"Hypochondriac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Captain Carey again looked ten years younger, and was evidently taking pains with his appearance. That suit of his had never been made in Guernsey; it must have come out of a London establishment. His hair was not so gray, and his face was less hypochondriac. He assured me that his health had been wonderfully good all the winter. I was more than satisfied, I was proud of ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... that at last the poet had "beat his music out," though his friends "still tried to cheer him." But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. "If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness," he said at this time; "for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done." The age had not la tete epique: Poe ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... work. All that is obviously no good, and all sensible people try to pull themselves up. When you have found out what suits you, do it boldly; but the man who admires discipline for its own sake is a sort of hypochondriac—a medicine-drinker. I have a friend who says that if he stays in a house, and sees a bottle of medicine in a cupboard, he is always tempted to take a dose. 'Is it that you feel ill?' I once said to him. 'No,' he said; ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... day, save when I was obliged to stop and lean my head on my hand. Real affliction, however, has something in it by which it is sanctified. It is a weight which, however oppressive, may like a bar of iron be conveniently disposed on the sufferer's person. But the insubstantiality of a hypochondriac affection is one of its greatest torments. You have a huge featherbed on your shoulders, which rather encumbers and oppresses you than calls forth strength and exertion to bear it. There is something like madness in that opinion, and yet it has a touch of ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... 10. Hypochondriasis. The hypochondriac disease consists in indigestion and consequent flatulency, with anxiety or want of pleasureable sensation. When the action of the stomach and bowels is impaired, much gas becomes generated by the fermenting or putrescent aliment, and to this indigestion is catenated ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... his own coffin and mutilated corpse was in reality revealed to him by the agency of some supernatural power, or whether it was (as sceptics will say) the natural effect of his hypochondriac state of mind, producing an optical deception, we will not take upon us to determine; certain, however, it is, that with a calm voice and collected manner he described to his brother James, a scene the dreadful reality of which was ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... we, thou hadst thought right to keep it secret! Who is there now that can read the five columns of Presentations in his Morning Newspaper without a shudder? Hypochondriac men, and all men are to a certain extent hypochondriac, should be more gently treated. With what readiness our fancy, in this shattered state of the nerves, follows out the consequences which Teufelsdroeckh, with a devilish ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. In most cases this lower jaw —being easily unhinged by a practised artist ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... not help remarking the strong contrast between them. He, with his sallow, delicately-shaped features—the thin mouth and long straight nose, of that form I have heard called the "melancholy nose," which usually indicates a feeble, pensive, and hypochondriac temperament; while his daughter—But I have described ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... feces and the great difficulty of voiding them. The influence of constipation upon the functions of the liver, is indicated by the sympathy displayed between that organ and the mind. The patient manifests apprehension, mental depression, taciturnity, and melancholy, all indicative of hypochondriac ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... gentleman—that hypochondriac who goes along turning his head from side to side, seeking salutes? That's the celebrated governor of Pangasinan, a good man who loses his appetite whenever any Indian fails to salute him. He would have died if he hadn't issued the proclamation ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... of Solomon, and some charms said to have been invented by that prince, or roots and herbs to which they attributed the same virtues, like as a clever physician by the secret of his art can cure a hypochondriac or a maniac, or a man strongly persuaded that he is possessed by the devil, or as a wise confessor will restore the mind of a person disturbed by remorse, and agitated by the reflection of his sins, or the fear of hell. But we are speaking now of real possessions and obsessions which are cured ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... sapphire, sapphirine, amethystine, turquoise, ultramarine, sky-colored; livid, ecchymosed; rigorous, severe; (Colloq.) melancholy, downhearted, depressed, despondent, dejected, low-spirited, dispirited, hypochondriac, chapfallen, gloomy, (Colloq.) gloomy, inauspicious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of us knows—not even the Commodore himself; assuredly not the Chaplain; even our Professor's scientific surmisings are vain. On that point, the smallest cabin-boy is as wise as the Captain. And believe not the hypochondriac dwellers below hatches, who will tell you, with a sneer, that our world-frigate is bound to no final harbour whatever; that our voyage will prove an endless circumnavigation of space. Not so. For how can this world-frigate prove ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... Knox's passion, Marjorie Bowes, is only alluded to as "she whom God hath offered unto me, and commanded me to love as my own flesh,"—after her, Mrs. Bowes is the dearest of mankind to Knox. No mortal was ever more long-suffering with a spiritual hypochondriac, who avers that "the sins that reigned in Sodom and Gomore reign in me, and I have small power or none to resist!" Knox replies, with common sense, that Mrs. Bowes is obviously ignorant of the nature ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... while it lasted! Then his little Daughter died on his hands; his Son had disorders, nervous imbecilities,—did not die, but did worse; went into hopeless idiotcy, and so lived for many years. Zimmermann, being dreadfully miserable, hypochondriac, what not, "his friends," he himself passive, it would seem, "managed to get a young Wife for him;" thirty years younger than he,—whose performances, however, in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and yielding, became in time a confirmed hypochondriac, and on the death of his wife, Maria Louise, in 1714, abandoned himself to grief, refusing to attend to business of any kind, shutting himself up in the strictest seclusion, and leaving the affairs of the kingdom practically in the hands of the Princess Orsini, the ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... action, I took him in tow, and ran him in to draw the Popworth's fire—in other words, introduced him to my uncle in the library. The meeting of my tall, lank relative and the big-nosed little Jew was a spectacle to cure a hypochondriac! "Mr. Jacob Menzel—gentleman from Germany—travelling in this country," I yelled in the old fellow's ear. He of the diminutive legs and stupendous nose bowed with perfect decorum, and seated himself, stiff and erect, in the big chair I placed for him. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... Aristides, it seems, was quite as liable to imposition. "The credulity of a Papias," says Dr. Lightfoot, "is more than matched by the credulity of an Aristides." [40:1] Such is the bishop's leading witness. Aristides was an invalid and a hypochondriac; and, in the discourses he has left behind him, he describes the course of a long illness, with an account of his pains, aches, purgations, dreams, and visions—interspersed, from time to time, with what Dr. Lightfoot estimates ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... Malthus, "If I consent to employ your word labour, you must understand me," so and so! Mr. Malthus says, "Commodities are not exchanged for commodities only; they are also exchanged for labour;" and when the hypochondriac Englishman, with dismay, foresees "the glut of markets," and concludes that we may produce more than we can consume, the paradoxical Monsieur Say discovers that "commodities" is a wrong word, for it gives a wrong idea; it should ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... an evil. I am sure that it is well worth while being sick to be nursed by a mother. There is nothing which I remember with such pleasure as the time when you nursed me at Aspenden. The other night, when I lay on my sofa very ill and hypochondriac, I was thinking over that time. How sick, and sleepless, and weak I was, lying in bed, when I was told that you were come! How well I remember with what an ecstasy of joy I saw that face approaching me, in the middle ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries—all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicings. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... at once directed against the faculty of medicine, and aimed at its most vulnerable point—namely, the influence used by some unworthy members of the profession to avail themselves of the nervous fears and unfounded apprehensions of hypochondriac patients. Instead of treating imaginary maladies as a mental disease requiring moral medicine, there have been found in all times medical men capable of listening to the rehearsal of these brain-sick whims as if ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of work.' He engaged, however, in another transaction of still worse character, which seems to have been even more unpleasant to him; for he says: 'After that I became melancholy, very much afflicted with the hypochondriac melancholy, growing lean and spare, and every day worse; so that in the year 1635, my infirmity continuing and my acquaintance increasing, I resolved to live in the country, and in March and April, 1636, I removed my goods unto Hersham ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Joinville is of somewhat queer disposition. Now he is joyous to the point of folly, anon gloomy as a hypochondriac. He is silent for three days at a time, or his bursts of laughter are heard in the very attics of the Tuileries. When he is on a voyage he rises at four o'clock in the morning, wakes everybody up and performs his duties ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... allowed that conversation yesterday. These monomaniacs will make a mountain out of a mole-hill... and see their fancies as solid realities.... As far as I remember, it was Zametov's story that cleared up half the mystery, to my mind. Why, I know one case in which a hypochondriac, a man of forty, cut the throat of a little boy of eight, because he couldn't endure the jokes he made every day at table! And in this case his rags, the insolent police officer, the fever and this suspicion! All that working upon a man half frantic with hypochondria, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... my heart, you see," she told Sara, with the martyred air peculiar to the hypochondriac—the genuine sufferer rarely has it. "It is, of course, a great deprivation to me, and I don't think either Dick"—with an inimical glance at her husband—"or Molly come up to see me as often as they might. Stairs are no difficulty ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of the inquiries come from saucer screwballs and these people are like a hypochondriac at the doctor's; nothing will make them believe the diagnosis unless it is what they came in to hear. And there are ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... the tale of "The Bosom Serpent," one of those "allegories of the heart" which he apparently meant to write in a series of which he never found the key. The idea is an old one; the man with a snake in his bosom is a hypochondriac, who by centring his thoughts on himself has developed this fancy and is tortured by it. The cure is wrought when he forgets himself in returning to the love of his wife. The almost physical dismissal of the serpent into the fountain, which is neither averred nor denied, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... that one can't be happy without being busy. Now that I can't keep up my athletic sports I should become a pale hypochondriac without these housewifely affairs to employ me. I don't like to embroider. I can't paint china. I'm not a musician. I somehow don't care to begin to devote myself to clubs in town. I love my books and the great outdoors—and plenty ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... and sun and rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since then? Not much, indeed. The return of the Stonewall Brigade to Winchester, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... double the sum which had formerly, and with reason, been found fault with. The slightest symptom of illness is magnified into a serious attack by the supposed affectionate and assiduous nurse, until her master, in compliance with her advice, becomes a confirmed hypochondriac, whom she governs despotically under a show of ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... comforts the heart, cheers melancholy, and revives the fainting spirits, says SALMON, in the 45th page of his "Household Companion" London, 1710. And EVELYN, in page 13 of his Acetaria, says, "The sprigs in wine are of known virtue to revive the hypochondriac, and cheer the hard student."—Combined with the ingredients in the above receipt, we have frequently observed it produce all the cardiac and exhilarating ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... Knebel, October, 1817, and again in his review in Kunst und Alterthum, June, 1820, emphasizes whilst he justifies and applauds the use which Byron had made of his work. "This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius." Afterwards (see record of a conversation with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... The hypochondriac has every known symptom of indigestion, or of heart disease, or is threatened with tuberculosis—all in his mind; and whatever the disorder he seizes upon, his attention hovers there, while the ideas of that particular disability persist ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... ancestors, but which now prevail universally, and are complicated with almost every other distemper. The bodies of men are enfeebled and enervated; and it is not uncommon to observe very high degrees of irritability under the external appearance of great strength and robustness. The hypochondriac, palsies, cachexies, dropsies, and all those diseases which arise from laxity and debility, are, in our days, endemic every where; and the hysterics, which used to be peculiar to the women, as the name itself indicates, ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... hessian cloaks, or umbrellas. It seemed as if a wet blanket were drawn between the sun and the earth. The atmosphere was always foggy, often perfectly wet, but never thoroughly dry. It wanted vitality; and every person that breathed it partook of its own damp, hypochondriac, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... the chief natural tonic, attributes it in great part to the action of the prospect of the sea upon the nervous system. 'I am fully convinced,' says he, 'that the physical effects of sea-bathing must be greatly increased by the impression on the mind, and that a hypochondriac or nervous person may be half-cured by residing on the sea-coast, and enjoying a view of the grand scenes of nature which will there present themselves—such as, the rising and setting of the sun ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... Rifle-Bird, names given . . . probably because in coloration it resembled the well-known uniform of the rifle-regiments of the British army, while in its long and projecting hypochondriac plumes and short tail a further likeness might be traced to the hanging pelisse and the jacket formerly worn by the members of those corps."— [Footnote]: "Curiously enough its English name seems ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after, another, a little before the fire; the old women, and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the other sex, whom I could almost call the old women too, remarked, especially afterward, though not till both those judgments were over, that those two comets passed directly over the city, and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... said, "is an invalid. He lives at a cove called Black Harbor, and all his truck goes through to him over the company's road. We receive it here, and send a pack-mule through once a month. I've met him; he's a bad-tempered hypochondriac, a cynic at heart, and a man whose word is never doubted. If he says he has a great auk, you may be satisfied ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... the possibilities of phonetic tradition; and any one who is unwilling to credit this should recollect the Scottish 'keepach' and 'dreeach' (used together or separately), which are derived, almost beyond belief, from 'hypochondriac.' ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me, at least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw, upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... mournful, over-sensitive, hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his young years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at midnight; Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochondria, thought himself near dying, and "had fancies about the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... darling, you are yourself low and nervous, and you treat this fancy of Bale's as seriously as he does himself. The truth is, he is a hypochondriac, as the doctors say; and you will find that I am right; he will be quite well in the morning, and I daresay a little ashamed of himself for having frightened his poor little wife as he has. I will sit up with you. But our poor Mary is not, you know, very strong; and she ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... little stupidly, Cobb thought, and suddenly smiled. He was bulky to the point of grotesqueness, with a huge white torpid face and a hypochondriac stoop of the shoulders, and the hand that traveled over his waistcoat, from pocket to pocket, looked as if it had been shaped ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... my companion, Mr. Rosenhagen. I found him in a spacious apartment hung all round with tapestry, so that there was no appearance of any windows. I was far from being indifferent to the comfort of a good dry bed; but poor Mr. Rosenhagen, besides being delicate, was hypochondriac. With one of the most rueful countenances I ever beheld, he informed me that he must certainly die of cold. His teeth chattered whilst he pointed to the tapestry at one end of the room, which waved to and fro with the wind; and, looking behind it, I found a large, stone casement ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... that by the eyes can flow in a subtle essence, causing such powerful corrosions in all the veins of the body, recesses of the heart, nerves of the members, roots of the hair, perspiration of the substance, limbo of the brain, orifices of the epidermis, windings of the pluck, tubes of the hypochondriac and other channels which in her was suddenly dilated, heated, tickled, envenomed, clawed, harrowed, and disturbed, as if she had a basketful of needles in her inside. This was a maiden's desire, a well-conditioned desire, which troubled her sight to such a degree that she no longer saw her ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... he stopped to take in the full real realization of what he had discovered. Louise, superb, arrogant, beautiful Louise, was really ill, desperately ill. A feeling of remorse mingled with his sense of shock. He had believed her a sort of nervous hypochondriac. He had so resented her excessive demands on Barbara that it was only since he had seen much of her in this last month that he had been able whole-heartedly ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... The hypochondriac imagines he has things the matter with him, and he becomes confirmed in his belief, he finds that so long as he lives he has something the matter with him. He no sooner gets cured of one than something else attacks him. There is no medicine ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... our friend Mr. Crawshay was talking to you about just now?" "Are you really interested?" she asked, with an air of faint surprise. "Well, if you must know, he was asking questions about my patient. He appears to be something of a hypochondriac himself, and he is ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sad and strange than ever after this marriage. I think that Stanley was right, and that living in that solitary and darksome dell helped to make her hypochondriac. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... ill-humor, wisdom, affection, or goodness. He never spares himself, except now and then to assume a somewhat diaphanous anonymity. Without regard for his own dignity, he exhibits himself as humiliated, or drunken, or hypochondriac, or inquisitive, or resorting to petty subterfuge—anything for the accomplishment of his one main purpose. 'Nay, Sir,' said Johnson, 'it was not the wine that made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.' 'What, Sir,' asks the hapless Boswell, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... I believe I have not had one whole day, or rather night, without my stomach having been greatly disordered, during the last three years, and most days great prostration of strength: thank you for your kindness; many of my friends, I believe, think me a hypochondriac." ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... His letters received then showed him vain, and more attentive to ceremony and etiquette, than we suppose men of sense should be. I have now a constant correspondence with him, and find him a little hypochondriac and discontented. He possesses a very good understanding, though not of the first order. I have had great opportunities of searching into his character, and have availed myself of them. Many persons of different nations, coming from Madrid ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... met when commands were given and received were dull from want of sleep or hectically bright as a hypochondriac's. Voices spoke in a grim, tired monotone, broken by sudden flashes of irritation or eruptions of anger. Features were drawn like those of rowers against a tide. The very proportions of the ghastly harvest after the last, the heaviest of ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... wrote under the influence of that hypochondria and despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p. 082) die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me through this to me miserable world! I have a hundred times wished ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... fact that the window was overshadowed by a huge building on the opposite side of the narrow street. Gloomy and cheerless as it was in appearance, the room was in keeping with the character of the man who occupied it. Johann Mayrhofer was regarded by his acquaintance as an hypochondriac, whose general depression of spirits entered largely into his poetical writings. But those who knew him intimately were aware of a gentle and tender side to his ordinarily stern nature. He was, in fact, a 'lonely, self-contained, ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... the credulity of the hypochondriac and the caffein-sensitive, in recent years there has appeared in America and abroad a curious collection of so-called coffee substitutes. They are "neither fish nor flesh, nor good red herring." Most of them have been shown by official government ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a little hard at Orchis, because the truth was, that until the lucky prize came to him, Orchis had gone under the nickname of Doleful Dumps, he having been beforetimes of a hypochondriac turn, so much so as to save up and put by a few dollars of his scanty earnings against that rainy day he used to groan ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... is a morbid secretion of the Spermaceti whale; for like you mortals, the whale is at times a sort of hypochondriac and dyspeptic. You must know, subjects, that in antediluvian times, the Spermaceti whale was much hunted by sportsmen, that being accounted better pastime, than pursuing the Behemoths on shore. Besides, it ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... were thus driven from power, and the government was intrusted to the creatures of Porto Carrero. The King left the city in which he had suffered so cruel an insult for the magnificent retreat of the Escurial. Here his hypochondriac fancy took a new turn. Like his ancestor Charles the Fifth, he was haunted by the strange curiosity to pry into the secrets of that grave to which he was hastening. In the cemetery which Philip the Second had formed beneath the pavement of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... required to be handled with delicacy, though with force and decision. Joachim Friedrich's eldest Son, Johann Sigismund, Electoral Prince of Brandenburg, had already, in 1594, married one of Albert Friedrich the hypochondriac Duke of Preussen's daughters; and there was a promising family of children; no lack of children. Nevertheless prudent Joachim Friedrich himself, now a widower, age towards sixty, did farther, in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... counsel and befriend, seemed in no perceptible degree to encourage him. His mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected. Shut up in these oaken walls, chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about, at times suddenly pausing, starting, or staring, biting his lip, biting his finger-nail, flushing, paling, twitching his beard, with other symptoms of an absent or moody mind. This distempered spirit was lodged, as before hinted, in as distempered a ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this, and brought him back to break up the ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... odd people are to be met at such a place; strong-minded women who have broken through the trammels of the Faculty, and gone to the Water Cure in spite of the warnings of their medical men, and their friends' kind predictions that they would never live to come back; and hypochondriac men, who have tried all quack remedies in vain, and who have come despairingly to try one which, before trying it, they probably looked to as the most violent and perilous of all. And the change of life is total. You may have finished ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... name, the "weill belovit sister" who is associated with so much of his life without one trace of human identity ever stealing through the mist that envelops her, was dead; disappearing noiseless into the grave, where it would seem her mother, Mrs. Bowes, the religious hypochondriac who had required so many solemn treatises in the shape of letters to comfort her, had preceded her daughter. Two boys, the sons of Marjory, were with their father in these panelled rooms. They both grew up, but not to any distinction; he did not spare ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... CAN be golden? Yes. But perhaps if a woman of the world should find herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak—she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make sounds, ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... fails me to enumerate all her engagements. She broke them one after another without a thought, and cast her admirers away as if they had been dresses of last year's fashion. Most of them, it must be said, recovered quickly enough, but the miserable COPE became a hopeless hypochondriac, and never smiled again. He died the other day, and HERMIONE's sketch of HANKINSON was found, frayed and soiled, in an ancient pocket-book which he always carried about with him. HANKINSON'S fate seemed at first to be worse. He took to poetry, morbid, passionate, yearning, unhealthy ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... never lose sight of the natural tendency of our inclinations, nor forget to ascertain if our penchants are painful in themselves, or improving to health. A little wine, or a few drops of liquor, brings the smiles to the most hypochondriac faces. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... town-major, after swallowing countless boxes of Morison's pills died in the belief that he had not begun to take them soon enough. The consumption of these drugs at that time almost surpassed belief. There was scarcely a sickly or hypochondriac person, from the Hill of Presburg to the Iron Gates, who had not taken large quantities of them." Mais voila le mot d'enigme. "'The Anglomania,"' was the answer to a query of the author, "'is nowhere stronger than in this part of the world. Whatever comes from England, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... article on Pascal) We may doubt whether there is more essential religiousness in this seeking of sorrow as a mortification,—in this monastic self-laceration and exclusion,—than in the morbid misery of the hypochondriac. Neither comprehends the whole of life, nor is adapted to its realities. Christ was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" but he was also full of sympathy with all good, and enjoyed the charm of friendship, and the light of existence. Around ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... that he was a wearisome hypochondriac. He was really much too well-bred to be a nuisance. He had an eye for the small weaknesses of humanity. But it was a good-natured eye. He made a restful, easy, pleasant companion for the hours between dinner and bedtime. We spent three evenings together, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... "A hypochondriac!" said Joe. "You are a little sick, and you think yourself much worse. You look better and feel better within the ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least—in the circumstances then surrounding me—there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... poetry remote and dubious; his very characters themselves seem to be infected by their creator's delight in the mysterious, the strange, and the unreal. They have no healthy activity; or, if they have, they invariably lose it in the second act; in the end, they are all hypochondriac philosophers, puzzling over eternity and dissecting the attributes of Death. The central idea of Death's Jest Book—the resurrection of a ghost—fails to be truly effective, because it is difficult to see any clear distinction between the phantom and the rest of the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... from the more serious disorders, let us consider the hypochondriac, who harbors the insistent thought that he must be always perfectly well, that each of his sensations must conform to his ideal, and that each function must follow regulations imposed by himself. If he can learn to ignore this thought by realizing ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... if you mean to ecstaticise and see beatific visions: you must get the most fashionable and picturesque specialists to come and feel your religious pulse, and you must on no account neglect the subscription lists. But only those rich enough to be hypochondriac can afford such luxuries. Now, in the toiling classes there are often good ears for music, and exquisite responsiveness to religious sensations. What satisfies such natures and such wants must be cheap. The Plymouth Brethren (I ought rather to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... as a fashion;—and how is it received? The clergyman thinks it would be very unclerical for him to wear it, though it may be as black, and is as modest, as the rest of his apparel. The young doctor timidly tries it on, and in his first walk meets the wealthy hypochondriac, his favorite patient, and the one who is trying to introduce him to practice, who seriously advises him, as a friend, not to wear that new-fangled thing,—if the poor hat had only been ugly, there would have been nothing bad in its ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... abode, and to return to thine ancient habitation!' This said, the sick man was ordered to withdraw, and another was brought forward in his place. This new comer said he was tormented by the melancholy vapours. In fact, he looked like a hypochondriac; one of those persons diseased in imagination, and who but too often become so in reality. 'Aerial spirit,' said the Irishman, 'return, I command thee, into the air! — exercise thy natural vocation of raising tempests, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of the transition school occurs the name of one who, like Gray, was a recluse, but with a better reason and a sadder one. He was a gentle hypochondriac, and, at intervals, a maniac, who literally turned to poetry, like Saul to the harper, for relief from his sufferings. William Cowper, the eldest son of the Rector of Berkhampsted in Hertfordshire, was born on the 15th of November, 1731. He was a delicate and sensitive child, and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... come of their own misdeeds. One of their friends or one of their family may be the skeleton, or the consciousness of coming and veritable misfortune, pecuniary or what-not. But the Medical Times, which no doubt ought to know, refers purely to cases of vague melancholy and hypochondriac foreboding. Apparently "The Spleen," the "English Disease," is as bad now as when Green wrote in verse and Dr. Cheyne in prose. Prosperous business men, literary gents in active employment, artists, students, tradesmen, "are all visited ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the opening of this fatal year 1818, expressions dropped from my beloved of his belief of his approaching end : they would have broken my heart, had not an incredulity —now my eternal wonder,—kept me in a constant persuasion that he was hypochondriac, and tormented with false apprehensions. Fortunate, merciful as wonderful, was that incredulity, which, blinding me to my coming woe, enabled me to support my courage by my hopes, and helped me to sustain his own. In his occasional mournful prophecies, which I always ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... laughter. He is as tender as a man without a skin; who cannot bear the slightest touch without flinching. What tickles another would give him torment; and yet he has what we may call lucid intervals, when he is remarkably facetious — Indeed, I never knew a hypochondriac so apt to be infected with good-humour. He is the most risible misanthrope I ever met with. A lucky joke, or any ludicrous incident, will set him a-laughing immoderately, even in one of his most gloomy paroxysms; and, when the laugh is over, he will curse his ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... must not wonder that Plunket did not stop to visit you in his way. He has now been four months absent from Ireland, suffering all the while from vexation and indifferent health, which have produced the effect of making him low and hypochondriac about himself. He was convinced nothing but the native breeze of the potatoes could revive him, and he was besides not a little uneasy as to the consequences of this absence upon his professional business, and very anxious again to see ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... us,' he said gloomily. His gloom was not that of the hypochondriac, but the legitimate gloom which has its origin in a syllogism. As he uttered the words he handed the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... of eloquence, a very natural object for the sympathy of devout women. At this happy juncture he fell into the company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She was a religious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom she honoured with her confidence. From the first time she heard Knox preach she formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of very great respectability, who was low-spirited and hypochondriac to a degree, was at times so fanciful, that almost every rustling noise he heard was taken for ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... Does an hypochondriac affection, which causes sadness and lowness in all those who suffer from it, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... we Christian people half enough realise how imperative a Christian duty, as well as how great a Christian privilege, it is to be glad always. You have no right to be anxious; you are wrong to be hypochondriac and depressed, and weary and melancholy. True; there are a great many occasions in our Christian life which minister sadness. True; the Christian joy looks very gloomy to a worldly eye. But there are far more occasions which, if we were right, would ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... unsteady, lurking eyes, suggested the bandit. No doubt, like most of his class, he was in hiding from the government authorities. He was something of a hypochondriac, and among other ailments he thought he had an animal in his stomach, which he got in there by way of a knife-stab he had received some time ago. When he came to me to get some remedy, he carried a rather fine ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... cleanliness? I have just read of two people who married after a six week's acquaintance, knowing nothing of each other's antecedents, personal habits, caprices or principles. The man proved to be a regular hypochondriac, taking medicine constantly, at one time with five doctors prescribing for him. He counted his pulse at every odd moment, and looked at his tongue instead of at the eyes of his wife, as he had done when a lover. He had a dread of pure air, and was as averse ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... nobles, gratifying greedy clergymen, subduing wild Highlanders, and composing deadly feuds. And since our empire is one of joy and pleasure, meet it is that we should haste with all our forces to the rescue of such as own our sway, when they chance, by evil fortune, to become the prisoners of care and hypochondriac malady. I speak in relation chiefly to Sir John, whom the vulgar call Ramorny. We have not seen him since the onslaught of Curfew Street, and though we know he was somedeal hurt in that matter, we cannot see why he should not ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... wish I could believe that his own conviction (as he told me) is true, and that death only means a larger government for him to administer. Anyhow, it is better to wind up that way than to go growling out one's existence as a ventose hypochondriac, dependent upon the condition of a few square inches of mucous membrane for ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... "coming events casts their shadows before;" to Indian livers condemned, else hopelessly, to the fate of Prometheus, preyed upon by that vulture Hepatitis, in its gnawing and chronic forms; and to the melancholy hypochondriac, steeped at once both in sadness and in pains—she calls, and calls loudly, that all these should come and see what great and good things are in store for them at Vichy. And finally, difficult though gouty ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... naturalists; and, some time ago, there appeared in the newspapers a letter from Carlyle, regretting that he himself had not been indoctrinated into the zoology of our waysides. I have heard a man out of health, hypochondriac, and idle, recommended to begin botany, geology, or chemistry, as a diversion of his misery. The idea is plausible and superficial. An overpowering taste for any subject—botany, zoology, antiquities, music—is properly ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... their grave moralities, their tragical histories, and their sportive tales; their verse and their prose. The village was in motion at their approach; the castle was opened to the ambulatory poets, and the feudal hypochondriac listened to their solemn instruction and their airy fancy. I would call miscellaneous composition LE GUAY SABER, and I would have every miscellaneous writer as solemn and as gay, as various and as pleasing, as ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... honour, sir,' replied the Baron,'the lad can sometimes be as dowff as a sexagenary like myself. If your Royal Highness had seen him dreaming and dozing about the banks of Tully-Veolan like an hypochondriac person, or, as Burton's "Anatomia" hath it, a phrenesiac or lethargic patient, you would wonder where he hath sae suddenly acquired all this fine sprack festivity ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the assertion for a while—I especially, for none but a hypochondriac would care to admit without proof that gangrene had been forced into his system. Kazimoto grew indignant, and offered to prove the truth of his claim on some animal. But there was no living animal in sight on which to prove it. We asked ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... to seeking professional guidance for the curing of a presumably minor disorder that most robust male adults have. In personal tribute I may add that I have never been hypochondriac in any possible respect. However, toward the end of those three weeks I formed the decision that I would go to see a doctor or so. But I would sneak up on these gentlemen, so to speak. I would call upon them in the role of a friend rather ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... from early life been subject to hypochondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, and was more immediately inherited by him from his father. They had not, however, been so strong ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... of a friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is the habit of people thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in exhibiting these miserable sores to any who would give themselves the pain of viewing them. A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and inward world, and caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The hypochondriac who nurses his spleen never looks forward cheerfully, but lounges in his invalid chair, and croaks like a raven, foreboding woe. "Ah," says he, "you will never ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... into hysteria; again it takes the form of hypochondria or chronic blues. The hypochondriac has a chronic, morbid anxiety about personal health and personal welfare. Frequently this state ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... for her. Daland nor she had probably in all their lives owned a precious stone. And this chest is full to the brim of jewels, and that ship contains more still a hundred-fold, and the man asking for his daughter's hand is clearly a hypochondriac, infinitely sea-weary, who sees in the prospect of home and settled life the whole desire of his heart, cloyed with riches and sick of wandering. If he, Daland, should hesitate, the suitor might change his mind. As for the daughter, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... gives them a Pain at the Stomach, Dejection of Spirits, Cold Sweats, Palpitation at the Heart, Trembling, Fearfulness; taking away the Sense of Fulness though presently after Meals, and causing a hypochondriac, gnawing Appetite. These symptoms are very little inferiour to what the most poisonous Vegetables we have in England would occasion when dried and used ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... took me by the soul, and that my heart turned as heavy as lead within me. I stammered out some few halting words of congratulation, and then sat downcast, with my head drooped, deaf to the babble of our new acquaintance. He was clearly a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack nostrums, some of which he bore ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle |
