Severity

“ It is well known that, in numerous cases, the fear of suffering, beforehand, and its severity while being endured, produce the most serious, and even fatal results. Many a patient has passed safely through the ordinary effects of a painful operation, and yet sunk from the mere effects of fear and physical suffering. ”

“ Public emergencies may require the hand of severity to fall heavily on those who are not personally guilty, but compassion prompts, and ever urges to milder methods. ”

“ He who under the surgeon's knife represses cries of pain, or he who exposes himself to social obloquy for duty's sake, feels as if he were following the line of greatest temporary resistance. He speaks of conquering and overcoming his impulses and temptations. ”

“ One must see the premature infirmity, the long-continued suffering, the irreparable catastrophes, the slow, cruel agonies, to which parents oftentimes condemn their children, to form a judgment of the power possessed by the demon of disease which lurks in the depths of their being. ”

“ Such was the mystical explanation of that election of suffering, the raison d’etre of that being who was so harshly separated from her fellows, weighed down by disease, transformed into the pitiable field of every human affliction. ”

“ Whatever can cause, or help to cause, discomfort, pain, sickness, death, vice, or crime—and whatever has a tendency to avert or destroy, or diminish such cases—are matters of interest to the sanitarian ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ The special suffering which first arrests attention may suddenly arise, but this is always preceded, and for a considerable time, by sensible deviations from that equable and temperate performance of function which can alone constitute sound health. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every physician knows that physical maladies are daily produced or aggravated in individuals by their disorders of mind and life; as by self-indulgence and intemperance, but, what is still more striking, by the immediate operation of evil passions. ”

“ Defect and disorder arise the moment the head seeks power or aggrandizement for itself, the hands work for their good alone, or the feet strive to bear the body alone the paths they only wish to tread. Disease follows, if the evil is not remedied ”

“ The operation of any other power, substituted in place of the natural one, even upon a body perfectly organized, produces a state very different from health;76 commonly attended with some uneasy sensations, and which is called DISEASE. I say it is commonly attended with uneasiness, but not always; for many persons within a few hours, nay, a few minutes, of their death, have imagined themselves quite recovered and well. ”

“ In the crisis of a disease, to mean well and lose the patient,—in the height of a tempest, to mean well and wreck the ship,—in a great moral conflict, to mean well and lose the battle,—these are things to be lamented. ”

“ The secret of it all is to resolve upon a firm attitude and maintain it. If you encourage thoughts of fear, hesitation, disease, trouble, decay, incompetency, failure and feebleness, you at once give an impetus to the disintegrating forces within you to begin their work—and you gradually become ill, timorous, and diseased in mind and body. ”

“ But the fact that medical shortcomings, real or supposed, manifested themselves in the sensitive area of human suffering and death made all the more glaring every instance of ineptitude, inadequacy, inefficiency, or just plain indifference. ”

“ And then, when that which was buried rises to confront you, in stark, unescapable reality, then, realize that your defences are not ready, that an emergency is upon you with which you have deliberately unfitted yourself to cope, that Truth, your only weapon, you have long ago cast from you at the bidding of those who read its name Morbidity. ”

“ Long suffering, through years of unmitigated tribulation, had already introduced disease into her delicate frame; and increased persecution gave it strength and root. As it continued to press upon her, she gradually grew feebler and more feeble ”

“ In estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take into account a more important factor—the merciful paralysis or partial paralysis of any center of sensibility—that is insistently assaulted. ”

“ I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling of impending danger—ever-present danger, which is the more terrible because I am unable to define it.
And have I not cause for such a feeling? Consider the long sequence of incidents which have all pointed to some sinister influence which is at work around us. ”

“ Whoever has marked the effects of success and failure upon the mind, and the power of the mind over the body, will see that in the one case both temper and health are favourably affected, while in the other there is danger of permanent moroseness, or permanent timidity, and even of permanent constitutional depression. ”

“ Why a new disorder expelled the old one in a marvelous manner; as it is accustomed to do, when the pain of the afflicted side, or the head, is turned upon the stomach; as it is with a man in a lethargy, when he turns boxer, and attacks his physician. ”

“ After a while it came to his mind that this was merely a species of weakness,—such, for example, as follows an operation in surgery, or an illness that a man has passed through,—and that positive life will fill out in time that void which he feels. ”

“ But no diagnosis, saintly or scientific, can add to the sense of misery and waste with which we recall that strong life so early broken, those twenty-five years of strained nerves and aching limbs, that six-months-long daily death of hysterical paralysis. ”

“ As we have seen, an intense state of fear, conscious or subconscious, produces a state of aboulia, a state of indecision, a state of incompletion of action, a state of insufficiency, a paralysis of will power, and a sense of unreality, all of which are intimately interrelated. ”

“ And it is from this cause that in human beings bodily suffering expresses itself not only in contortions, but in shrieks and groans—that in anger, and fear, and grief, the gesticulations are accompanied by shouts and screams—that delightful sensations are followed by exclamations—and that we hear screams of joy and shouts of exultation. ”

“ When one watches for symptoms, every organ in the body is ready to put in its claim. By and by a real illness attacked him, and the box of little pellets was shut up, to minister to his fancied evils no longer. ”

“ Recovery, invalidism, and death depend upon the degree of success with which the attacking or invading enemies are met. Questions regarding disease become, therefore, questions in adaptation, and it is possible that, when studied in the light of this conception, the key to many hitherto unsolved physical problems may be found. ”

“ Dragging with her one woman who was paralysed with fright, she induced the others to follow her, and when they were out of the line of fire, proceeded to examine the terrific wounds from which one and all declared themselves to be suffering. ”

“ Brain weary, nerve weary, is there any wonder that he rolls and tosses, throws over his pillow, kicks off the clothes, groans, almost cries aloud in his agony of longing for rest. Poor victim of worry and sleeplessness, how I long to help you get rid of your evil habit and save others from falling into it. ”

“ In the first place, artists, sportamen, and bon-vivants, know comparatively little of the nature and extent of the suffering caused by lacerations of the living tissues, or the production of morbid conditions, while the physiologists understand the matter to a nicety, and have the most perfect acquaintance with every pain which they cause—nay, whose causation is often the immediate object of their ingenious exertions. ”

“ Sudden news of misfortune, or great attacks of fear, have produced instant prostration and bodily suffering, and these cases occur so frequent that all within the range of an ordinary life are familiar with them. ”

“ Then when one considers the army of physicians who feel it to be their duty to write of sickness for the benefit of the people, who give detailed symptoms of every disease known; and of the larger army of quacks who deliberately live and fatten themselves upon the worries they can create in the minds of the ignorant, the vicious and the diseased ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the same way, a moral wound for which we are not prepared may bring about abrupt and prolonged consequences, from which the most robust health does not always protect us; and which is in proportion disastrous if the person on whom it falls is by temperament excitable or nervous. I have over and over seen such shocks cause lasting nervousness. ”

“ For neither the absence of all symptoms of physical or of clearly mental disease, nor the presence of an astounding frequency, abruptness, and completeness of change in the psycho-physical actions and functions of the living person, nor, above all, the conjunction of these two peculiarities, are for us now, taken by themselves, anything but indications of nervous, hysterical derangement. ”

“ If you have such tender feelings about the dangers and troubles of others, how great must be the estimation you place upon the losses and sufferings of our people! Streams of blood, and a stream of tears for every drop of blood ”

“ The greatest difficulties in the study of the alterations which the human face undergoes in suffering are essentially two in number. The first is the rapidity and the perpetual restlessness of muscular movements, [201] which are so fugitive that our eye cannot grasp and comprehend them. The second difficulty lies in the nature of our mind, which is disturbed and touched at the sight of pain. ”

“ And as the value of health is never truly and feelingly understood except in sickness, contemplate for a moment what the want of order is. Think of disorder in things remote, and then as it approaches thee. ”

“ To suffer from intelligence in such an atmosphere as this is a disease—the silent sickness—of which such symptoms as the lips tight bound, the heart heavy, and an aching void behind the eyes, are common to all its victims. ”

“ The reparative process which Nature has instituted and which we call disease, has been hindered by some want of knowledge or attention, in one or in all of these things, and pain, suffering, or interruption of the whole process sets in. ”

“ I look about me in the world, and nearly everybody I know is sick. I could name one after another a hundred men and women, who are doing vital work for progress and carrying a cruel handicap of physical suffering. ”

“ A contemplation of emergencies that may arise should plainly lead us to avoid their creation, either through a careless disregard of present duty or even an undue stimulation and ill-timed expression of feeling. ”

“ But though the various accidents and disorders happen ing to the body, are the certain causes of disorders and irregular operations in the mind; yet causes that are internal affect it still more; I mean the stimulations of ambition, revenge, lust, and avarice. These are the great causes of the several irregular and vicious pursuits of men. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The insanitary conditions abounding everywhere, and which are directly, or indirectly, the cause of much preventible suffering and mortality, call for your thoughtful attention as to the most practicable means of dealing with them. ”