Irritation

“ In conclusion, I would remind you, that it may, some time or other, be the will of God to afflict you with heavy and permanent sickness, habitually affecting your temper, generating despondency, impatience, and irritation, and making the whole mind, as it were, one vast sore, shrinking in agony from every touch. ”

“ Of exciting causes strong emotions, such as fright, ill-usage or hardship of any kind, insufficient feeding, overwork or anxiety, are among the most common; while, again, some distant source of irritation, such as teething or intestinal worms, appears capable of giving rise to an attack. ”

“ When we talk of life we mean vital activity. Now, every vital action supposes an excitation or irritation. The irritability of the part is the criterion by which we judge whether it be alive or not. Our notion of the death of a part is based upon nothing more or less than this—that we can no longer detect any irritability in it. ”

“ It is possible, and quite as necessary, to treat one's own nervous system with this distant courtesy.
This brings us to the second simple truth. In nine cases out of ten the cause of this nervous irritation is in ourselves. If a man loses his temper and rouses us to a return attack, how can we blame him? Are we not quite as bad in hitting back? ”

“ Hence when we say that “we feel in places subjected to external irritation,” we express a real fact of which we have experimental evidence, and in regard to which no habit or external appearance can make us err. ”

“ A variously distributed irritation in the brain, due to one or more of a multitude of possible causes, into which we need not stop to inquire, would propagate itself outward, becoming fainter the farther it traveled. ”

“ Every one knows the tendency of disease to produce irritation,—sometimes imperceptibly to the sufferer, sometimes unavoidably, and with a painful consciousness. In no duty or sympathy for the sick is there more need of kind allowance ”

“ I. The temperament of decreased irritability known by weak pulse, large pupils of the eyes, cold extremities. Are generally supposed to be too irritable. Bear pain better than labour. Natives of North-America contrasted with those upon the coast of Africa. Narrow and broad shouldered people. Irritable constitutions bear labour better than pain. II. Temperament of increased sensibility. Liable to intoxication, to inflammation, hæmoptoe, gutta serena, enthusiasm, delirium, reverie. These constitutions are indolent to voluntary exertions, and dull to irritations. ”

“ For the irritative ideas of the apparent motions of objects are now excited by irritation from internal stimulus, or by association with other irritative motions; and the inebriate, like one in a dream, believes the objects of these irritative motions to be present, and feels himself vertiginous. ”

“ To cause any real harm to the child psychologically, such irritations must be chronic and unattended to for a long period. The usual short-term irritation has no known permanent effect on the child’s development psychologically. ”

“ Counter-irritation probably plays quite an important role in the relief of discomfort, but I am sure that the suggestive influence of acute sensory feelings at the surface produced by counter-irritation serves to divert the mind from the duller ache or the functional disturbance below. ”

“ Why do the same parts of successive trains of action sometimes affect each other by direct, and sometimes by reverse sympathy?—1st, When any irritative motion ceases, or becomes torpid, which was before in perpetual action; it is either deprived of its usual stimulus, and thence the sensorial power of irritation is not excited ”

“ Artificial irritation will immediately occasion them to contract, or, as is frequently the case, when contracted, will occasion them to dilate, and the phenomena of tinctumutation may be observed in facto. ”

“ If the irritation acting upon the one is stronger than the force of will which should excite the other to activity, the reflex motion will take place in spite of what is called 'best intentions,' whether the occasion be a start of alarm, a desire to yawn, laugh, or weep at unfitting times, a scream, an angry gesture, or even a blow bestowed upon the object whence proceeds the incitement to wrath. ”

“ In reading Elizabeth Drinker’s journal, we cannot but be struck with the absence of invective, and, for the most part, of comment. Anxiety and irritation are alike powerless to overcome the lifelong habit of restraint. ”

“ A fright, a fit of anger, nagging, irritation, or any disturbing emotions, may hamper digestion. An experiment that is sometimes performed in the physiological laboratory on the cat nicely illustrates this. ”

“ Exposed workers reported large decreases in most symptoms during the second period, when they handled the completed forms with broken microcapsules (280/day) rather than the fresh forms (1,200 per day) during the first period. These symptom decreases during the second period included a sixfold decrease in skin irritation and threefold decreases in eye irritation, pruritus, nasal congestion, nose-bleed, and cough. However, increases occurred in facial erythema, rash, and runny nose. Figure 4-2 shows the relationship between pruritus and increasing CCP exposure. ”

“ I have watched you narrowly, and I know how you try to conquer this irritability; there is no black spot of anger in your heart, whatever words come to your lips. You are like a fretful child sometimes, I grant you that, who is ailing and unconscious of its ailment. ”

“ It is not necessary to charge much upon our ancestors. The causes may much oftener be found within our own minds and bodies, would we but look for them there. We harbor or perhaps indulge a thousand unpleasant feelings from day to day, not seeming to know, or at least to realize, that as small streams form larger ones, so these first risings of anger lead to its more out-breaking forms.
Not a few of the instances of irritability, fretfulness, impatience and melancholy, have their origin in physical causes—in errors in regard to exercise, sleep, air, temperature, dress, eating, drinking, &c. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Phrases like "to sit on thorns," "to be on pins and needles," "to drain the cup of misery to the dregs," show with graphic power the folly and curse of worry. Why should one sit on thorns, or on pins and needles? If one does so accidentally he arises in a hurry, yet in worrying, one seems deliberately, with intent, to sit down upon prickles in order to compel himself to discomfort, distress, and pain. Is there any wisdom, when one has the cup of misery at his lips, in deliberately keeping it there, and persistently drinking it to the "very dregs"? ”

“ I have the gift of concealing and restraining my irritability on many subjects; but if I happen to be touched at any time when I am more than usually susceptible of anger, I burst forth more violently than any one else. ”

“ And pain, it is true, transmuted, so to say, by its own fiery heat into anger, loses every appearance of depression and feebleness; the angry man makes a show of energy, as the man in a high fever does of natural heat, while, in fact, all this action of the soul is but mere diseased palpitation, distention, and inflammation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the irritability, which has been attributed to the author’s genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the man, who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability. ”

“ The body becomes inert and languid, with a sense of illness pervading the frame; the mind is haunted by apprehension of evil, and is disturbed by a nervous restlessness and irritability of the most distressing kind. After a day or two these symptoms disappear. I experienced it most painfully, and am now quite well, but rather eager to get away: I am heartily tired of the waters, the promenade, the dinners, the sick; and the surrounding scenery is by no means interesting enough to compensate for our disagreeable style of life. ”

“ Thus an emotional disposition of irritability, resulting from a definite fit of anger, will make us, while it lasts, more susceptible to anger than we are normally.
(5) The objects or situations which excite emotions in one person may have no effect on others. Emotions are relative to persons just as desires are. What is an object of desire to me may leave you quite cold. Similarly, what excites my emotions may have no effect whatever on you. The Englishman feels disgust at eating frogs, and the German feels disgust at the thought of eating rabbits. ”

“ Thus the appearance of a cheerful countenance gives us pleasure, and of a melancholy one makes us sorrowful. Yawning, and sometimes vomiting, are thus propagated by sympathy; and some people of delicate fibres, at the presence of a spectacle of misery, have felt pain in the same parts of their bodies, that were diseased or mangled in the object they saw. ”

“ By a line of humorous reflection already suggested, we may in all cases of worry and moral disturbance reach the consolatory idea that the trouble has, in the first view of it, been grossly exaggerated. At the moment when the sensitive tissue is lacerated the shock of pain blinds us to dimensions; our disappointment fills the outlook, like a thunder-storm. The healthy nervous organism will show its vitality in the rapidity of the recuperative process ”

“ Hence, when the mind, which animates the most robust and best organized body, is violently agitated by fright, rage, grief, vehement desire, or any other passion, whether sudden, or attended by long and painful sensations, the body manifestly suffers, and a variety of diseases, as apoplexy, palsy, madness, fever, and hysterics, may be the consequence. ”

“ X. Tomar agua fria encima de colera.—To drink cold water immediately after a fit of anger, which is the meaning of the words in our text, is a frequent cause of ailment, and one which the practitioner every day hears of as the origin of the worst cases of visceral obstructions or hepatic disease. Unfortunately, the occasions of such attacks are of ordinary occurrence; for the temper of those who suffer from them is rarely under proper control, and, as a necessary consequence of the existing state of society, provocations to anger are common in every situation. ”

“ The loss of self-control, reacting upon the body, produces a morbid irritability (always a sign of weakness) which is a real disease, subjecting the individual to constant excitement and exhaustion from slight causes. ”

“ No cry escaped her, nor sound except a moan, half of mental pain, half of the deadly sickness, the actual nausea, which every one who has ever sustained a severe shock of pain or fear knows is its invariable accompaniment. ”

“ The decay of physical power, emaciation, the irritable temper, the sallow complexion, the drawn and anxious look, the unsteadiness of the hands, the dyspepsia, the capricious appetite, the aversion to parental and other advice, the tendency to seek lower companionship, could hardly fail to leave its impress upon such an audience. ”

“ Turning a street corner, we encounter suddenly a bitter wintry blast; we feel at once an arrest upon our movements. An ill odour, a painful contact, a grating noise, a disagreeable spectacle, have all the same immediate efficacy. The proper, the direct consequent of an incursion of pain, is suspended activity. Not only is this second law conformable to observation, it is the implication, the obverse, of the previous law connecting pleasure with increased activity. ”

“ The pain, of which the appetite desires the relief, is a sensation, as much as any other internal bodily pain which we feel,—a state or affection of the mind, arising, immediately and solely, from a state or affection of the body,—which is the only definition that can be given of a sensation. ”

“ From the evidence just given it appears that any high degree of excitement in the central nervous system, whether felt as anger, terror, pain, anxiety, joy, grief or deep disgust, is likely to break over the threshold of the sympathetic division and disturb the functions of all the organs which that division innervates. ”

“ Thus in anger we have over and above pain a more or less definite object as its cause, and a certain characteristic reactive display—frowns, compressed lips, erect head, clenched fists, in a word, the combative attitude—as its effect, and similarly of other emotions; so that generally in the particular movements indicative of particular emotions the primary and primitive effects of feeling are overlaid by what Darwin has called serviceable associated habits. ”

“ Pain I have enough of, but that is indeed to me a mere trifle, but the almost unceasing, overpowering sensations of wretchedness—achings in my limbs, with an indescribable restlessness that makes action to any available purpose almost impossible—and worst of all the sense of blighted utility, regrets, not remorseless. ”

“ Leanness of body, costiveness, hollow eyes, anger without a cause, a testy disposition, yellowness of the skin, bitterness in the throat, pricking pains in the head, the pulse swifter and stronger than ordinary, the urine higher coloured, thinner and brighter, troublesome sleeps, much dreaming of fire, lightning, anger, and fighting. ”