Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Atrophy   Listen
verb
Atrophy  v. t.  (past part. atrophied)  To cause to waste away or become abortive; to starve or weaken.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Atrophy" Quotes from Famous Books



... just a minute. People do not seem able as yet to understand that a man is really "punished," in the popular sense of that word, unless they can see him publicly whipped. It does not seem to them to mean anything because a man deteriorates, because the highest and finest qualities in him atrophy and threaten to die out. I used an illustration in my sermon two weeks ago to which I shall have to recur again, to see if I can make it mean more than it did then. It is the story of Ulysses who fell into the hands of the famous sorceress, and whose companions were turned into ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... of an artery may be more affected than the other, and the lumen may be narrowed at one side and not at the other, allowing the artery to expand irregularly from the force of the heart beat. As the disease continues, the internal elastic layer is lost, the muscular coat begins to atrophy, and then small calcareous granules may begin to be deposited, which may form into plates. In the large arteries, the advance of the process differs somewhat. There may be more actual inflammatory signs, fatty degeneration may occur, and even a necrosis ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... degeneration and final extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally terminating in almost complete atrophy of the worker's ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... the flood of eulogy will be supplied by Sir ALMROTH WRIGHT, who, taking the view that the simplicity with which logarithms can be handled is leading the nation inevitably towards mental atrophy, will introduce the question, "The Logarithm: is it a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various

... birth are the lustiest; for the stomach not being used to meat, and milk being taken too much, crudities are easily bred, or the milk is corrupted; and it is better to vomit these up than to keep them in; but if vomiting last long, it will cause an atrophy or consumption, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... had been drawn together by a common characteristic. Their consciences were dead. That atrophy of conscience made them all worshipers of the same idol—money. The motives that propelled each of the three to the altar were as diverse as their separate natures, but the sacrifice that each offered to the Moloch was the ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks

... "fogyism," is due far more to lack of variety and recreation and to dearth of intellectual stimulus than to hard labor, severe as this often is. Age is more than the flight of the years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries; it is also the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the emotions resulting from disuse. The farmer needs occasionally to have something more exciting than the alternation of the day's work with the nightly "chores." And his wife should now and then have ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... the eye upon small and nearby objects for which, in its undeveloped condition, it is not fitted, the organ is permanently weakened and rendered incapable of its legitimate use later in life when the book is a necessity. And again, this excessive use of the eye causes an atrophy of the other ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring each other. This proposal received such wide popular support there ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... lumber camp is a time when a man can put in loads of thinking. Dried fish and boiled tea do not atrophy a man's brain. Loggers do not say much except on Sundays, when they wash their shirts. Even then it was Sylvanus who did most of ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... an irritant poison, but days may elapse before any characteristic symptoms appear, and these may be mistaken for those of acute yellow atrophy of the liver. The earliest signs are a garlicky taste in the mouth and pain in the throat and stomach. Vomited matter luminous in the dark, bile-stained or bloody, with garlic-like odour. Great prostration, diarrhoea, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... in your hearts, and of insufficiency in all the ordinary pursuits of your lives? It cannot but be so; for though it be true that our natures are in some measure subdued to what we work in, and although it is possible to atrophy the deepest parts of our being by long neglect or starvation, yet you will never do that so thoroughly but that the deep-seated longing will break forth at intervals, and the cry of its hunger echo through the soul. Many of us do our best to silence it. But I, for my part, believe that, however ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... multitudinous cases of rudimentary and apparently useless structures. I confess, however, that it has often appeared to me that the facts of Dysteleology cut two ways. If we are to assume, as evolutionists in general do, that useless organs atrophy, such cases as the existence of lateral rudiments of toes, in the foot of a horse, place us in a dilemma. For, either these rudiments are of no use to the animal, in which case, considering that the horse has existed in its present form ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... tutorage of the famous Magendie, and published jointly with him a classical work on the nervous system of vertebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least one discovery of epochal importance. He observed that the brains of persons dying in old age were lighter than the average and gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he reasoned that such decay is a normal accompaniment of senility. No one nowadays would question the accuracy of this observation, but the scientific world was not quite ready for it in 1825; for when Desmoulins announced his discovery to the French Academy, that august and somewhat ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... anyone could think a thing wrong and yet do it. His biographer said, very shrewdly, that his sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music—that he did not possess even the common liberty of right and wrong. That's a bad case of atrophy! You must not, of course, be at the mercy of your moods, but you must not be at the mercy of your ethical habits either. Of the two, I am not sure that the ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... make very large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium. But there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish, like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire. The first is, that the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of the country among its inhabitants shall be so conducted that no crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults who are not producing by their personal exertions ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... importance than a correct start in life for any boy or girl; but a false start, a bad beginning for the children of the very poor who happen to possess brain power is fatal. Their talents get no chance, for they are never used, consequently they atrophy, or, worse still, are used in a wrong direction and possibly for evil. Good is changed into evil, bright and useful life is frustrated, and the State loses the useful power and influence that should result from brains ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... it on paper, he played it, but speak it he could not. Here is a point that reveals Chopin's native indecision, his inability to make up his mind. He recalls to me the Frederic Moreau of Flaubert's "L'Education Sentimentale." There is an atrophy of the will, for Chopin can neither propose nor fly from Warsaw. He writes letters that are full of self-reproaches, letters that must have both bored and irritated his friends. Like many other men of genius he suffered all his life from folie de doute, indeed his ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... contributions to this department abroad and at home would be simply impossible on the present occasion. I cannot, however, omit to notice how early Dr. Bucknill was in the field, as his laborious examination of a number of brains of the insane to determine the amount of cerebral atrophy and the specific gravity, bear witness, as also his demonstration of the changes which take place, not only in the brain and its membranes, but in the cord, in general paralysis; these observations, along with those of Dr. Boyd, having been fully ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... a counterpoise to sociocracy. We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist, which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything be ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... one, the deep-seated principles of humanity and chivalry in war. It had been done gradually and systematically—scientifically, in fact, and in the majority of cases it succeeded in producing a state of atrophy of the moral sense that was altogether admirable—from a German ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... and social progress, as exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably. The streets dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of the town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in the first stage of its creation. Land-holders set up poles on lost patches of ground, and, plaintively advertising that they were to let for building, raised ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... consider for a moment the result of Socialism as a permanent policy. It means the substitution, as already shown, of government or official judgment and initiative for that of the individual. The whole process would be one to deaden and atrophy the powers of the people in general, with the result that there would follow a leveling down to a plane of mediocrity rather than a leveling up according to individual capacities and ambitions, exercised ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers

... imbecility and madness—solitary confinement has the power to unmake men's minds and leave them idiots. If he neglect his conscience, it will run off into lawlessness and vice. Or, lastly, if it is his soul, it must inevitably atrophy, drop off in ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... phenomena presented by different species. The younger the animal, the grosser the morbid symptoms witnessed. The animal fails to grow. The bones and cartilage, except of the skull, fail to develop. The abdomen projects and becomes large and flabby. The sex organs atrophy. There is sterility. Pregnant rabbits abort, hens produce very small eggs or none at all. These are the results of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... the effect of beneficial modification is felt immediately, and the modified organs or organisms are stimulated and strengthened cumulatively, while the unmodified are enfeebled and paralyzed cumulatively through inactivity and quickly pass toward atrophy and extinction. Conversely in demotic development, which is characterized by the persistence of the organisms and by the elimination of the bad and the preservation of the good among qualities only, there is a constant tendency toward ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee

... aside all considerations which affect your mere personal ruin—not mentioning the atrophy of spiritual life and the clinging sense of degradation which is involved in such a course as yours—I want you to see if you will be honest, that the fault is yet more deadly, because you involve other souls and other lives in your own destruction. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... evacuations only effect a partial and temporary reduction of its bulk, in consequence of the continued extension of the morbid growth and ulcerative process which often proceed towards the pharynx, rendering respiration and deglutition still more difficult, until at length the animal sinks from atrophy or phthisis pulmonalis. ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings

... social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that make us different. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... their slow length along. Few persons believed that any good was likely to result from these stately and ponderous conferences; yet men were so weary of war, so desirous that a termination might be put to the atrophy under which the country was languishing, that many an eager glance was turned towards the place where the august assembly was holding its protracted session. Certainly, if wisdom were to be found in mitred heads—if the power to heal angry passions and to settle the conflicting claims ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... to—make a song about it!" winced the Senior Surgeon. "It's just about the crudest case of complete muscular atrophy that ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... This sentimental atrophy left his intellect entirely untrammelled; and he was more ambitious than ever of attaining a high position in society. Inasmuch as he had such a stepping-stone, the very least he could do was to make use ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... recal the finale of their interview, and having lost the thread of the rigmarole, did not know to what his silence had been supposed to assent. Next, Algernon conquered his uncle by representing Lucy as on the road to an atrophy, and persuading him that he should be much safer on the Continent with a wife than without one: and though the two ladies were harder to deal with in themselves, they were obliged to stand by the decision of their lords. Above all, he made way by his sincere ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... discoursed of Beauty and Virtue in the groves of Academe.' With a capacity to grasp physical principles which his friend Goethe did not possess, and which even total lack of exercise has not been able to reduce to atrophy, it is the world's loss that he, in the vigour of his years, did not open his mind and sympathies to science, and make its conclusions a portion of his message to mankind. Marvellously endowed as he was—equally equipped on the side of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... his office, perquisites, gratuities, and promotion. He never spoke of anything but of his duties, either at the Admiralty or at home, for he had married the portionless daughter of one of his colleagues. His mind, which was in a state of atrophy from his depressing daily work, had no other thoughts, hopes or dreams than such as related to the office, and there was a constant source of bitterness that spoilt every pleasure that he might have had, and that was the employment of so ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... purpose of the North to give it up. But, as well might you, as to say, that it is the "purpose" of the abolitionists to "manumit." It is very much by such misrepresentations, that the prejudices against abolitionists are fed and sustained. How soon they would die of atrophy, if they, who influence the public mind and mould public opinion, would tell but the simple ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... Stammering (Literal Bulbo-nuclear Dysarthria and Anarthria).—Patients who have lost control over the muscles of speech through bulbo-nuclear paralysis, stammer before they become speechless, and along with paralysis and atrophy of the tongue occur regularly fibrillar contractions of the muscles of the tongue. The tongue is no longer ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... It is not a disease, just a lack in the development of the muscles, which waste away or shrink when not used as nature provided. For instance, perhaps you have had or have seen persons that had a fractured leg or arm and on account of not being able to use the leg or arm the muscles wasted away (Atrophy), until they were used normally for sometime, when the muscles again came back to ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek

... prescribed by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not take ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... insufficient supply obtainable through the insufficiently patulous glottis, new corks with smaller grooves being substituted as laryngeal breathing becomes easier. Corking the cannula is an excellent orthopedic treatment in certain cases where muscle atrophy and partial inflammatory fixation of the cricoarytenoid joints are etiological factors in the stenosis. The added pull of the posterior cricoarytenoid muscles during the slight effort at inspiration restores their tone and increases the ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson

... pull that antimacassar home-and-mother stuff on me. Ask Bernard Shaw, ask Freud, ask Mrs. Gilman, how good it is for children's stronger, better selves, to live in the enervating, hot-house concentration on them of an unbalanced, undeveloped woman, who has let everything else in her personality atrophy except her morbid preoccupation with her own offspring. That's really the meaning of what's sentimentally called 'mothering.' Probably it would be the best thing in the world for the Powers children if their mother ran away with that fine broth of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... masters, though it is sometimes thought to be a service peculiarly fitted for men of letters, was illustrated in Hawthorne's career in many ways and on several occasions, but nowhere more plainly than in the period of his five years of atrophy from the time he entered the consulate till the composition of "The Marble Faun." He wrote vigorously in his note-books, from time to time, but such composition was the opiate it had always been for his higher imaginative and moral powers, and exercised only his faculty ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... diu—and I believe, between ourselves, his grandsire was from the wrong side of the Border—one Bullsegg, who came hither as a steward, or bailiff, or ground-officer, or something in that department, to the last Girnigo of Killancureit, who died of an atrophy. After his master's death, sir,—ye would hardly believe such a scandal,—but this Bullsegg, being portly and comely of aspect, intermarried with the lady dowager, who was young and amorous, and possessed himself of the estate, which devolved ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... supernaturalism. Assuming that originally there existed what was accepted as good evidence for the existence of a supernatural, it is hardly credible that every subsequent generation went on accepting it merely because one generation received evidence of its existence. As organs atrophy for want of exercise, so do beliefs die out in time for want of proof. Some kind of evidence must have been continually forthcoming in order to keep the belief alive and active. It is not a question of whether the evidence was good or bad. All evidence, it is important ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... devotion to any special line of study is liable to lead to forgetfulness of other, even kindred, lines—almost, in extreme cases, to a kind of atrophy of other parts of the mind. There is the example of Darwin and his self-confessed loss of the aesthetic tastes he once possessed. Nor are scientific studies the only ones to produce such an effect. The amusing satire in The New Republic has, perhaps, lost ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... educationists have disputed their relative importance: but neither party can deny that the most fortunate nature, given wrongful or insufficient nurture, will hardly emerge unharmed. Even great inborn powers atrophy if left unused, and exceptional ability in any direction may easily remain undeveloped if the environment be sufficiently unfavourable: a result too often achieved in the domain of the spiritual life. We must have ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... abnegation such as giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in New England liked to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly repeated deals with the efforts of some acrid spinster—or wife long widowed—to keep a young girl from ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... the power to work up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material prosperity ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,—as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,—or, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... 'em—dragging my idleness and viciousness and my stupidity and my money at my heels. I tell you, Kathleen, this is no good. There's a stench of money everywhere; there's a staler aroma in the air, too—the dubious perfume of decadence, of moral atrophy, of stupid recklessness, of the ennui that breeds intrigue! I'm deadly tired of it—of the sort of people I was born among; of their women folk, whose sole intellectual relaxation is in pirouetting along the danger mark without overstepping, and in concealing it when they ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... experiment was in regard to the effect of electricity on plant life. He referred particularly to the fact that it was his aim to discover the law of growth and atrophy among plants. Such a discovery had a great bearing on the future of agriculture and would revolutionise world thought. Electricity, he explained and illustrated, would promote or retard the growth of life by reaction. In England and other countries electricity ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... is quite strongly opinionated. His theory is that the more successful the Party is in attaining the goals it set half a century ago, the less necessary it becomes. He's of the opinion that it will eventually atrophy, shrivel away to the point that all that will be needed will be the slightest of pushes to ...
— Freedom • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... the 'inertia rusticorum'! It is a great mistake to imagine that dwellers in quiet districts are more easily excited by any event than are dwellers in packed cities. On the contrary, the very absence of 'sensations' produces an atrophy of the senses. It is the constant supply of 'sensations' which creates a real demand for them in cities. Suppose that in our day some specially unpopular clergyman were martyred 'at the corner of Fenchurch Street,' how the 'same old crush' would be intensified! ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... professes to sell milk "pure from the cow." From the quality of this morning's supply, I should be inclined to fancy that that cow is suffering from an advanced stage of atrophy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various

... his ineptitude, however, is the waste and atrophy of his best powers through disuse. Thus the early settlers of the Coachela Valley fought hunger and thirst while rivers of water ran away a few feet below the surface of the richly ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... inflamed the passions of men, and caused them to commit the most unheard-of excesses. They laid their ban on those who enjoyed the most prosperous health, condemned them to peak and pine, wasted them into a melancholy atrophy, and finally consigned them to a premature grave. They breathed a new and unblest life into beings in whom existence had long been extinct, and by their hateful and resistless power caused the sepulchres to give ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... and lasses came in, and jigs and reels succeeded each other with such rapidity, that, notwithstanding the copious supplies of whiskey, the drummer's arms failed him, and the fifer had almost blown himself into an atrophy. Did I dance? To be sure I did, and right merrily too. I had such pleasant, fair-haired, rosy, Hebe-like instructresses, ready to tear each other's eyes out to get me for a partner. Then, they talked Irish so ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... was placed before them. The eye-ball had a yellowish tinge and the iris was not well-defined but seemed to have undergone discoloration and faded away into the white of the eye. They seemed affected by a kind of temporary atrophy. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... the incomplete. One side of their nature has undergone atrophy, with the result that they have lost touch with their living fellow ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... recognized as closely related to atrophy of the optic nerve with deep excavation. No line of demarcation can be drawn between them, except by reserving the term of glaucoma for cases that depart from the pure type, terminating in glaucoma of some other kind, which ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various

... and sought to show in this way that I assumed a gradual degeneration of the food-yelk and the yelk-sac on the way from the proreptiles to the mammals. "The cenogenetic process of adaptation," I said, "which has occasioned the atrophy of the rudimentary yelk-sac of the mammal, is perfectly clear. It is due to the fact that the young of the mammal, whose ancestors were certainly oviparous, now remain a long time in the womb. As the great ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... professor," said a College President, "should be willing to work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet a man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow it out ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... is a musculo-fibrinous organ and depends for blood and nerve supply above its own location, and that supply must be given freely and pure for nerve and blood or we will have a diseased organ to start with; then we may find a universal atrophy or oedema, which would, besides its own deformity not be able to rise and fall, to assist the lungs to mix air with blood to purify venous blood, as it is carried to the lungs to throw off impurities and take on oxygen previous to returning to the heart, to be sent off as nourishment for the ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still

... system; and the first and most important step toward a public-school system is the equipment and adequate support of a sufficient number of Negro colleges. These are first steps, and they involve great movements: first, the best of the existent colleges must not be abandoned to slow atrophy and death, as the tendency is to-day; secondly, systematic attempt must be made to organize secondary education. Below the colleges and connected with them must come the normal and high schools, judiciously distributed and carefully manned. In no essential ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... of the phenomenon must be looked for in the race character; and whatever the higher education may accomplish in the remote future, it can scarcely be expected to transform nature. But does it at present atrophy certain finer tendencies? I think that it unavoidably does, for the simple reason that, under existing conditions, the moral and mental powers are overtasked by its requirements. All that wonderful national spirit of duty, of patience, of self-sacrifice, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... be well worth the sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice. I do not mean by reading the Bible what, I am afraid, is far too common, reading a scrap of Scripture as if it were a kind of charm. But I would most earnestly press upon you that muscle and fibre will distinctly atrophy and become enfeebled, if Christian people neglect the first plain way of hiding the word in their heart, which is to make the utterances of Scripture as if incorporated with their very being, and part ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of pathologists, in the treatment of obsessed or insane persons, pay very close attention to the subjects of their dreams, and attribute much nerve-misery to the atrophy, or suppression by circumstances, of instincts which betray themselves in dreams. I am inclined to think that the educators of the future must somehow contrive to do more—indeed they cannot well do less than is actually done—in ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... widens our sympathies; it enriches the world to our eyes and minds, by revealing to us the marvels, delights, tendernesses and suggestions which are all around us in man and nature; it keeps alive our better part in places and circumstances when that better part might perish with disease and atrophy; it continually irrigates with benign influences the mind which might grow arid and barren, and so it enables all the little seeds and buds of our intellectual and moral nature to germinate and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... to occur to him that children have large powers of resistance and that some of his pupils may have won distinction in spite of his teaching and his methods of examination and not because of them. His trouble is mental and spiritual atrophy. He thinks and feels by rule of thumb, "without variableness or shadow of turning." In the matter of new methods he is quite immune. He settled things to his complete satisfaction years ago, and what was good enough ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... it makes of existence, and what God meant by giving it to us mortals. You are intended by nature to be a complete woman if you did but know it—but such a life, tied to that half fish man, would atrophy all that is finest in your character. You would grow really into what they are trying to make you appear—after years of hopelessness and suffering. Do you not feel all this, little star, ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn

... S. villosum, the internal organs have the appearance of immaturity; the shape of the capitulum is specially modified for its reception between the scuta of the hermaphrodite, and several of the valves have not been developed. This atrophy of the valves, is carried much further in S. rostratum. In Ibla, many of the parts are embryonic in character, but others mature and perfect; some parts, as the capitulum, thorax, and cirri, are in a quite extraordinary state of atrophy; in fact, the parasitic males ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... duty is to purify the blood from debris (waste matter), to filter out some things, to break up and alter others, and to expel them from the body in the form of bile. There are certain diseases in which the liver suddenly declines to do any more work. Acute atrophy of the liver is the name of this condition, and when it arises death rapidly results from suppression of the secretion of bile. It brings about a state of things called acholia; the patient is actually poisoned by the non-removal of those ingredients from the blood ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... rise to species, we have enumerated his chief contributions to the advance of the question. On the other hand, from his ignorance of any power in Nature competent to modify the structure of animals, except the development of parts, or atrophy of them, in consequence of a change of needs, Lamarck was led to attach infinitely greater weight than it deserves to this agency, and the absurdities into which he was led have met with deserved condemnation. Of the struggle ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... this is the early morning. The fruit does not suffer by this process but continues developing and ripens perhaps more rapidly, at the same time improving in flavor, becoming sweeter; the seeds, however, atrophy and lose their power of germination. Peckolt gives the following as the ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera

... could not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert's offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... atrophy of the organ of common-sense rose in his place in the halls of legislation and pointed with pride to his Unblotted Escutcheon. Seeing what it supposed to be the finger of scorn pointed at it, the Unblotted Escutcheon turned ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... (c.) Tertiary syphilitic manifestations or disabilities directly attributable to syphilis infection:— (i.) Affecting nervous system—e.g., gumma, locomotor, G.P.I., &c. (ii.) Affecting ear, eye, &c. (special senses)—e.g., optic atrophy, &c. (iii.) Affecting respiratory system—e.g., syphilitic laryngitis, &c. (iv.) Affecting digestive system—e.g., syphilitic stricture of rectum, &c. (v.) Affecting circulatory system—e.g., syphilitic angina, aneurism, &c. (vi.) Affecting spleen (vii.) Affecting skin, bones, ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health

... that sterility in women can arise from the womb; for if it be after any ways thus affected, there will be a barrenness,—if it be more condensed, or more thin, or more hardened, or more callous, or more carneous; or it may be from languor, or from an atrophy or vicious condition of body; or, lastly, it may arise from a twisted or distorted position. Diocles holds that the sterility in men ariseth from some of these causes,—either that they cannot at all ejaculate any sperm, or if they do, it is less than nature ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... Betty that Tom's ideals, if he possessed any, had not led him in the direction of what he termed display. His social impulse had suffered atrophy. The house was utterly disorganized; there was a dearth of suitable servants. Those she had known were gone—sold, she learned. Tom explained that there had been no need for them since he had lived pretty much ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... But not so strongly after one of Juan's drinks; they are distilled illusions, vain dreams still of hope. They have all the brave ring of accomplishment without its effort. But I can see the end even of them—atrophy. Soon Cytherea will go into the attic, have her nose broken, and the rats will eat the clothes from her indifferent body. Cytherea on a pearl shell in the Ionic Sea... I was one of her train, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue; either the people must be subjected to continual plunder, as a substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy, and, in a short course of time, perish. In the Ottoman or Turkish empire, the sovereign, though in other respects absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his subjects, has no right to impose a new ...
— The Federalist Papers

... light than merely as an idolatry of persons, there is an easy answer ready for it. But considering that religion is now so far dead that it consists in little else than formalities, and that its divine truth is no longer such to half the great world, which lies, indeed, in dire atrophy and wickedness,—and if we further consider and agree that the awakened human soul is the divinest thing on earth, and partakes of the divine nature itself, and that its manifestations are also divine in whomsoever it is embodied, we can see some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... quality brought by the change was better. That milk fresh from the udder was the best. The Talmud describes jaundice and correctly ascribes it to the retention of bile, and speaks of dropsy as due to the retention of urine. It teaches that atrophy or rupture of the kidneys is fatal. Induration of the lungs (tuberculosis) was regarded as incurable. Suppuration of the spinal cord had an early, grave meaning. Rabies was known. The following is a description given ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... man in the uniform of a German officer entered, followed by two grey-coated soldiers. The officer neither bowed nor saluted, but merely glared with an intimidating frown. The maire's clerk sat in an atrophy of fear, unable to move a muscle. The officer advanced to the desk, pulled out his revolver from its leather pouch, and laid it with a lethal gesture on the maire's desk. The maire examined it curiously. ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... operation necessary? Will the child not outgrow its adenoids? Usually the adenoid growths atrophy or dry up after the age of puberty. Adenoids are not uncommon in adults, however. The surgeon general of the army reports that during the year 1905, out of 3004 operations on officers and enlisted men in service, there were 225 operations on the nose, mouth, and pharynx, 103 of which were ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... and stabbing pains in the legs; station very poor, but strength unimpaired, and he was able to walk after being a few minutes on his feet; when first rising he was very unsteady. Knee-jerk lost, no reinforcement. No sexual power. Some difficulty in emptying the bladder. Examination showed slight atrophy of both optic nerves, Argyll-Robertson pupil, and myosis. He was ordered two weeks' rest in bed, with massage, cool sponging daily, and galvanization of the areas of neuralgia. After two weeks he was allowed to get up gradually, to occupy ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... develop consumption. Yet you can study the world's health records and never find a line to prove that any man with "occupation or profession—novel reading" is recorded as dying of consumption. The humped-over attitude promotes compression of the lungs, telescoping of the diaphragm, atrophy of the abdominal abracadabra and other things (see Physiological Slush, p. ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... most part only the sculptor's means. It need not be said that the personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from conventionality than from caprice. And this is in fact what has happened since the high Renaissance, the long line of conventionalities being continued, sometimes punctuated here ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... conducts also to perfect atrophy of moral sense. This heredity is a wall in which one can make as many windows as one pleases. The doctor is such a window. He considers himself as being degenerated from the nervousness of the family; it means that he is a ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,

... quarter of the camp contains 55 men who have lost limbs in the war. They are provided with the most perfect prothesis apparatus, jointed artificial limbs. Among them are 2 blind men. Sixty other wounded who have escaped more lightly suffer from stiffness of the joints, ankylosis and atrophy. They are well provided with sticks ...
— Turkish Prisoners in Egypt - A Report By The Delegates Of The International Committee - Of The Red Cross • Various

... mentality, and tend to reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... him with a momentary bristle of enquiry in the gentle brown eyes, and he remembered, just in time, that her husband had once held the reins in Pall Mall for half a year, when, feeling atrophy creeping on, he resigned office ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... and the teachings of the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, are believed to have been introduced several hundreds of years previously. This contact with and importation from China undoubtedly had a marked effect in inducing what I may term atrophy in the development of the Japanese language as also the growth of its own literature, that is a literature entirely devoid of Chinese influences. Indeed it is impossible to speculate on what might have been the development of Japan and in what direction ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... works both ways: If too rigorously held in check, if denied all functioning whatever, the parts will atrophy, to the detriment of the whole nature, physical, mental, and spiritual. The body will become "dried up," the sex organs shriveled, and a corresponding shrinking of the whole man or woman, in all parts of the being, is very apt ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long

... barely twenty per cent of the cases occur before forty years of age, sixty per cent between forty and sixty, and twenty per cent between sixty and eighty. Thus the early period of decline, the transition stage between full functional vigor and declared atrophy (wasting) of the glands, is clearly the period of greatest danger; precisely the period in which the gland-cells, though losing their function,—and income,—have still the strength to inaugurate a rebellion, and a sufficient supply of the ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... cured. There are few students or physicians of human nature, in this world of superficial observers, who go deep enough into the springs of man's action to distinguish the external symptoms of heart-cancer from ossification, or to learn ihe difference between satiety and atrophy. A night of nervous sleeplessness, a day of irresolution and dread, had aggravated almost beyond her control the restlessness which in Mabel was the unerring indication of unhealthiness of mind and body. To sit still was impracticable; to talk connectedly and easily would soon ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... chemical studies appears to have been the invention of a syrup, in which he had great confidence; but its trial blew him up into a tympany, from which he was only relieved by having recourse to a drug, also of his own discovery, which, in counteracting the syrup, reduced him to an alarming state of atrophy. But the mischances of the historian do not enter into his history: and our curiosity must be still eager to open Lenglet's "Histoire de la Philosophie Hermetique," accompanied by a catalogue of the writers in this mysterious ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... gathered knowledge where she listed; her further faculty flashed forth fine rays at unexpected intervals to cheer her, and her hungry heart also began to seek satisfaction. For Beth was by nature well-balanced; there was to be no atrophy of one side of her being in order that the other might be abnormally developed. Her chest was not to be flattened because her skull bulged with the big brain beneath. Rather the contrary. For mind and body acted ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... disease that must either break out or strike inward with fatal results. When Sunday night came, Mitchell was about ready to fare forth with gun and mask and take conversation away from anybody who had it to spare. He had begun to fear that his vocal cords would atrophy. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... a soft sadness in her voice. "But wait until you've seen somebody drunk with the passion of too much money and crazy with the hunger for more; wait until you've seen a man's soul grow black from hugging it to his heart, and his conscience atrophy and his manhood wither. And then when it rises up and crushes him, and all ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... feebler, and soon bring on fatigue; their actions are slow and painful. Even old men whose mental vigour is unimpaired admit their muscular weakness. The physical correlate of this condition is an actual atrophy of the muscles, and has for long been known to observers. I have found that the cause of this atrophy is the consumption of the muscle fibres by what I call phagocytes, or eating cells, a certain ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... from the semicircular canals into the cochlea. When, as a consequence of the rapid whirling movements, a great part of the endolymph is hurled into the scala tympani, the organ of Corti in the scala vestibuli is fixed and its parts are rendered incapable of vibration. The condition of atrophy which is observable in the sense cells and in the nerve elements is probably due to the impossibility of functional activity; it is an atrophy caused ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... confined to the cortical substance, or even to the tubular. The kidneys are occasionally much larger than usual, without any other change of structure; or simple hypertrophy may affect but one of them. They are subject to atrophy, which may be either general or partial; or one of the kidneys may be completely wanting, and this evidently the consequence of violence ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... that they cannot sing have very often, by the simple denial of their ability, ensured a kind of mental atrophy in the function. It is quite a usual thing for us to fasten unnecessary limitations upon ourselves by refusing to believe in our own powers, and most of us have a large stock of very real inhibitions, which prevent us from doing things ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... high degree of proficiency in any particular subject invariably leads to atrophy in other directions. A man who eats and breathes and dreams Toxins, for instance, who lives so much in Toxins that he corresponds almost daily with learned and unintelligible Germans; who knows so much about Toxins that when he enters, with shabby ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson

... in his heart. Men in business and professions have so little time for reading or thinking—and idle people have still less—that their means of grace, as the theologians say, are confined to discipline without nourishment, whence their religion, if they have any, is often from mere atrophy but a skeleton; and the office of preaching is, after all, to wake them up lest their sleep turn to death; next, to make them hungry, and lastly, to supply that hunger; and for all these things, the pastor has to take ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... and recited—merely talking aloud in their intellectual sleep but not reflecting—China was awake and thinking hard. Japan's continued civil wars, which caused the almost total destruction of books and manuscripts, secured also the triumph of Buddhism which meant the atrophy of the national intellect. When, after the long feuds and battles of the middle ages, Confucianism stepped the second time into the Land of Brave Scholars, it was no longer with the simple rules of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... a single cilium, of the antherozoids of Dictyota and Taonia, they were believed to be immotile bodies, like the male cells of red seaweeds. in Dictyota the unfertilized oosphere is found to be capable of undergoing a limited number of divisions, but the body thus formed appears to atrophy sooner ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the State, does it want parliamentary orators, first of all, and men capable of writing books? What a rag-fair of extinct monkeries, high-piled here in the very shrine of our existence, fit to smite the generations with atrophy and beggarly paralysis,—as we see it do! The Minister of Education will not want for work, I think, in ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... successively and at different times, had been unable to extract it. Meanwhile the little patient was suffering from an earache that extended over almost the entire head, and that increased at night and especially in cold and damp weather. To these symptoms were added strokes of epilepsy and an atrophy of the left arm. Finally, in November, 1595, De Hilden, being called in, acquainted himself with the cause of the trouble, and decided to remove the foreign body. To do this, he selected, as he tells us, "a well lighted place, caused the solar light to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... of the sensorial power of association occurs, which is exerted on the pulmonary and cutaneous absorbents by reverse sympathy, and produces a great absorption of the fluid effused into the cellular membrane in anasarca, with dry skin; constituting one kind of atrophy. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... seem to show us how the over-development of the ritual aspect of religion may lead to atrophy of those ideas and beliefs through which the religion has been built up; and then how, in its turn, the ritual may suffer, and acts which are performed mechanically, with no living ideas behind them, may come to be performed carelessly and incompletely, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... mental bias, they had lost the blithe spontaneity of the Renaissance. But they were at the same time suffering from grievous exhaustion, humiliated by the tyranny of foreign despotism, and terrorized by ecclesiastical intolerance. In their case, therefore, a sort of moral and intellectual atrophy becomes gradually more and more perceptible. The clear artistic sense of rightness and of beauty yields to doubtful taste. The frank audacity of the Renaissance is superseded by cringing timidity, lumbering dulness, somnolent and stagnant acquiescence ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... she had killed. Finding a very sharp sword, in a very frail scabbard, she had whetted the one and worn down the other, by every stimulus in her power, till a jury of physicians might have found her guilty of manslaughter; but perfectly unconscious of her own agency in causing the atrophy, her dear Anna Webster lived foremost in her affections, the model for every subsequent pupil. She seldom remained more than two years in a family. Sometimes the young brains were over-excited; more often they fell into a dreary ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... compensatory hypertrophy in consequence of the removal of the other testis. At the same time the male instincts and the other generative organs were unchanged. In a few cases, however, Ancel and Bouin observed atrophy of the interstitial cells as well as the spermatic cells. They believe this is due to the nerves supplying the testis being included in the ligature. This is rather a surprising conclusion in view of ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... lacteals, atrophy. Distaste to animal food. II. Cause of dropsy. Cause of herpes. Scrophula. Mesenteric consumption. Pulmonary consumption. Why ulcers in the lungs are so ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... tragic consequence of dependence on the complex machinery of a foreign government is the atrophy of the communal sense. The direct touch with administrative cause and effect is lost. An outside protector performs all the necessary functions of the community in a mysterious manner, and communal duties are not realised ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... think, each after his kind. The horse rejoices in the liberty of acting like a horse, and not like an ox; and man enjoys the privilege of acting the part of a man, and not of a disembodied spirit. If the limbs of the former are struck by an atrophy, we do not expect him to win the race. If the brain of the latter is blasted by disease or deterioration, we cannot expect the fruits of a sound and vigorous organism. When we say that a person with a brain vitiated by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... intensely sectarian in method. Their isolation from the great currents of the world's life acts on them intellectually and spiritually as the process of in-and-in breeding does upon animals: it intensifies their peculiarities and defects. A process of atrophy or degeneration takes place; and they grow from generation to generation more isolated, sectarian, and peculiar. Unitarianism has escaped this tendency because it has accepted the modern spirit and because to a large degree its adherents ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Impossible that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as In the Ranks and Harbour Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled—the miser in the old castle counting his ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... creature of whims and inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he treacherously deepens it—but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with a flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... these reasons, the negative one, is that aesthetic pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving inactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. But before entering on this discussion I would beg my reader to ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... won't be for a long, long time,' she said, thinking aloud as she often did, and adding with the callousness that sometimes comes with age—arising not from hardness, but from the atrophy of the emotions—'and, of course, she may ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... joined to his youth, and the goodness of his constitution, the force of the distemper at last abated, yet could not be so intirely eradicated, as not to leave a certain pressure and debility upon the nerves, by some called a fever on the spirits, which seemed to threaten either an atrophy or consumption; his complexion grew pale and livid, and his strength and flesh visibly wasted; and what was yet worse, the vigour of his mind decayed, in proportion with that of his external frame, insomuch that, falling into ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... sodden. The accountant adds up figures all day and has no chance to exercise his judgment or other mental faculties. In the same way a person who does not exercise his artistic, poetic, or affectional side will suffer its atrophy. The plaint of Darwin that he had allowed his taste for music and poetry to atrophy could to-day be made by many intellectual specialists. Good ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... the initial character of the foot of the early ancestral mammals. It had five toes. By the suppression or atrophy of first the innermost toe, then of the outermost, you find that mammals may first acquire four toes only, and then only three, and by repeating the process the toes may be reduced to two, or right away to one, the ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... ATROPHY of the heart is the opposite to hypertrophy, and signifies a wasting away of the muscular substance, and a diminution in the thickness of the walls of the heart. Its power is diminished in proportion ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... her Spanish-American sisters because she won her way to republicanism by evolution rather than revolution. They plunged into the extremely difficult experiment of democratic, of popular, self-government, after enduring the atrophy of every quality of self-control, self-reliance, and initiative throughout three withering centuries of existence under the worst and most foolish form of colonial government, both from the civil and the religious standpoint, that has ever existed. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... one of the upland plains, every fertile huerta of the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... Church, and do a little needlework all her life, unless some man came along to marry her and give her emancipation. The happiness which goes with a career, even if that career fails, is saving daughters from this parentally imposed "atrophy." They are learning that to live one's own life is not necessarily to live a "bad" life, but a "fuller" life. Thus the young are teaching the Old People wisdom—the knowledge that youth has its Declaration of Rights ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... here is different—sonorous, tense, elastic; On it you might a tattoo beat, with fingers or with a stick. There's costiveness and atrophy, with features Hippocratic; When these appear, there's much to fear, all safety is erratic. Although a cordial laxative, mix'd up with some carminative, Might be prescribed, with morphia, or hops, to keep the man alive; Take care his diet's nutritive, avoiding food that's flatulent, And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various

... Leaves and Berries.—The leaves have very rarely been given internally; notwithstanding they are recommended (in the Ephem. natur. curios. vol. ii. obs. 120.) against the atrophy of children; their taste is nauseous, acrid, and bitter. Externally they have sometimes been employed for drying and healing ichorous sores, and likewise for keeping issues open. The berries were supposed by the ancients to have a purgative and emetic quality; later writers ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... and stillbirths. In his opinion it was the duty of medical men to point out to the public that physiological laws could not be broken with impunity. It had been observed that if the doe were withheld from the buck at oestral periods atrophy of the ovary took place. In this connection Dr. Gibbons recalled a large number of patients who had used contraceptives in early married life, and subsequently had longed in vain for a child. This applied also to those ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... the meeting must still be delayed. It was a little thing, perhaps. Yet, it was capable of meaning much concerning the nature of the lad. It revealed surely a tender heart, one responsive to a pure love. And to one of his class, there are many forces ever present to atrophy such simple, wholesome power of loving. The ability to love cleanly and absolutely is the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... unreasonable to ask—and just as it is the fashion to let their spines droop until they suggest nothing so much as Tenniel's drawing in Alice in Wonderland of the caterpillar sitting on the toad-stool—so do they let their mental faculties relax, slump and atrophy. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... was the gradual atrophy of the whole administrative machine. The Austrian government was not consciously tyrannical, even in Italy; and Francis himself, though determined to be absolute, intended also to be paternal. Nor would the cruelties inflicted on the bolder spirits who dared to preach reform, which made ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... with Him is life, a will which is burdened with its own selfhood, an imagination which paints the misty walls of this earthly prison with awful shapes that terrify and faint hopes that mock, a heart that hungers for love, and a reason which pines in atrophy without light. And all these the gospel which is lodged in our hands meets. It addresses itself to nothing in men that is not in man. Surface differences of position, culture, clime, age, and the like, it brushes aside as unimportant, and it goes straight to the universal wants. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... lately been studying the last molar teeth in the different races of man, and has come to the same conclusion as that given in my text, viz., that in the higher or civilised races they are on the road towards atrophy or elimination.) ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... of men. Why should there be this correspondence between Jesus of Nazareth and human life? It is best brought out, when we realize what he has made of Christian society, and contrast it with what the various religions have left or produced in other regions—the atrophy of ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... except as the ever-fertile Mr. Stanley heard of one in Africa? And where is his monkey that first lost the prehensile power to climb trees? For bear in mind that it was the loss of this prehensile power that resulted in the caudal atrophy of our monkey progenitors, who became men simply because they were tailless monkeys! They had lost their power to climb trees, and accordingly had no longer any use for tails to let themselves down from the limbs. A "beneficent ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... university, render useless the architect's and builder's plans, throw down the mechanic's tools, the artist's brush, the sculptor's chisel, the writer's pen, still the orator's tongue, make null and void the legislator's high emprise and draw a line of atrophy across the unfolding processes ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman

... the valueless husk, of ancient Chinese life is here still, remains untouched in many places, as will have been seen in previous chapters; but the soul within is steadily and surely, if slowly, undergoing a process of final atrophy. But yet the proper opening-up of the country by internal reform and not by external pressure has as yet hardly commenced in immense areas of the Empire far removed from the imperial city of Peking. And the mere fact that the Chinese propose such an absurd program ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... latest as the lightest of all the calamities that had fallen upon her frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought the Reverend Orme back—nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender care,—all the discarded emotions,—returned to light up her withered face and give it beauty. Night and day ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... to Their Senses Gradually.—New-measurism was resorted to by the General Synod in order to revive the dying Church. The true cause of her apathy, atrophy, and decay, however, was not diagnosed correctly. It was the prevailing confessional indifference, religious ignorance, and the neglect of Lutheran indoctrination by catechization, especially of the young. Dr. Hazelius, himself a revivalist, as ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente

... of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled to ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... well as to sermons, may not be neglected. Our faculties, like our jaws, atrophy if we do not use them to bite with. The Carnegie libraries have emphasized a fact that is to education and the colleges what social work is to medicine and the hospitals. We were running south some years ago on our long northern trip before a fine leading wind, when suddenly ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... habit, and caution, conservatism, sureness, seem even in time of crisis to be more important than a bit of daring. In my Department, I figure that it takes about seven years for the nerve of initiative and the nerve of imagination to atrophy, and so, perhaps, it is in other departments. It took five months for one of our war bureaus to get out a contract for a building that we were to build for them. Fifteen men had to sign the contract. And of course we have been impatient. But things are bettering ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... weakening of the generative power and of the constructive imagination coincide in old age, which is, in a word, a decay of nutrition, a progressive atrophy. It is proper not to omit the influence of castration. According to the theory of Brown-Sequard, it produces an abatement of the nutritive functions through the suppression of an internal stimulus; and, although its relations to the imagination have not been especially ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... humor rises almost to excitement before Cornelius shows signs of sleepiness. The contrast between Aunt Judy's table service and that of the south and east coast hotels at which he spends his Fridays-to-Tuesdays when he is in London, seems to him delightfully Irish. The almost total atrophy of any sense of enjoyment in Cornelius, or even any desire for it or toleration of the possibility of life being something better than a round of sordid worries, relieved by tobacco, punch, fine mornings, and petty successes in buying and selling, passes with his guest as the whimsical affectation ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw

... and nostrils, excretion of much pale urine, and no fever, but a fall of temperature below the normal standard. Having regard to which train of symptoms it is fair to suppose the acorn will afford in the human subject a useful specific medicine for the marasmus, or wasting atrophy of young children who are scrofulous. The fruit should be given in the form of a tincture, or vegetable extract, or even admixed (when ground) sparingly with wheaten flour in bread. The dose should fall short of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... criterions. I guess he's come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that intellectual ability is among them—what we call intellectual ability. He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental make- up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... with shipwrecked strangers of the talking nations that the office of the interpreters exists. When, as from time to time happens, a child is born with some powers of articulation, he is set apart, and trained to talk in the interpreters' college. Of course the partial atrophy of the vocal organs, from which even the best interpreters suffer, renders many of the sounds of language impossible for them. None, for instance, can pronounce v, f, or s; and as to the sound represented by th, it is five generations since the last interpreter ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... recommendation of what is generally used; for this constant effect must render them too copious, and thus, according to all physical experience, the blood must be thickened in the greater vessels, which frequently terminates in an atrophy. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith

... settles too close in one kind of work there is a tendency to atrophy in the disused portions of the brain. We like to ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

... the atrophy both of mental and physical activity, broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals of Charles the Great, of the Isaurian Emperors, of Otto I., of Alfred and his House, the practical energy of Heathen enemies,—for the Northmen were not seriously touched by Christianity ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... am obliged to you,)" said the Superior, pleased at the Gordian knot being loosed, and then relapsed into his atrophy, without moving ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton

... scorn. There are disadvantages in reducing a man to a subordinate position and allowing him no use for his self-respect; it is a virtue that has a tendency to atrophy. Julia recognised this with something like personal shame. "Your debt is discharged," she said gently, "but mine is not; it has been shifted, not cancelled; it lies with me and Mr. Rawson-Clew now, and it ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad

... and it is hidden away under the skin. The instances might be multiplied a thousandfold. In the same way then any mental faculty becomes atrophied if it is unused. Bad company is that which produces this atrophy of the finer powers; and it is strange to see how soon the deadly process of shrinkage sets in. The awful thing to think of is that the cramp may insensibly be set in action by a company which, as I have said, is composed of rather estimable people. Who can forget Lydgate in "Middlemarch"? ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... reconciled to his immobility. It is probable that after passing several months or years in a state of immobility fakirs no longer experience any desire to change their position, and even did they so desire, it would be impossible owing to the atrophy of their muscles and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... week before I could go, and when did go, I found him much worse than I had imagined him to be. There was no virulent disease of any particular organ, but he was slowly wasting away from atrophy, and he knew, or thought he knew, he should not recover. But he ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... of Irish money lying in the banks throughout this country, yet the nation is perishing from atrophy, starving for want of commercial nourishment. If the gold now piled in banks were but circulated through the channels of industry, every limb of national life would pulse with new vigour, the remotest corner of the land would ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan

... itself—a commandment that it must obey if it wishes to develop normally and in health—that it neglect the exercise of no member of its body, deny gratification to no natural impulse. Each member must fill the function, that it is intended for by Nature, on penalty of atrophy and disease. The laws of the physical development of man must be studied and observed, the same as those of mental development. The mental activity of the human being is the expression of the physiologic ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away something from the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... was temporarily out of commission and her stricken men in the hospital; but by the time the specialists had diagnosed the trouble as amblyopia, from some sudden shock to the optic nerve—followed in cases by complete atrophy, resulting in amaurosis—another ship came into Honolulu in the same predicament. Like the other craft four thousand miles away, her deck force had been stricken suddenly and at night. Still another, a battle-ship, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson

... loftier thought and nobler ideal and thus make the world a better place. Child, how will you acquit yourself of this responsibility? Will you make the most of your great gift, using it for the benefit of countless others, or let it atrophy ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... the missionary field. Faithlessness in this respect and fearfulness of expenditure, both of men and money in missionary work, have always stood in any church for choked channels of spiritual power, and subsequently spelled anaemia, atrophy, and death. Constant metabolism is as essential for spiritual life as physical. A church must die that doesn't use up and give out energy as surely as a physical body. The period of latent physical life is not long. God in his mercy has seemed to prolong latent spiritual life ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell



Words linked to "Atrophy" :   wither, shrink, withering, amyotrophy, wasting, wasting away, kraurosis, tabes, shrivel up, shrivel, amyotrophia, weakening



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org