of life is spent in abject bondage to quacks in a futile quest after a remedy that will rid them of their suffering. ”

“ Days and weeks passed slowly on, with nothing to cheer us, but everything to depress our spirits. Cold, hungry, and discouraged with the sight of so much misery all about us, little wonder that some lost their reason. ”

“ If health was denied, yet all the compensations that could be granted in loving companionship and intellectual pursuits were mercifully granted. Still, those only know, to whom the monotony of the sick room is often appointed, how heavy the burden is, and how it presses on those who have to bear it. ”

“ Chronic Decline, with its attendant anæmia, may be induced by bad habits, destitution, or constitutional depravity. Sickly forms, wrecks of health, address our senses on every side. All these subjects evidently once had a capital in life, sufficient, if properly and carefully husbanded, to comfortably afford them vital stamina and length of days. ”

“ If every sick prisoner in our land were questioned, and could and would answer truly, I believe all would reply (all who have minds) that their worst pangs are in the soul. For the moment,—for the hour,—no agony is, I know, to{167} be compared with some pains of body; but when the question is of months and years (including the seasons of delicious reaction from bodily pains) , I am confident that the peculiar misery of our condition—subjection to a besetting thought—will be owned to absorb all others. ”

“ Of the incalculable amount of physical suffering and disablement which they occasion, and of the sorrows, and anxieties, the permanent darkening of life, the straitened means of such subsistence, the very frequent destitution and pauperism which attend or follow such suffering, death statistics testify only in sample or by suggestion. ”

“ Why should I tire you with a description of our unutterable sorrow at the fatal news of this event, the remembrance of which now fills my aged eyes with tears! When our grief subsided a little, and reflection came to our aid, we found ourselves deserted by the whole world, and in danger of perishing by want; whereupon we made application for the pension, and were put upon the list. ”

“ Recently a rare case of suffering and devotion has come to my knowledge. A woman, young in years, yet a mother and widow, was struggling on in spite of want, poverty, and pain, seeking to earn a subsistence for her two children, grew weary, faint, and exhausted, when her little ones were taken from her without a 117moment’s warning, and hurried into the spirit world by what you of earth call an accident. ”

“ There were some whose chief complaint was the aches and pains of age, brought on before their time by hard labour and exposure; poor folk who were taking a rest after a season of sharper suffering, and making ready for another turn or two of hard work before the end should come.
“It is no’ that I’m sae ill. I hae done mony a day’s work with more suffering on me than I have now. ”

“ In many cases, even of the greatest apparent suffering and distress, instead of showing any anxiety to communicate the causes of their distress, or to relate their privations, and their longings for their homes and their friends and relatives, they lay in a listless, lethargic, uncomplaining state, taking no notice either of their own distressed condition, or of the gigantic mass of human misery by which they were surrounded. ”

“ See if you can go through the day carrying your load of sorrow, or disappointment or chagrin, with so serene a face that the sick for whom you are caring will not suspect that you have a burden at all. ”

“ Shall we, poor human beings at such a disadvantage from the first in the fight with Fate through the many weaknesses and ailments of our bodies, load our souls as well with an ever-growing burden of regret and penitence? ”