Malignity

“ The Progress of an Epidemic That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions: is a fact as firmly established by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere. ”

“ His sores bred worms, the scabs were like clods of dust, and his skin was broken; so evil was the disease which cleaved fast to him. See what vile bodies we have, and what little reason we have to pamper them or be proud of them; they have in themselves the principles of their own corruption: as fond as we are of them now, the time may come when we may loathe them and long to get rid of them. ”

“ The demon theory of disease, a prevalent feature in almost every popular creed, has some influence on the Hindoo writers of medicine, according to whom the malignant spirit, if wittingly or unwittingly provoked, enters the body of the offender, annoys him in various ways, and afflicts him with certain kinds of diseases. ”

“ That the diseases have some natural cause never occurs to my patients: they attribute them to evil spirits, to malicious human magic, or to "the worm," which is their imaginary embodiment of pain of every sort. ”

“ It is a sickness that gives raging pain—like a poisoned arrow in an open wound, and devours all that is near it like a fire-brand, and is harder to cure than the disease which is killing that coughing wench. To be possessed by that demon of anguish is to suffer the torture of the damned—or else," and her voice sank to softness, "to be more blest than the Gods, happy as they are. ”

“ But the end of sickness uncured is death. We 'have no healing medicine,' and the 'wound is incurable' by the skill of any earthly chirurgeon. The notion of sickness passes, therefore, at once into that of danger: for unhealed sickness can only end in death. Oh! that my words could have the waking power that would startle some of my complacent hearers into the recognition of the bare facts of their lives and character, and of the position in which they stand on a slippery inclined plane that goes straight down into darkness!
You do not hear much about the danger of sin from some modern pulpits. ”

“ On the whole, it is very often remarked that an evil spirit dwells in a sick body.
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. Even while the disease is still silently stealing through the hidden corners of our mechanism, and undermining the strength of nerve, the mind begins to anticipate by dark forebodings the fall of her companion. ”

“ And yet what were my pupils doing ten minutes ago but making game of a far worse disease than the plague—the fatal disease of sin? Its spots are blacker, the pain it gives more terrible: often has it caused the death of the body, and, except where repented of and forsaken, the death, the endless death of the soul! Oh, my children! it may be your lot, as it was that mother’s, to be obliged to go out and meet the danger, 97for the Almighty may have seen good to place you in situations of great temptation ”

“ 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. ”

“ Physicians can tell fearful tales of the ravages of disease, proceeding directly from sinful indulgences and moral corruption; disease, in which rottenness pervades the marrow and bones, and eats away the very features of the face—leaving the man a horrid monument of his own evil, and a dreadful proof of the correspondence that exists between moral disease and physical.
That there exists a direct connection between physical and moral disorders, or between bodily disease and sin, is very distinctly taught in the pages of Holy Writ. ”

“ What is the case that perplexes your eye of physician, which is usually keener than mine, despite all the length of my practice?"
"The sufferer is young, his organization rare in its vigour. He has gone through and survived assaults upon life that are commonly fatal. His system has been poisoned by the fangs of a venomous asp, and shattered by the blast of the plague. These alone, I believe, would not suffice to destroy him. But he is one who has a strong dread of death; and while the heart was thus languid and feeble, it has been gnawed by emotions of hope or of fear. ”

“ There shall no evil come to thee, nor shall the scourge come near thy dwelling." But above all let us attend to what generally engages peoples minds during a plague, namely, to keep from our consciences the plague of the soul sin, the fuel of all evil lest the divine anger should be aroused and punish us by another pestilence of the body. ”

“ It may be said—admitting that evil or disorder in the mind has the effect sometimes of immediately producing disease in the body, and admitting that it was the original cause of disease,—yet, is it not also true that a great portion of the disease and consequent suffering existing in the world, has no direct, or at least no visible, connection with moral evil or sin in the individual patient? ”

“ From time to time he raised himself, and seeming to hold the disease in his joined hands, opened them at once into the air, blowing, as if he drove away some evil spirit. During those rites, an old woman in tears howled with great violence in the child's ears. ”

“ A thousand evil thoughts intrude Tumultuous in my breast; Which indispose me for my food, And rob me of my rest. Lord I am sick, regard my cry, And set my spirit free; Say, canst thou let a sinner die, Who longs to live to thee? ”

“ Nothing is more common than to read serious admonitions, in medical works, about the folly of trusting to remedies which only palliate for the moment but leave the root of evil untouched; and, of course, there is a certain respectable modicum of the fire of truth behind all this orthodox smoke. ”

“ So disease among the lower races is accounted for by possession by demons, who are often themselves human souls, and who enter the bodies of their victims, causing all kinds of illness, and especially those phenomena of convulsion and delirium in which the patient seems actually animated by a spirit not his own. ”

“ From time to time they catch the attention of some foolish souls and prove fatal by the very infection of their contact; one plague as destructive as another when once the poison of their teaching has found its way into the hearer’s thoughts. ”

“ Men and women who had enemies to accuse them of evil knowledge and the power to cause illness in others, were hanged or pressed to death by heavy weights. Such sicknesses they could cause by keeping a waxen image, and sticking pins or nails into it, or melting it before the fire. ”

“ Have you not, lastly, often read, and as often been told, that bodily death is one of the most tremendous evils which man has to fear, and consequently to be dreaded as the scourge of all scourges, and the plague of all plagues, in the long catalogue of human miseries? ”

“ Until the plague hath had its work in him,
Killing the nerves which die before the life;
Then, when his strings have cracked with agony
And all his bones are empty of the sense
To ache, the plague will quit and light elsewhere.
Oh, sir! it is not good to hold him so! ”

“ He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. ”

“ Do we observe the memory, the imagination, and the judgment, to be affected by diseases, particularly by madness? Where is the physician who has not seen the moral faculty affected from the same causes! How often do we see the temper wholly changed by a fit of sickness! And how often do we hear persons of the most delicate virtue, utter speeches in the delirium of a fever, that are offensive to decency or good manners! ”

“ This disposition of mind, altogether so peculiar to the Middle Ages, and which, happily for mankind, has yielded to an improved state of civilisation and the diffusion of popular instruction, accounts for the origin and long duration of this extraordinary mental disorder. The good sense of the people recoiled with horror and aversion from this heavy plague, which, whenever malevolent persons wished to curse their bitterest enemies and adversaries, was long after used as a malediction. ”

“ The outside pressure, therefore, is immense upon the physician, tending to force him to active treatment of some kind. Certain old superstitions, still lingering in the mind of the public, and not yet utterly expelled from that of the profession, are at the bottom of this, or contribute to it largely. One of the most ancient is, that disease is a malignant agency, or entity, to be driven out of the body by offensive substances, as the smoke of the fish's heart and liver drove the devil out of Tobit's bridal chamber, according to the Apochrypha. ”

“ Meantime, the disease, instead of passing away, changes its form, sinks deeper into the flesh, the blood, the bones. The disease is this: that men born good and gentle, men with love and mercy rooted in their hearts, perpetrate such atrocities on one another, themselves not knowing why or wherefore. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For months he knew that a disease which held out no hope of cure was slowly but surely killing him, but he nevertheless attended as assiduously to his duties in behalf of suffering humanity as physical pain would permit. ”

“ Diseases of all sorts, particularly paralysis, are invariably ascribed to the possession of the human frame by one of these unwholesome visitors, and when a death occurs, to what else can it be due than to their evil and invisible operation? ”

“ It brings on the body a long and lasting train of disagreeable sensations and diseases, and at length it destroys the soul also. I have seen men of fine understanding and amiable disposition carried off by this plague, in the flower of their youth, who, if they had lived abstemiously, might now be among us, to benefit and adorn society. ”

“ Passion, appetite, dishonesty, envy, and malice ripen into action, only to pass on from shame and woe to their next stage, self-destruction.
The dream of disease is like the dreams we have in sleep, wherein every one recognizes suffering to be Diease a dream. wholly in mortal mind. In both cases the dreamer thinks his body is material, and that the suffering is in that body. ”

“ I was like the child I knew about that had been miraculously cured of infantile paralysis; or like the widow I had spoken to who had been miraculously cured of a fistula in the arm that had been five times vainly operated upon; or like the old woman I had seen who had been miraculously cured of an “incurable” tumor that had caused her untold suffering for twenty-two years. I was a miraculée, like these others, hundreds of others, one more case that would be carefully noted down by skeptical investigators on their neatly ruled sheets, if only the mysteries of a sick soul could be revealed! ”

“ Less than three centuries ago the fact that illness and death had come suddenly to any well-known person, was often sufficient to raise the whisper of suspicion; and any disease that did not yield to the favourite treatment of bleeding, and for which the physicians were for the moment unable even to find a name, was sure to be attributed by popular gossip to the action of poison or witchcraft, or of both. ”

“ But this terrible disease was, like the leprosy of old, or the plague in modern times—a signal for the sufferer to be deserted, abandoned in despair. Blessed be the God of mercy, such is not the case now; a “new sympathy,” has been awakened, and, by the aid of a merciful Providence, it has spread widely! An establishment, hitherto conducted on a small scale, but hereafter to be in a degree commensurate with the WANT, exists in this Metropolis, where the patient will not apply for help in vain. ”

“ So must the man, whom the devil has wounded, not blush to confess his failings, to fly from him, and to implore the medicine of penance. For he that is ashamed to lay open his wounds to a physician, exposes his body to a total infection ”

“ And you admit that everything has a good and also an evil; as ophthalmia is the evil of the eyes and disease of the whole body; as mildew is of corn, and rot of timber, or rust of copper and iron: in everything, or in almost everything, there is an inherent evil and disease? ”