Illness

“ I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness. ”

“ Now it has become the invariable practice the moment that illness, even of non-infectious kind, declares itself, to send straight away to the hospital artisans, small tradesmen, and farmers from their own comfortable abodes, servants from the large and airy houses where they have labored faithfully, and even children from their mothers’ arms. ”

“ A fresh case of illness means the setting up of a fresh manufactory of horrible, insidious, deadly germs of disease, which, once set going in the world, cannot be recalled, and can only with difficulty be destroyed. ”

“ By VIRGINIA WOOLF CONSIDERING how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm chair and confuse his 'Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth' with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a growing tendency to discriminate between sickness and illness, limiting the words sick and sickness to some slight disturbance of the physical system, as nausea, and applying the words ill and illness to protracted disease and disordered health. ”

“ If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think. ”

“ When we have recovered from dangerous illness there is an error into which our earth-bound minds are apt to fall. This is entertaining our friends, with every symptom and variation of our malady, instead of the praise of our great physician. ”

“ No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,—an illness given by the hand of man!{254}
Since I came out of the Infirmary a vivid idea has occupied me,—a thought which affects me to madness; ”

“ 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. ”

“ The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. ”

“ In all modes of travelling, the American customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy; and I strongly incline to the belief that a considerable amount of illness is referable to this cause. ”

“ The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness, and the confinement of a sick-chamber, is above the conceptions, as well as the descriptions, of those in health. ”

“ It is not your fault; you are ill. And the name of your illness is:
FANCY.
It is a worm that gnaws black wrinkles on one’s forehead. ”

“ In diseases this sympathy is still more striking. All severe illnesses, especially those of malignant nature and arising from the economy of the abdominal regions, announce themselves, more or less, by a strange revolution in the character. ”

“ “Yes, and you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness. ”

“ Illnesses, more particularly those attacking the nerves and the head, are signs that the defensive strength of strong nature is lacking; ”

“ In the whole phenomena of malady, nothing is more striking than the accommodation of the mind to the condition of suffering. I remember once—I was then in all the strength and confidence of youth and health—discussing this point with a friend, a physician of skill and eminence, now no more, and was greatly struck by a theory which was new, at least to me. He regarded every species of disease, from the most simple to the most complicated, as a sanatory process, an effort—not always successful, of course—on the part of Nature to restore the system to its condition of health. ”

“ The sooner we realize and acknowledge that sickness, far from being the arbitrary visitation of an offended God, or the test of an unwise Providence, is the result of our own error or sin, the sooner shall we enter upon the highway of health.
Disease comes to those who attract it, to those whose minds and bodies are receptive to it, and flees from those whose strong, pure, and positive thought-sphere generates healing and life-giving currents. ”

“ I name these facts to show that disease has a mental origin, — that faith in rules of health or in drugs begets and fosters disease, by attracting the mind to the subject of sickness, by exciting fear of it, and by dosing the body in order to avoid it. ”

“ Does disease dispute the empire of Mind, dethrone it, and take the government into its own hands? Is sickness an aggressive, self-constituted material power, that copes astutely with Mind, and finally conquers it? Has God endowed matter with power to disable Mind, and chill harmony with a long, cold night of discord? ”

“ 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? ”

“ Explain to the sick the power which error exercises over their bodies. Give them divine and wholesome Healthful explanation. understanding, wherewith to fight against their erroneous sense, and so efface the images of disease from mortal mind. Keep distinctly in thought that man is the offspring of Soul, not body, — of God, not man; that man is spiritual, not material; and that soul is not in matter, giving it life and sensation, and producing disease. To break the dream of disease, understand that sickness is formed by the human mind, and not by matter. ”

“ 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; from whence it follows that the members are misshapen, crooked, and deformed. So that these two, a disease and sickness, proceed from a violent concussion and perturbation of the health of the whole body; but a defect discovers itself even when the body is in perfect health. But a disease of the mind is distinguishable only in thought from a sickness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have discerned disease in the human mind, and recognized the patient's fear of it, months before the so-called Disease foreseen disease made its appearance in the body. Disease being a belief, a latent illusion of mortal mind, the sensation would not appear if the error of belief was met and destroyed by truth. ”

“ I venture to affirm that they do not heal; they only relieve, and exchange one disease for another. I classify disease as error, that nothing but Truth, or Mind, can heal, and this Mind must be divine, not human. ”

“ For a long time I have known that my sickness was like your own—the sickness that no doctor can cure. Through the long nights, when others slept, I have sat alone under the stars, and the voices of the darkness have taught me many things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Six things are much spoken of amongst physicians as principal causes of this disease; if a man be melancholy, he hath offended in one of the six. They are diet, air, exercise, sleeping, and walking, and perturbations of the mind.
Idleness, the badge of gentry, or want of exercise, the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, and a sole cause of this and many other maladies, the devil's cushion and chief reposal, begets melancholy sooner than anything else. ”

“ The fact is, the knowledge of the symptoms of disease is, to a mother, almost a sealed book. If she were better acquainted with these matters, how much more useful would she be in a sick-room, and how much more readily would she enter into the plans and views of the medical man! By her knowledge of the symptoms, and by having his advice in time, she would nip 171disease in the bud, and the fight might end in favor of life, for “sickness is just a fight between life and death.” ”

“ THERE are certain mental mysteries associated with peculiar states of disease, and especially with low, nervous diseases, which discover unexpected powers of mind, and which illustrate some of the conditions on which human life depends, and the laws that govern its continuance. ”

“ In my last, I remember, I told you of your Authors opinion concerning the seat of Diseases, viz. that Diseases are properly in living bodies, and consist in the life it self; but when I consider his definition of Life, and of a Disease, I cannot conceive how they should consist together; for he describes [1] a Disease to be a real, material and substantial being, truly subsisting in a body; but life to be a meer nothing, and yet the immediate mansion of a disease, the inward subject, yea, and workman of the same; and that with the life all diseases depart into nothing. ”

“ In this work new theories, some revolutionary in the extreme, are advanced as to the nature of disease, the action of drugs and stimulants, the germ theory, the quantity of food necessary to sustain life, of cancer, insanity, pain, fatigue, sleep, death, the causation and maintenance of bodily heat and of human vitality. ”

“ All rose up with pleasure at this proposal. And they commenced to invent diseases so fast that they had soon named every kind of sickness that you ever heard of. Had they thought of many more, no human beings would now be alive. ”

“ Remove the leading error and governing fear of this lower mind, and you remove the cause of any disease, as well as the morbid and excited action of any organ. You also remove, in this way, what are termed organic diseases as readily as functional difficulties.
The remote cause of all disease is mental, even a mistaken belief, — a conviction of the necessity and power Terror's potency. of ill-health, and a conclusion that Mind is helpless to defend the Life of man, and wholly incompetent to control it. ”

“ Do you know, Lucius, that sometimes diseases of the mind or body give to those afflicted by them a strength which healthy men do not possess? For, as a matter of fact, there is no such thing as good health or bad health. There are only different conditions of the organs. Having studied what are called maladies, I have come to consider them as necessary forms of life. ”

“ For the origins of diseases, in general, are intemperance, luxuries of various kinds, pleasures merely corporeal, also envyings, hatreds, revenges, lasciviousness, and, the like; which things destroy man's interiors, and when these are destroyed, the exteriors also suffer, and draw man into disease and, thus to death.—Sin is all that which is contrary to Divine order. ”

“ My publications alone heal more sickness than an unconscientious student can begin to reach. If patients seem the worse for reading my book, this change may either arise from the frightened mind of the physician, or mark the crisis of the disease. ”

“ Health and sickness are not really, or at least necessarily, opposed; a measure of health is the efflorescence of the body, the elasticity, courage, and joyfulness of the mind, i.e., the extent to which sickness may be endured, overcome, and made tributary to health: sickness may be a stimulus to the "great health." ”

“ You sentence yourself, else your doctor, friends, medical books, and mortal mind in general do it. Therefore conclude to make your own terms with sickness, and be just to yourself. Meet every adverse circumstance as its master, and watch mind instead of your body, that nothing unfit to be developed shall come from that universal cause. ”