Hypochondria : Part 4

Why Worry?
by George Lincoln Walton, M.D.

(Page 10 of 20)

A man all lucid, and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear mirror geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all objects and impressions made on it and imaging all things in their correct proportions; not twisted up into convex or concave, and distorting everything so that he cannot see the truth of the matter, without endless groping and manipulation: healthy, clear, and free and discerning truly all around him.

The following extracts illustrate his attitude toward his physical shortcomings, whatever they may have been.

... "A prey to nameless struggles and miseries, which have yet a kind of horror in them to my thoughts, three weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free from noise."

"I sleep irregularly here, and feel a little, very little, more than my usual share of torture every day. What the cause is would puzzle me to explain. I take exercise sufficient daily; I attend with rigorous minuteness to the quality of my food; I take all the precautions that I can, yet still the disease abates not."

"Ill-health, the most terrific of all miseries."

"Grown sicker and sicker.... I want health, health, health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious.... If I do not soon recover, I am miserable forever and ever. They talk of the benefit of health from a moral point of view. I declare solemnly, without exaggeration, that I impute nine-tenths of my present wretchedness, and rather more than nine-tenths of all my faults, to this infernal disorder in the stomach."

"Bilious, too, in these smothering windless days."

"Broke down in the park; konnte nichts mehr, being sick and weak beyond measure."

"Many days of suffering, of darkness, of despondency.... Ill-health has much to do with it."

"Occasionally sharp pain (something cutting hard, grasping me around the heart).... Something from time to time tying me tight as it were, all around the region of the heart, and strange dreams haunting me."

"There is a shivering precipitancy in me, which makes emotion of any kind a thing to be shunned. It is my nerves, my nerves.... Such a nervous system as I have.... Thomas feeling in his breast for comfort and finding bilious fever.... All palpitating, fluttered with sleeplessness and drug-taking, etc.... Weary and worn with dull blockheadism, chagrin (next to no sleep the night before)."

"A head full of air; you know that wretched physical feeling; I had been concerned with drugs, had awakened at five, etc. It is absolute martyrdom."

"A huge nightmare of indigestion, insomnia, and fits of black impatience with myself and others, - self chiefly.... I am heartily sick of my dyspeptic bewilderment and imprisonment."

"Alas! Alas! I ought to be wrapped in cotton wool, and laid in a locked drawer at present. I can stand nothing. I am really ashamed of the figure I cut."

Froude's statements regarding Carlyle's condition are as follows:

"... The simple natural life, the 'wholesome air, the daily rides or drives, the poor food,... had restored completely the functions of a stomach never so far wrong as he had imagined.... Afterwards he was always impatient, moody, irritable, violent. These humours were in his nature, and he could no more be separated from them than his body could leap off its shadow.... He looked back to it as the happiest and wholesomest home that he had ever known. He could do fully twice as much work there, he said, as he could ever do afterwards in London."

"... If his liver occasionally troubled him, livers trouble most of us as we advance in life, and his actual constitution was a great deal stronger than that of ordinary men.... Why could not Carlyle, with fame and honor and troops of friends, and the gates of a great career flung open before him, and a great intellect and a conscience untroubled by a single act which he need regret, bear and forget too? Why indeed! The only answer is that Carlyle was Carlyle."

These observations carry weight as representing the impartial and judicial estimate of a careful observer desiring only accurately to picture Carlyle as he was. The only logical conclusion, it seems to me, was that Carlyle, in addition to ocular defect with its legitimate consequences, was weighed down by worry over the failure to realize his own exaggerated ideal of health, that he devoted an undue degree of attention to this subject and was unduly anxious about it - in other words, that he had decided hypochondriacal tendencies.