48

CANCER, ATROPHY, JAUNDICE, &C.

this condition of brain: "the major contains the minor," and both acknowledge the same cause.

On the other hand, the brain sometimes abuses the belly, and helps to maintain irritation there, to such an extent as to produce spasm of the stomach, which nearly or quite carries off our business friend: aye, and in a quarter of an hour too. Sometimes the patches of inflammation in the stomach run into ulceration, and a slower but not less surely fatal termination follows. Sometimes the irritation fixes on one part of the stomach, (generally the lower end, where it touches the liver,) and goes on to cancer of the stomach. Sometimes, whilst the stomach is yet capable of digesting food, slow inflammation takes possession of the small bowels, in consequence of the irritation of purgatives and other drugs, and stops the passages which convey the chyle into the blood circulation, causing a wasting or atrophy. At other times the stomach irritation extends to the liver, and jaundice suddenly occurs: or else the liver gradually loses its power of pouring out bile, and a kind of permanent jaundice is established, in token of which the patient looks always as yellow as the guineas, the search after

up

RESUME OF SYMPTOMS.

49

which has commenced all this mischief. This last occurrence-the hardening and loss of office in the liver-is most commonly met with in those who have returned from the East and the West Indies, where huge doses of mercury, cayenne, and curry by bushels, and oceans of Madeira, join the fretting in the onslaught; the patient, meanwhile, modestly attributing everything to the cli

mate.

This is sufficient to show the mode in which fretting adds to the mischiefs which food and physic originate. I have individualised the results, because they can be thus more clearly and graphically stated. But the whole of what precedes is applicable to the entire section under consideration, viz. the individuals in whom the cares of business of any kind, the anxieties of doubt, the corrosions of sorrow, the super-exertion of the intellect, produce that strained and excited condition of the brain which food and physic produce in the stomach and bowels,

You will observe that such condition of the brain is in itself a source of irritation to the stomach and bowels; you will observe how gradually but certainly, these last return this irritation: how the attempts to remedy by physic

E

50

VARIATIONS IN SYMPTOMS.

increase the disorder: how, from the moment the healthful office of the brain is perverted, sombre thoughts and evil passions, anger and selfishness, take possession of it: how these react still more forcibly and still more morbidly on the belly; whence reaction on the brain is again made and so on, until or brain or belly, or both, fall into irremediable, substantial, organic disease; and life, be it prolonged, is only prolonged misery ; and death, if speedy, is only the more welcome.

Reader, what are your reflections upon this picture? The period of this treatise has not yet come when I am to give mine: but when given, methinks you will agree that they are inevitable upon what has preceded.

Lights and shadows, however, various as the constitutions of men, and diversified as the circumstances in which they are placed, enter into the above broad delineation of the progress of stomach derangement consequent on the joint operation of the three causes with which I started.

Thus, there is a stage of the evil in which the living chemistry of the body causes the food and air the patient takes in, to be converted almost entirely into fat-fat without ruddiness or consistence;-which is deposited, instead of the bone

ACCUMULATION OF FAT.

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51

and muscle that should be found in adult age. The friends of the patient commonly remark, that he is "bloated," that he looks " doughy," and so forth. Certes, his is not an instance of “ laugh and grow fat;" for in his case, the fat is inside as well as outside of him. It collects about his heart, causing it to labour and palpitate with the slightest, or even without any, exertion, producing wheezing breath, and occasional feeling of suffocation. It collects about the bowels, developing paunch, and, by its weight, adding mechanical to vital irritation in the morbid parts, and causing each movement of the body to augment the irregular action of the heart and pulse; it presses on the large blood-vessels too in the belly, and thus prevents the due return of blood through them, whence dropsical swelling begins about the legs and feet. It collects about the kidneys, helping to deteriorate their action, and to render the urine scanty in quantity, or diseased in quality. Into the causes of this accumulation of fat, I cannot be expected to enter in a work of this kind, further than to say, that the bad digestion of the food makes a poor, diseased blood, more fit to deposit morbid fat than hard muscle and bone, which require a rich blood made from good

52

EMACIATION OF THE BODY.

food and good digestion-and not interfered with by physic.

But you must not expect to see the victim of stomach and drug disease always fat. He that is so, if he continue his miserable attempts at remedy in the common way, after a time melts away, like a lump of butter, before the consuming fire within him. His blood becomes more and more poor, so as not to be fit even to make fat. Moreover, less and less of chyle is carried into the circulation, as the inflammation of the small bowels is increased by the purgatives he uses, and as a smaller quantity of blood is formed, so that as the disease increases, the man diminishes;

"Small by degrees, and miserably less,"

Some

until he becomes "the shadow of his former self," and the clothes that were filled by the bloated dyspeptic, hang on the skeleton of a man. times, however, emaciation begins from the first, the fat never accumulates, especially in persons of highly nervous temperament.

Another variation in the picture is to be found in the occurrence of asthma, which, though an affection of the breathing, is invariably the result of stomach disease. The stomach irritates the