Biographic Clinics (Volume 1); The Origin of the Ill-Health of de Quincey, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, and Browning

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THOMAS CARLYLE. The formidable number of the following excerpts should not deter the reader, if at all interested in the subject, from attentive consideration of each. I have omitted a hundred or more which were merely general expressions, or repetitions of these, in order to reduce the space as much as possible. But, for one reason or another, I think every line quoted has some special significance in helping to give a thorough understanding of the clinical biography of the patient: Thomas Carlyle was born December 4, 1795. At the age of 23, says Froude, he was attacked with dyspepsia, which never wholly left him, and in these early years soon assumed its most torturing form, 'like a rat gnawing at the pit of his stomach.' At this time he says of himself, just entering upon the three most miserable years ot his life, he was fast losing his health (while a student in Edinburgh), a prey to nameless struggles and miseries, which have yet a kind of horror in them to my thoughts, three weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free from noise. In sickness of body and mind, dyspepsia had him by the throat, irritable, gey ill to live wi', etc., are further descriptions of these years. I enjoyed any amount of walking in those young years. Bad health does depress and undermine one more than all other calamities put together. (24 years of age.) With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much. (25.) It is these ' coorsed nervous disorders.' If I had but strong health ! (26.) In spite of all my dyspepsias, and nervousness and hypochondrias. (27.) He had been working hard on Schiller and Meister. He had been complaining of his health again. (28.) Is Tom got better? Does he sleep well yet? It...