"Hypochondriac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... 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 dejection, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 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 ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... father and the very 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 rejoicing. 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 ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 like air and exercise and occupation. The ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... But the 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
... 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 effects ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Lewis had 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 as to give uneasiness to his family. ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... 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 affirmed to be born with a ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... disease by one common principle, but certainly the symptoms are an inexhaustible manifold. The rapid changes of the intense moods of the patient usually stand in the center. Torturing obsessions, abnormal impulses, over-suggestibility, hypochondriac depressions, paralysis of arms or legs, anaesthesia and paraesthesia, a mental stupor and confusion, illusions and perceptions of physiological symptoms may work together in spite of his, or rather her clear intelligence. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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 ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... summoned to see a rich old hypochondriac at the antique university town of Bouquin-Moisi, and upon his prescribing change of air and travel as remedies, he was retained to accompany the timid patient on a tour of some weeks; it but remained, therefore, for the new doctor to continue his attendance ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and does not believe he is killed. Poor fellow! I 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 one's heaven ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... 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 ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... 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 ought to ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... heightened by the 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 ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... 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 ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... directly—in the manner of 'faith cures' and the like—I would answer certainly not, unless the disorder happens to be in itself due to a delusion. I can imagine the hypochondriac being cured by mental stimulus." He felt that he was drawing near the point at issue, and his eyes shone ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... 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 this difficult ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... conviction 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
... that smokers and chewers have a thousand ailments? that German physicians attribute one half of the deaths among the young men of that country to tobacco? that the French Polytechnic Institute had to prohibit its use on account of its effects on the mind? that men grow dyspeptic, hypochondriac, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... formed rather a disadvantageous idea of him. 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 to Paris, all speak of him as in high esteem, and I ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 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 ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 to be first mentioned in ornithological literature by Frenchmen—Lesson ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... consequence derived from accidental coincidences, which, were they received by the community in general, would go near, as on former occasions, to cost the lives of those who make their boast of them. At least one hypochondriac patient is known to the author, who believes himself the victim of a gang of witches, and ascribes his illness to their charms, so that he wants nothing but an indulgent judge to awake again the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... hypochondriac angles formed between the points F, L, N, on either side the lungs are absent both in inspiration and expiration. Percussion, when made over the surface of the angle of the right side, discovers the presence of the liver, G G*. When made over the median line, and on either side of it ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... 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 that so very near the houses that it was plain ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with 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 ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... pestered, as he himself would have put it, by the mysterious illness of his young wife, fretted by the presence of the children, no doubt in a measure because he felt himself to be doing an ill part by them. His grumpy silence of other days, his sardonic humour, gave place to hypochondriac complainings and outbursts of fierce temper. Pony had hurt his foot in a machine at the factory and it required daily dressing. Johnnie understood from the sounds which greeted her that the sore foot was ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... hypochondriac, was pleased with him in a mournful sort of way. Of course, she was somewhat alarmed when Miss Cotton declared that the minister was "jist a terror to cut up and could play 'Dan Tucker' better than Sandy Neil himself." But Annie Fraser explained that Mr. Egerton had done it just to show that ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... on it," answered Bent. "He seems to be turning into a regular hypochondriac. I hope nothing is really seriously wrong with him. But anyway—this day week. And you'll play your part of best man, ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... lawyer. "Such a sacrifice! Why! that woman can't keep even a servant about her. A heartless, selfish hypochondriac! even her nieces will scarcely stay in the house with her. I think she would get you cheap at a thousand a year, Miss Kane; but ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... Hypochondriac! essay the elastic flooring! It shall so pleasantly and gently jolt thee, as to shake up, and pack off the stagnant humors mantling ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... than of a cold, now a cringing, cowering fellow; apparently an old man, nursing his life with pitiful tenderness, fearful that at any moment something may happen to break the hold of his aorta-walls on the stiletto-blade; a confirmed hypochondriac, peevish, melancholic, unhappy in the extreme. He keeps himself confined as closely as possible, avoiding all excitement and exercise, and even reads nothing exciting. The constant danger has worn out the ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... diagnosing my illness and prescribing for myself, from time to time I hope that I am deceived by my own illness, that I am mistaken in regard to the albumen and the sugar I find, and in regard to my heart, and in regard to the swellings I have twice noticed in the mornings; when with the fervour of the hypochondriac I look through the textbooks of therapeutics and take a different medicine every day, I keep fancying that I shall hit upon something comforting. All that ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Fancy, which recall touches in The Ten Pleasures. She introduces a Padua doctor on the stage. She shows, in several of her plays, a curious interest in medicine, especially quack medicine. Sir Patient, a hypochondriac, thinks he is swelling up like the "pipsy" husband. Isabella, in the same play, says "keeping begins to be as ridiculous as matrimony.... The insolence and expense of their mistresses has almost tired out all but ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region a broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been measured for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used either of them. He knew a clergyman named Brayley who went up into that region with Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that he couldn't carry a watch. The ticking ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... he was ill-clothed to encounter the change of weather. He had been unfortunate in the fact that his mother had for years used the vigilant tyranny of feebleness to enforce upon the boy her own sanitary views. Children are easily made hypochondriac, and under her system of government he became self-attentive, careful of what he ate and extremely timid. There had been many tutors and only twice long residence at schools in Vevey and for a winter in Budapest. The health she too sedulously watched she was fast destroying, and her son ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... analyzing his physical state is called a hypochondriac. What shall we call the man who is constantly analyzing his moral state? As the hypochondriac loses all sense of health in holding the impression of disease, so the other gradually loses the sense of wholesome relation to himself and ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... interest of Father Lobo, whose book he had read at Pembroke College. Mr. Warren, the bookseller, thought it would be worth while to print a translation. Hector joined in urging Johnson to undertake it, for a payment of five guineas. Although nearly brought to a stop midway by hypochondriac despondency, a little suggestion that the printers also were stopped, and if they had not their work had not their pay, caused Johnson to go on to the end. Legrand's book was reduced to a fifth of its size by the omission of all that overlaid ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... supposed that many 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 your ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... dinner the Duke went straight up to the Countess Olenska, and they sat down in a corner and plunged into animated talk. Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first have paid his respects to Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers, and the Countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, Mr. Urban Dagonet of Washington Square, who, in order to have the pleasure of meeting her, had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out between January and April. The two chatted together for nearly twenty ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... 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 be "productions;" ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... boring, and, to my thinking, 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 monastery, to set Amfortas and the knights to some ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... minded" and the six children were of inferior mentality. In a case of first-cousin marriage the wife became insane and two of the children were idiotic. In a case of the marriage of cousins, themselves the offspring of cousins the husband was a hypochondriac, and seven children idiotic. In another marriage of the same class both parents were feeble-minded and the children idiotic. These are simply taken at random, and many others might be given. When we find also that in a majority of cases no ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... ill-favoured pair establish themselves in occupation of poor Mrs. Nutter's domicile, 'I'll not object to the notices being received. There's the servant up at the window there—but you must not make a noise; Mrs. Nutter, poor woman, is sick and hypochondriac, and can't bear a noise; but I'll permit the service of the notices, because, you see, we can afford to snap our fingers at you. I say, Moggy, open a bit of that window, and take in the papers that this gentleman will hand you. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... family of Mr. Duncan, when he resolved to penetrate the almost unknown region of the west. No hypochondriac papa or aristocratic mamma, can I introduce, but a hale, robust yeoman, who looks upon himself as in the prime of manhood, though nearly fifty years of age, and who boasts of never having consulted a physician or taken a drug. Mrs. Duncan wore her own glossy hair at forty-five, ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... these were the scholars, who pronounced the dramas of Gottsched far superior to those of Corneille and Racine; there were the German patriots, who would not grant a smile to the best representation of "Le Malade Imaginaire," but declared "The Hypochondriac," by Guistorp, the wittiest drama in the world. In short, this large class of men ranged themselves in bold opposition to the favoritism shown to Frenchmen by Frederick the Great. These were the elements which composed the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 soon ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... letters (and men of letters), but not so many geniuses. In this one thing old Mother Nature will be whimsical and womanish. This is a gift that John Bull, or Johnny Crapaud, or Brother Jonathan does not find in his stocking every Christmas. Crude imagination is common enough,—every hypochondriac has a more than Shakspearian allowance of it; fancy is cheap, or nobody would dream; eloquence sits ten deep on every platform. But genius in Art is that supreme organizing and idealizing faculty which, by combining, arranging, modulating, by suppressing the abnormal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the Emperor Charles VI. had hoped to restrain her from so compromising a match; here, in the year 1720, Charles Edward had been born and had his baby fingers kissed by the whole sacred college; and here the so-called King of England had died at last, a melancholy hypochondriac, in 1766. The palace closes in the narrow end of the square of the Santissimi Apostoli, stately and quiet with its various palaces, Colonna, Odescalchi, and whatever else their names, and its pillared church front. ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... 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; ...
— 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... uncertain effect, and to administer such only as should be agreeable to the palate, without doing violence to the constitution. Such a physician could not but be agreeable to people of all dispositions; and, as most of the patients were in some shape hypochondriac, the power of imagination, co-operating with his remedies, often effected ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... his glass and glared at me as if I were the guilty party. "She's a worry-wart," he continued. "A hypochondriac, a neurotic, an escapist, and a communist." He studied the ceiling thoughtfully. "And sometimes I think she's a ...
— Compatible • Richard R. Smith
... sacrifice to it our peace, our prosperity, our blood, our future, our honor! What an insatiable vampire is this that drinks out the very marrow of our manliness! Pardon me; this sounds like a dark dream, like the offspring of a hypochondriac imagination; and yet—have I been unjust in what I have said? ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Madman. — N. madman, lunatic, maniac, bedlamite[obs3], candidate for Bedlam, raver[obs3], madcap, crazy; energumen[obs3]; automaniac[obs3], monomaniac, dipsomaniac, kleptomaniac; hypochondriac &c. (low spirits); crank, Tom o'Bedlam. dreamer &c. 515; rhapsodist, seer, highflier[obs3], enthusiast, fanatic, fanatico[Sp]; exalte[French]; knight errant, Don Quixote. idiot ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Experience; the first Time persons drink it, if they are full grown, it generally 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 in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... some mistake had not her name been written in full on the envelope. Her second impulse was to laugh at her adventure. She accorded full justice to Mlle. Moriaz; she knew very well that she did not resemble the first chance comer; but that her beauty would work miracles, resurrections; that a hypochondriac, merely from seeing her pass by, was likely to regain his taste for existence, scarcely appeared admissible to her. So great was her curiosity, that she took the pains to make inquiries; the flowers and the letter had been ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... first place, 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[45] part of the other sex (whom I could almost call old women too), remarked, especially afterward, though not till both those judgments were over, that those two comets passed directly over the city, and that so very near the houses that it was plain they imported something ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... aversion 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 than avowedly as ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... sloppy—we lie in bed, we dawdle, we eat too much, we moon over our 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; 'but I have an idea that it might do me good.' The disciplinarian is like ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a new purpose—the satirizing of contemporary manners and affectations by frank portrayal and criticism. In the great plays that followed, "The School for Husbands" and "The School for Wives," "The Misanthrope" and "The Hypocrite" (Tartuffe), "The Miser" and "The Hypochondriac," "The Learned Ladies," "The Doctor in Spite of Himself," "The Citizen Turned Gentleman," and many others, he exposed mercilessly one after another the vices and foibles ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... that the warnings about venereal disease, prostitution, etc., which are an integral part of sex instruction, tend to create a cynical, inimical attitude towards the male sex, which may even result in hypochondriac ideas and ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... his character for the causes of his popularity. A hypochondriac by temperament, of mediocre intelligence, incapable of grasping realities, confined to abstractions, crafty and dissimulating, his prevailing note was an excessive pride which increased until his last day. High priest ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... 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 ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Halewijn or Olbert, it is at once apparent that such changes are quite within 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
... him through the summer, which he spent in the heat and stress of the town. In his work he could forget a little the despair in which he lived; but in a double consciousness like that of the hypochondriac, the girl whom it seemed to him he had deserted was visibly and audibly present with him. Her voice was always in his inner ear, and it visualized her looks and movements ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... 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 too concrete ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... 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 ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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 ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... 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 ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... after being a patient in that hospital for some weeks, he returned home much worse. In addition to the aggravation of his other symptoms, there were present oedematous swelling of the extremities, which were generally cold and benumbed, gnawing pain in the right hypochondriac region, and almost total loss of appetite. On examining the right hypochondrium, which he described as swollen, there was evident indication of an enlarged liver, and he complained much of shooting pain in that region during a paroxysm ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... purse, and his handkerchief home with him, to which de Sigognac joyfully answered in the affirmative. In this friendly banter he soon forgot his sombre thoughts, and asked himself whether he had not been the dupe of a hypochondriac fancy, which could see nothing ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many complaints as a hypochondriac. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... 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 ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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, inanimate character. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • 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 as ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... himself, and knowing that any such chain enfeebles and almost annihilates the mental powers. Endued with exquisite sensibility, his wit never gave the smallest wound, even to the grossest ignorance of the world, or the most morbid hypochondriac bashfulness.' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... being told that a physician had been summoned, sneered at the hypochondriac fancies of the rich and idle, who, she said, having nothing but themselves to think about, must needs send for a doctor if only so much ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... 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 about salutes to which he ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... what he saw; fear and hypocrisy were reflected in the eyes of that world. In the jesters, fools and humpbacks immortalized by Don Diego was revealed the forced merriment of a dying nation that must needs find distraction in the monstrous and absurd. The hypochondriac temper of a monarchy weak in body and fettered in spirit by the terrors of hell, lived in all those masterpieces, that inspired at once admiration and sadness. Alas for the artistic treasures wasted in immortalizing a period ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a temperament called the HYPOCHONDRIAC, to which many persons, some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are born heirs,—a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent depression,—an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... 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
... fact Joel's surrender was in accord with the most elemental of psychological laws. With the characteristic caprice of her sex in matters of the heart, Celia had taken a violent fancy to this pale-blooded hypochondriac, and made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as her especial property. Nothing is so flattering to the vanity as the preference of a child, that naive, spontaneous affection to which it is impossible to impute mercenary motives. And Joel had responded by becoming ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... 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 ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... 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 ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... 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 ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... one day in crossing a little puddle when Pigasov was present, he put out his hand and picked up the skirt of his coat, as women do with their petticoats. Then he turned to another gentleman who to begin with had been a freemason, then a hypochondriac, and then wanted to be ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... captain to 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 ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... B——, of W——, AEt. 31. After a tertian ague of 12 months continuation, suffered great indisposition for 10 months more. He chiefly complained of great straitness and pain in the hypochondriac region, very short breath, swelled legs, want of appetite. He had been under the care of some very sensible practitioners, but his complaints increased, and he determined to come to Birmingham. I found him supported upright in his chair, by pillows, ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... after his visit to Lord Caranby, Mallow was unexpectedly called to Devonshire on account of his mother's illness. Mrs. Mallow was a fretful hypochondriac, who always imagined herself worse than she really was. Cuthbert had often been summoned to her dying bed, only to find that she was alive and well. He expected that this summons would be another false alarm, ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... would come! I wish he would come!" I exclaimed, seized with hypochondriac foreboding. I had expected his arrival before tea; now it was dark: what could keep him? Had an accident happened? The event of last night again recurred to me. I interpreted it as a warning of disaster. I feared my hopes were too ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... work? Look at the two ludicrous children, their legs dangling in air; at the lions' heads above the capitals of the pillars; at the lettering of the two visible words of the inscription, and at the gloomy hypochondriac or lunatic, clasping a cushion to his abdomen. That hideous design was not executed by an artist who "had his eye on the object," if the object were a Jacobean monument: while the actual monument was fashioned in no period of art but the Jacobean. From Digges' rhymes in the Folio of 1623, we ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... is so selfish; it is all self-contemplation, miserable self-weariness, gloomy reveries bounded by the narrowest horizons. If ever he turns to others' evil case, it is with the melancholy satisfaction of the hypochondriac, who finds his own symptoms repeated with less or greater variations in others' cases." To these I could only reply, "You have totally misunderstood the life. It is not a selfish one. The deepest self-communings are necessary ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... infirm, but from whatsoever cause it proceeded, he now appeared to labor under some secret presentiment of calamity, against which he struggled in vain. So at least he himself admitted. It is true that age and a constitution enfeebled by delicate health might alone, in a disposition naturally hypochondriac, occasion such anxiety; as we know they frequently do even in the youthful. Be this as it may, one thing was evident, his lordship began to sink more rapidly than he had ever done before; and like most invalids ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... excluded by their physical conditions from the activities of life. Mme de La Fayette, who was perhaps something of a hypochondriac, tossed all day among the pillows of that golden bed with the extravagance of which the austerity of Mme de Maintenon upbraided her. La Rochefoucauld, tormented by the gout, lay stretched at her side in his long chair, and the days went by in endless discussion, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... efficacious in producing this effect; it is true that sometimes they employed the name 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 ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... limited range of ideas, or more truly comic, than the two that figure in this story. Nick Whickson, too, the good-natured ne'er-do-well, who is in his own and everybody's way till he finds his natural vocation as an aid to a dealer in horses, is a capital sketch. The hypochondriac Squire Plumworthy is very good, also, in his way, though he verges once or twice on the "heavy father," with a genius for the damp handkerchief and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... godliness of 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 ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as a prelude of mortality. Indeed I believe that he took a hypochondriac pleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in dosing himself in all sorts of ways. His mysterious preoccupations with dried orange-peel had no doubt a medicinal end in view. But when it came to suffering pain and even to enduring ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... for shade, begins to appear 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 ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... to those whom the Chameleon litmus paper of "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 ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... ordinary occasions; we will not fatigue our readers by entering into any other detailed account of the domestic economy of the establishment. We will therefore proceed to events, merely premising that the mysterious tenant of the back drawing-room was a lazy, selfish hypochondriac; always complaining and never ill. As his character in many respects closely assimilated to that of Mrs. Bloss, a very warm friendship soon sprung up between them. He was tall, thin, and pale; he always fancied he had a severe pain somewhere or other, and his face invariably ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... also be an egotist, dwarfing the objects of his spite, and exaggerating the small atom that has arrayed itself against the universe. It is a species of insanity, wherein a mind has lost perception of the correct relationship between different existences. The poor hypochondriac who imagined himself a mountain was a living satire on many of his fellow-creatures, who differ only in being able to keep ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... nature weak 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 governess of his children, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... of their day; they had 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
... that blasts," "Darkness," and the "cold of winter," constituted the foundation of a belief in a personal Devil; and, when the time was ripe for the appearance of his satanic majesty, it required only a hypochondriac—a disordered mental organization—to formulate and project this ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... know whether illness to him is not rather a prerogative than 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 of people that did not care ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... diseases, is the root of his troubles. This alarms but interests him; he studies other advertisements, sends for pamphlets, and so becomes familiar with a few medical terms. He then takes a "treatment", and talks of his "complaint" and how he "diagnosed" it. He has become hypochondriac. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to the grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... story, his weak health, and his great faculty 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 ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stranger, and even the faithful and loving touch 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 of beautiful women, and something ugly ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was ready for 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. The avuncular ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... 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
... with all the tenderness that the African army is now bestowing upon Abd-el-Kader: she is as solicitous in her behalf as a physician is anxious to avoid curing a rich hypochondriac. Between the two, Caroline and Madame de Fischtaminel invent occupations for dear Adolphe, when neither of them desire the presence of that demigod among their penates. Madame de Fischtaminel and Caroline, who have become, through the efforts of Madame Foullepointe, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... gigantic mastery it has established there had grown intolerable; I must have told it. The sense of solitude under this aggressive and tremendous delusion was agony, hourly death to my soul. That is the secret of my talkativeness; my sole excuse for plaguing you with the dreams of a wretched hypochondriac." ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... blood is stagnant, Sir. Would to God I could see myself a shade paler!—the blood does not flow; I am like a pool in a citizen's garden, with a willow at each corner;—but a truce to my complaints. You see, Sir, I am no hypochondriac, as my fool of a doctor wants to persuade me: a hypochondriac shudders at every breath of air, trembles when a door is open, and looks upon a window as the entrance of death. But I, Sir, never can have enough air; thorough draught or east wind, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Shandy, says, "Whenever a man's conscience does accuse him (as it seldom errs on that side), he is guilty, and unless he is melancholy and hypochondriac, there is always sufficient ground for the accusation. But the converse of the proposition will not hold true," that if it does not accuse, the man ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Functions.... no part or Function of the Body escapes the Influence of this tedious and long protracted Disease, whose Symptoms are so violent and numerous, that it is no easy Task either to enumerate or account for them.... No disease is more troublesome, either to the Patient or Physician, than hypochondriac Disorders; and it often happens, that, thro' the Fault of both, the Cure is either unnecessarily protracted, or totally frustrated; for the Patients are so delighted, not only with a Variety of Medicines, but also of Physicians.... On ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... share again with its brothers and sisters. This feeling, too, sometimes becomes quite uncontrollable, and the child then needs as much care and as judicious management, both bodily and mental, to bring it back to health, as would be called for in the case of some adult hypochondriac ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... 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, she will either see the thing as he sees it,—how could human ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... the surface of the angle of the right side, discovers the presence of the liver, G G*. When made over the median line, and on either side of it above the umbilicus, N, we ascertain the presence of the stomach, M M*. In the left hypochondriac angle, the stomach may also be found ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... Cortes, and the kingdom of Mexico, and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that audacious brute Pizarro; and the Polynesians, just for all the world like the Ancient Britons; and the American Indians and the South-sea Islanders? How petulant and young and adventurous and frisky your hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! Then, for that vice of the mind which I call sectarianism,—not in the religious sense of the word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of a steadfast and all-embracing joy. I do not believe that 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... and its motion heavy, solemn, and slow;' the other, which preceded the Great Fire, was 'bright and sparkling, and its motion swift and furious.' Old women, he says, believed in them, especially 'the hypochondriac part of the other sex,' who might, he thinks, be called old women too. Still he half-believes himself, especially when the second appears. He does not believe that the breath of the plague-stricken upon a glass would leave shapes of 'dragons, snakes, and devils, horrible to behold;' but he does ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 Teufelsdrockh, with a devilish coolness, goes on ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... a variety of ways. It is protean in its versatility. It can be physical or mental. The hypochondriac conceives that everything is going to the "demnition bow-wows." Nothing can reassure him. He sees in every article of diet a hidden fiend of dyspepsia; in every drink a demon of torture. Every man he meets is a scoundrel, and every woman a leech. Children are growing ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... have 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 ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was all brown like a leaf with Valley dust 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 ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... troubles to those who are suffering if we can lessen their own. It may be a very great relief to them to know that others have passed through trials equal to theirs and have survived. There are obscure, nervous diseases, hypochondriac fancies, almost uncontrollable impulses, which terrify by their apparent singularity. If we could believe that they are common, the worst of ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... cerulean, cerulific, 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, dismal, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... quit thy new 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, and do not excite any more wind in this sad unlucky body!' This man ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... to 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
... thinking, his eyes dim with trouble; for when once a man has set out to find God, he must find him or die. This was the inside reality whose outcome set the public of Glaston babbling. It was from this that George Bascombe magisterially pronounced him a hypochondriac, worrying his brain about things that had no existence—as George himself could with confidence testify, not once having seen the sight of them, heard the sound of them, or imagined in his heart that they ought ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... a disorder of the imagination contracted in infancy. The devout man is a hypochondriac, who only augments his malady by the application of remedies. The wise man abstains from them entirely; he pays attention to his diet, and in other respects leaves ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... whither we may be gliding, for, as yet, not a soul on board 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 our eventual abiding place, when upon our first embarkation, as ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... develops 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 is accompanied ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter |
