Incurable

“ Some, furious and strong in agony, sat in their beds bolt upright,—raving, tossing their arms, and muttering horrible imprecations—hideous objects of misery. The most fearful of all were the most healthy,—those whom they called the “Convalescents;” and who glided about in their long, white, shroud-like hospital-gowns and dresses; looking and moving like creatures emerged from the grave—even more appalling to Nature than those who were ready to descend into it. ”

“ She clasp'd her hands in pangs severe,
And shrieks reveal'd her agony.
And fainting on the earth she lay,
With struggles of convulsive breath,
As if weak life had fled away
In terror at the sight of death. ”

“ I knew that I stood upon the borders of the Middle State. Believing that more is to be gained by descriptions of the good and excellent than by exciting the horror of deformity, I forbear, in this introductory volume, to recount the terrors of the awful Hell of the vicious and the self-damned soul.
Suffice it that I beheld scenes of lust, insanity, debauchery, and all vileness, sufficiently dreadful to appal the stoutest heart of any sane one who dwells in the same awful phantasies, insanities and evils. ”

“ Some shape of horror, some monster born of the terror I was in; a diseased imagining of my mental, moral, physical paralysis; a creature, neither human nor inhuman, but wholly horrible, which should come stealing, resistless, in, to force me, in my agony, to welcome death. ”

“ The medicinal virtues of the fruits of charity are best proved amongst them. Grant that the disease arises from some remote or proximate ill-directed mental states. Why should we have more horror of insanity, than many other consequences of ill-regulated minds.—To me, the foul ward of some large public Hospital, is incomparably more horrible and loathsome.—p. 91Such direct consequences of wickedness present the object before us in an aspect that makes it difficult for us to exercise any feelings of commiseration towards them. Not so the insane! ”

“ No circle in any hell would have contained more concentrated suffering than was crowded into his every conscious moment—horrible, brute, physical suffering, tearing at every nerve, suffering that degraded him, that left him no humanity. ”

“ Kill not for food, and where Necessity Demands the sacrifice of sentient life, Kill with all kindness and with due regard To Physical—and Mental—feelings. Pain Is a nerve-racking, dread experience, Especially unto the dumb Creation, Who cannot question, yet are forced to bear That dread experience, all unwillingly. ”

“ In this agony they sigh, groan, utter indistinct sounds, and remain in the jaws of death, till, by the utmost efforts of nature, or some external assistance, they escape out of that dreadful torpid state. ”

“ Have I not prayed before, and not only no answer was vouchsafed, but no sensation of a listening Power, a loving Presence, assuaged my pain. Yet, human or brute, we must make our groans, though futile, when we are in the grasp of a mortal agony. ”

“ It branded, maimed and mutilated—it imprisoned and tortured—it blinded and burned, hanged and crucified, and utterly destroyed millions and millions of human beings. It touched every nerve of the body—produced every pain that can be felt, every agony that can be endured. ”

“ Who can picture to himself without horror the dreadful moments which lingered as they passed, and seemed endless in the anxiety of suspense! There the poor fellow lay, in speechless agony, the fated witness of barbarity the most revolting. ”

“ May all the members of my body be tortured with inconceivable agony, and all the powers of my soul tormented with horror and despair, inexpressible and eternal! Let my dwelling be in the blackness of darkness, and my companions accursed men and accursed devils! ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ That of their care thou hast no stronger proof?
Perhaps they do not like to hear or see
Thy last deep groan, thy dying agony!
The grass upspurn’d,
Thine eye upturn’d,
Bespeak its weight to heedless passers by!
That hoarse deep sigh, the sad effect of sin,
Proclaims the depth of agony within!
On man and beast,
Greatest and least,
Grim Death doth feed, and glad his victim win! ”

“ Sometimes these nerves of sensation are no longer useful as monitors, and in the unavoidable emergency of accident, surgical operations, child birth, and certain diseases, suffering can do no good, and then pain—that Prince of Terrors—thrusting his presence upon the hapless victim, racks body and limb, calling forth groans, and shrieks and writhings, till the poor sufferer, possessed with a dominating agony which displaces all thought of life, memory of friends, and love of God, breaks down in unutterable distress, and prays for death and oblivion. ”

“ Lear, on his knees, bareheaded, with heavenward eye, quivering lip, and hands clasped together in agony, pronounced the terrible curse, and in his death realised all that can be imagined of human woe. ”

“ Our original corruptions are the sickness and disease of the soul, an habitual indisposition; our actual transgressions are the wounds of the soul, which put conscience to pain, if it be not seared and senseless. ”

“ It may be more difficult to formulate that species of anguish in words, and it may seem a less positive and substantial grief than some others, but the plagues of the soul are real tortures, and I set few sufferings above them, few difficulties and few pains beyond those that have their source not in the outward dispensation of events, but in the inward conditions of our physical and moral constitutions. ”

“ Seeing also, the mighty risings and inundations of the water; and by these conjecturing the calamities and misery these prodigious signs threaten to the world, will be amazed with such a horror, that they will be without life, without voice, without color, or human shape; they will be dead before they die, dreading their damnation before the sentence be pronounced, imagining the future pain, by their present distemper. ”

“ With the clamour and horror yet in our ears of that raging eloquence in which the sufferer flings into the faces of prosperous men the very flame and hell-fire of his suffering, it needed no less than this to leave the mind exalted and reconciled. ”

“ My eyes have faltered in anger, my soul and my stomach.
10 Because imprisoned in sorrows is my life, and my years in sighing. My strength has failed in my miseries, and my bones have faltered.
11 From all my opponents I have become despicable, and much so to my neighbors, and a fear to my acquaintances. ”

“ Men and women and young children, gaunt with hunger and begrimed with dirt, some with faces that were hard and stony, some with faces that were weak and simple, some with eyes that were red as blood, all weary with waiting and wasted with long pain, ran hither and thither in the gloom of the foul place where they were immured together. ”

“ The strange and frightful diseases to which he was subject, the freezings and burnings of fever, the contortions of epilepsy, the sudden palsies, the darkness of night, and the wild, terrible and fantastic dreams that filled his brain, satisfied him that he was haunted and pursued by countless spirits of evil. For some reason he supposed that these spirits differed in power—that they were not all alike malevolent—that the higher controlled the lower, and that his very existence depended upon gaining the assistance of the more powerful. ”

“ The gods only know what agony of mind is mine. The torture of thinking of the pure, sweet girl in the power of those wretches above us—to imagine her shrinking in their foul, pitiless hands—oh!’ The young man shook his clenched fists and then buried his face in his hands. ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ He felt he was being crippled, caked over, blinded, stupefied in the wrappings of this life, he felt as a man might feel who has taken some horrible poison, and feels destruction spreading within him. ”

“ But we can bear each day and night of pain, only by taking each by itself. We can break each rod, but not the bundle.” And the sufferer, in real great suffering, is well described as turning to the wall in blank despair, when he looks too far on. ”

“ This victim I saw lying under the fell power of one of the most frightful of diseases, brought on by his own intemperance; and not far from his bed lay a half-finished Scripture-piece—a work which, if finished, would have brought him money and fame. He presented the ordinary appearances of his complaint. Emaciated and pale, he laboured under that union of ague and temporary madness which delirium tremens exhibits. All the motions of his nerves seemed to have been inverted; those servants of the will had got a new master, which kept them, by his diabolical power, in continual action. ”

“ Pain, even to agony, were better than thus to brave Omnipotence—to rush forward uncalled into that state of which no certain end is known: to snatch destiny into our own power, and draw upon ourselves, 86 in one instant of time, terrors and punishments above the boundless apprehension even of an evil imagination to conceive. ”

“ Who can tell the anguish of those weary hours, when the only sound the sick man hears, is the disjointed wanderings of some feverish slumberer near him, the low moan of pain, or perhaps the muttered, long-forgotten prayer of a dying man? ”

“ He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel eruptions. ”

“ These sinister spirits assert their vast power, and display their malevolence, not only in plague, pestilence, and dearth, and all the desolating convulsions of the physical world, but in the moral perversion and deception of the human race. ”

“ But an earthy, sensual, and weak despondency is the attribute of the lowest mental and bodily disease; and the imbecilities and lassitudes which follow crime, both in nations and individuals, can only find a last stimulus to their own dying sensation in the fascinated contemplation of completer death. ”

“ To see herself before the foul odors of decomposing flesh, to contemplate the flow of blood—a horrible thing for her who had always felt an invincible repugnance toward all the unpleasant conditions of ordinary life! ”

“ Pain tortured every nerve and sinew in his body, and there were times of terrible collapse,—when he was conscious of nothing save an intense longing to sink into the grave and have done with all the sharp and cruel torment which kept him on the rack of existence. ”

“ Some cling to you in woebegone misery; others come back fiercely and weirdly, like ghouls bent upon sucking your strength away; others, again, have a catastrophic splendour; some are unvenerated recollections, as of spiteful wild-cats clawing at your agonized vitals; others are severe, like a visitation; and one or two rise up draped and mysterious, with an aspect of ominous menace. ”

“ In a little time his three horrid heads will growl with rising fury each to each, over the enormous spoils of decaying life. Wait! and the growls will grow fierce and more furious; and at last in mortal and horrible combat the beast will strive with itself, spreading chaos and death around. ”

“ The hopeless tragedy of the situation is admirably expressed without a trace of theatrical exaggeration. We see a young man, suffering from a grave and mysterious malady, extended upon his bed of suffering. ”

“ Letting the question as to hell hereafter rest for the present, how do you account for the hell here—namely, the existence of pain? There are people who, by no fault of their own, are at this present time in misery. If for these there is no life to come, their existence is a mistake; but if there is a life to come, it may be that the sequel to the acts of the play to come will justify the pain and misery of this present time?—Rev. ”

“ The face is distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts, cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty, disheveled and panting with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. ”

“ As if counting and hesitating what course to pursue for their relief, he paces up and down the grotesque mass, touching one, and gazing upon the haggard features of another, who looks up to see what it is that disturbs her. ”

“ Evil thought, worry, directs to the person, or to that part of the body considered, an injurious and baneful influence that produces pain, inharmony, unhappiness. It is as if one were to divert a stream of corroding acid upon a sensitive wound, and do it because we wished to heal the wound. ”

“ Long days of suffering followed as the tortured nerves recorded their far-spread effects in the waste of the body and that failure of emotional control which even the most courageous feel when long under the tyranny of continuous pain. ”

“ He who holds us in his power could not have devised more cruel torture than that you are compelled to endure. You are condemned to live, to await death through a vista of long, wasting torments, for your description of your feelings fully explains to me the many alarming symptoms I have observed in you from day to day, and of which I have hitherto vainly sought to find the cause."
"But the symptoms you speak of as alarming are nothing but exhaustion, a sort of reaction of the bodily and mental powers ”

“ A dry, cold, impassive agony, silent, insidious, and exhausting, appeared to absorb the very elements of life, and reduce her to a condition of such physical and morbid incapacity as to feel an utter inability, or at all events disinclination, to complain. ”