Pleurisy

“ The sigh of anguish he wishes to keep in, his very breath which he smothers, exhaust the lower part of his trunk, and works into his flanks, which make us judge in some degree of the palpitations of his visceral organs. But his own suffering appears to occasion less anguish than the pain of his children, who turn their faces toward their father, and implore him, crying for help. His father's heart shows itself in his eyes, full of sadness, and where pity seems to swim in a troubled cloud. ”

“ It does not need that the blow be very hard to bring involuntary tears to adult eyes. But what is such a pain as this, in comparison with the pain of a dozen or more quick tingling blows from a heavy hand on flesh which is, which must be as much more sensitive than ours, as are the souls which dwell in it purer than ours. Add to this physical pain the overwhelming terror which only utter helplessness can feel, and which is the most recognizable quality in the cry of a very young child under whipping ”

“ And then in a last agonized failure she began to grizzle, to cry in a shivery little fashion of a child that doesn’t want to cry, but which is beaten from within, and gives that little first shudder of sobbing which is not yet weeping, dry and fearful.
He had won. She stood there absolutely helpless, shuddering her dry sobs and her mouth trembling rapidly. And then, as in a child, with a little crash came the tears and the blind agony of sightless weeping. She sank down on the grass, and sat there with her hands on her breast and her face lifted in sightless, convulsed weeping. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Stop crying, dear child, she exclaimed, sobbing. I can put up with almost any amount of suffering, but I cannot bear to watch you cry. For me the greatest misery imaginable is to be deprived of the sight of your sweet face. ”

“ But if one finds that in this battle a friend has been killed, the feeling is much intensified and may become an emotion of grief, expressing itself in some complex way, perhaps in tears, in sobbing, in wringing the hands. Similarly, a feeling of slight irritation expressed in a frowning face, if intensified, becomes the emotion of anger, expressed in tense muscles, rapidly beating heart, laboured breathing, perhaps a torrent of words or a hasty blow. ”

“ It comes over one in paroxysms, followed by a great calm as from sudden cessation of acute pain, then by a choking sensation, a terrible sinking of the heart, down, down, all things swim in the convulsion of lost senses until tears once more relieve the overwrought soul. ”

“ The fact of tears not being shed at a very early age from pain or any mental emotion is remarkable, as, later in life, no expression is more general or more strongly marked than weeping. When the habit has once been acquired by an infant, it expresses in the clearest manner suffering of all kinds, both bodily pain and mental distress, even though accompanied by other emotions, such as fear or rage. The character of the crying, however, changes at a very early age, as I noticed in my own infants,—the passionate cry differing from that of grief. ”

“ Death came on rapidly in deep, resounding roars, and the misery of the cringing, suffering brute was unfolded—told in heart-rending intonations, until at last he gave up his breath in one terror-stricken cry. ”

“ To have cried in childhood as I cried then, incessantly and for months, sometimes for the greater part of the day under a bed, that none of these mocking young creatures might see me and laugh at me; to have stood so intolerably alone among so many, without a hand to dry my eyes, a kiss to comfort me, a soft breast against which I could rest my tired little head and sob out my tale of sorrow,—this is to start permanently maimed for the battle of life. ”

“ Sometimes a child would cry, a man utter an oath, a woman shriek: then would come harsh orders delivered in a gruff voice, more swearing, the grounding of arms and more often than not a dull, flat sound like a blow struck against human flesh, followed by a volley of curses, or a cry of pain. ”

“ Thou art seen to sweat with pain, to look pale and red, to tremble, to vomit well nigh to blood, to suffer strange contortions and convulsions, by starts to let tears drop from thine eyes, to urine thick, black and frightful water, or to have it suppressed by some sharp and craggy stone that cruelly pricks and tears thee. ”

“ Painful sensations, when great, excite the faculty of volition; and the person continues voluntarily to call up or perform those ideas, which occasion the painful sensation; that is, the afflicted person becomes so far insane or melancholy; but tears are produced by the sensorial faculty of association, and shew that the pain is so far relieved as not to excite the excessive power of volition, or insanity, and are therefore a sign of the abatement of the painful state of grief, rather than a cause of that abatement. ”

“ Danger of repressing a tendency to cry. Anecdote from Dr. Rush. Physiology of crying. Folly of attempting wholly to suppress it.
"Crying," says Dr. Dewees, "should be looked upon as an exercise of much importance;" and he is sustained in this view by many eminent medical writers.
But people generally think otherwise. Nothing is more common than the idea that to cry is unbecoming; and children are everywhere taught, when they suffer pain, to brave it out, and not cry. Such a direction—to say nothing of its tendency to encourage hypocrisy—is wholly unphilosophical. ”

“ But the preoccupation of these useful tears caused a diversion in my feelings by interrupting the spontaneity, and, in consequence, retarded the physiological phenomena of tears. "If I could not weep? Suppose the tears do not come?" I thought with ridiculous and puerile fear, as if my fate depended on this slight material fact that my will did not suffice to produce. And yet a voice always the same whispered inwardly: "What a mistake! What a mistake! No opportunity could be more propitious. One can scarcely see one's self in this room. What effect sobbing would have in the dark!" ”

“ It is the cry of the weary and worn; their thin blood flows feebly, and their life is ebbing fast as they cry, “Oh, for one short hour to breathe the breath of the cowslip sweet and to feel as I used to feel.” ”

“ Thus did the child cry through the mouth of the man, seeking vengeance upon the father; and because of the intensity of the passion and because of the conditions under which it developed and because of the nature of the buried complexes to which the cry made such a profound appeal, one fourth of the human race, and that the unchangeable one, has not been merely influenced but utterly remoulded. ”

“ Grant me the shade of thy wings, O Death, for I would rest within.
Weary of smiling faces when the heart is like to break.
Of lips that are too silent when they long the while to speak,
Of tears that fall from eyes too young, of quivering lips that laugh. ”

“ In grief we sigh, in mirth we laugh: in the latter little stress is laid upon the respiration, and this is performed with less regularity than it is at any other time; all the muscles without, and every thing within feel loose, and seem to have no other motion than what is communicated to them by the convulsive shakes of laughter. ”

“ When fury and anger sweep us in their red flame, and gentle, familiar aspects of nature take on the hue of blood, we clench our fists until the nails are driven deep into the flesh. In the first shock of the agony of bereavement, or during those cruel dragging hours when we are adjusting ourselves to living with our hearts torn asunder, we clasp our hands in frenzy. ”

“ Sorrow, with all its intellectual and volitional elements, may become more distinct for consciousness the more it is actively expressed. But the pain itself, which constitutes the primary and initial state of this emotion, has by no means been increased. On the contrary, a crying fit, for instance, as even Professor James admits, may be accompanied by a kind of excitement which has a peculiar tone of pungent pleasure. ”

“ He never even said, as I have heard men say at the first starting of tears—not after they have been flowing, like mine, for weeks and weeks—"Why don't you make an effort to control yourself? You know perfectly well that crying only makes you worse and does nobody any good"—as if a poor mother cried from choice and perversity and the pleasure of doing it, when her heart was broken! ”

“ We have, indeed, a strong sympathy with all kinds of misery; but it is a feeling of pure unmixed pain, similar in kind, though not equal in degree, to what we feel for ourselves on the like occasions; and never produces that melting sorrow, that thrill of tenderness, to which we give the name of pity. They are two distinct sensations, marked by very different external expression. One causes the nerves to tingle, the flesh to shudder, and the whole countenance to be thrown into strong contractions; the other relaxes the frame, opens the features, and produces tears. ”

“ Lo, how contrasted the effect of a similar cause of grief at different stages of life! Chase the first day-dreams of our youth, and we cry, "Action—Strife!" In that cry, unconsciously to ourselves, Hope speaks, and proffers worlds of emotion not yet exhausted. ”

“ This is not a pretty bit of theory but is the result of the experience of every physician who has ever taken seriously the problems of caring for the grief-stricken.
Natural and Pathological Grief.—It is, of course, not easy to distinguish between grief that may be called morbid in the sense of a melancholy, that is, more than natural—a true mental disease—and that which represents only an affective state accompanied by depression from which there will be complete reaction. A mother loses a favorite, it may be an only son, and is plunged into grief. ”

“ The screams of frightened children and women bathed in tears are blended with those of the distracted men; all are on their knees, with clasped hands, their looks raised to Heaven, imploring its mercy with sobbing voices. ”

“ With a heart-rending cry for mercy she would start up in bed, and, before her cry had well subsided, would come the consciousness that the peril was past, and then, with a mournful sigh, would she sink back again to try and regain sufficient self-control to betray nothing ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Now it chanced once upon the break of day that he heard a cry so terrible that one would have called it a demon’s cry; nor had he ever heard a brute bellow in such wise, so awful and strange it seemed. ”

“ And while I stood thus rooted to the ground, the sweat standing in large drops on my forehead, all at once close to me sounded a cry, fine and clear at first, and rising at the end to a shriek so loud, piercing, and unearthly in character that the blood seemed to freeze in my veins, and a despairing cry to heaven escaped my lips ”

“ So there is my receipt for sudden tears. I being—thank heaven—a cheerful body, and given to frequent laughter, may laugh in peace up to the last moment, if I have only stowed away some heart-breaking incident that I can recall at the proper moment. It seems like taking a mean advantage of a tender heart, I know—what Bret Harte would call "playing it low down" on it; but what else could I do? I leave it to you. What could you do to make yourself cry seven times a week, for nine or ten months a year? ”

“ Tears of perspiration collect in beads at the apertures of the pores; tears glide down the surface, and fall from all the salient points of our frame, from our elbows, from our finger-ends; a sweet languor creeps over us, and we feel as though, like a heathen god of old, we were dissolving into a liquid stream. ”

“ The expression of an aching heart has always appeared to me to have a literal as well as a figurative sense; there is a sort of positive pain that accompanies certain kinds of mental sufferings, different in its nature from the feeling of grief, even in its highest degree; and disappointment in its various forms is perhaps the species of suffering which generally produces it. ”

“ My griefs sometimes wrap me about like cold confining walls, which have neither windows nor doors. It seems as though a fluid sorrow can congeal into a cold, hard temperament, and hold me in its icy embrace. ”

“ I gave you tears for drinking,
⁠And heart-sick sobs,
With brain too sick for thinking,
⁠And to the throbs
Of my sad heart I hushed you till I crushed you
Into rest for all your thorns.
Into my heart. Sorrow, too oft you came ”

“ On vous répliquera que c’est une maladie, dans laquelle tous, ou presque tous, ces accidents se trouvent combinés. S’il en manque un ou plusieurs, ce n’est point la pleurésie, du moins la vraie pleurésie essentielle des écoles. ”

“ The cry of a child, to an experienced doctor, is, each and all, a distract sound, and is as expressive as the notes of the gamut. The cry of passion, for instance, is a furious cry; the cry of sleepiness is a drowsy cry; the cry of grief is a sobbing cry; the cry of an infant when roused from sleep is a shrill cry; the cry of hunger is very characteristic,—it is unaccompanied with tears, and is a wailing cry; the cry of teething is a fretful cry ”