68 66 66 enough to gain your worldly ends and retire from the trickeries and turmoils of business to leave some space between them and the grave, you would not, as is also often the case, be hurled into that grave at the very time you were inwardly saying to yourself, as the rich man in Scripture said to his soul, Thou hast many riches heaped up." Again I tell you, you are in the wrong track high feeding and physic-taking never did and never will diminish or repair the ills of fretting they are oil to fire: and he who tells you otherwise has the unpleasant alternative of being convicted of roguery or ignorance. The species of mental action to which I have applied the term "fretting" is in general parlance synonymous with vexation, sorrow, or anxiety. But as regards the action of the mind's physical agent, the brain, "fretting" is synonymous with any too complicated, too prolonged, and irritative state of the mind: the brain "frets" whenever its powers are overtaxed. Hitherto I have been speaking of the fretting of complicated and anxious business, such as commercial men are subjected to; and they form the most extensive section of the community in this country, to which my remarks apply, viz. the dyspeptic and drugged section. FRETTING OF LITERARY MEN. 69 But a similar action of the brain as a cause of stomach disease takes place in the literary men of the community. The strong exertion, and, in most of such men, the greater constitutional preponderance, of the brain suffices in them to produce hurtful effects on the digestive organs; and this, whether the reasoning faculties or the imaginative power be the seat of such exertion; the mathematician and the poet are alike subject to stomach malady and all its consequences. This fact was too glaring to be overlooked by the ancients. ARISTOTLE tells us that "all the great men of his time were melancholic," a term which agrees with our present one of hypochondriasis, the origin of which is always in the stomach. ARETÆUS says:* "Familiare est etiam stomachi vitium illis qui doctos sermones et res graves meditantur." (Disease of the stomach is especially common in those who write learned disquisitions and discuss profound subjects.) Dr. CHEYNE says: † "I seldom ever observed a heavy, dull, clod-pated clown much troubled with digestive or nervous disorders." And a writer in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales, "Les personnes observes: * Lib. 2. Cap. 6. English Malady, p. 180. + Vol. xxiii. p. 113. 70 THE "ROUSING" SYSTEM. qui exercent beaucoup leur entendement ont ordinairement les organs abdominaux faibles et très sensibles; il semble que l'activité mentale ait lieu au prejudice des fonctions digestives. L'homme qui pense le plus est celui qui digere le plus mal." It is needless to multiply authorities on a point which, I believe, is generally admitted. But the means of remedying, as far as may be, the unfortunate tendency in the human ornaments of an age, are open to much improvement. The ordinary, vulgar process is gone through in this, as in other cases of "fretting." "Doctor, my bowels are very torpid."-"Ah! I see: we must rouse them." Down goes the Latin for a purgative. After a time it is: "Doctor, my appetite is going.""Ah! 66 I see we must rouse it." He scrawls the hieroglyphics of a bitter tonic. The next complaint is announced shortly afterwards. Doctor, my mouth is bitter, and my eyes are yellow.”—“ Ah! I see your liver is torpid: we must rouse it." To do which some small but remarkably heavy pills (which the druggist tells you are made of calomel and conserve of roses,-" Let roses deck my tomb") are ordered. And so the " And so the "rousing" system goes on until every organ of the body has been " roused," 66 71 and, among the rest, the brain, which by this time cannot be coaxed to rest and the patient, "So coy a dame is sleep to him, With all the weary courtship of his care-worn thoughts, 66 But what of that? There is the doctor with his eternal" Ah! I see," to which he adds, on this occasion, we must quiet the nervous system." Quiet it! why was it ever "roused?" With your purgatives, your tonics, your mercurials, your diuretics, your carminatives, and the whole farrago, you have exasperated a complaint, which was simple and confined, into a complex and widespreading malady that now includes every minute nerve and every minute blood-vessel in the system. Quiet it! why was this not done before? was it not plain to every reasonable person who is a physiologist that the original disorder-the very first symptom, the constipation,-was indicative of an unquiet state of the nervous system? for when a man's nervous system is healthy it is quiet and all goes on as it should, and vice versâ. By your purgation you rendered a further portion of that system unquiet-you "roused" new sympathies; by your tonic you included the liver in the circle, and then came the bilious state; to re 72 CIRCLE OF DRUGGING. move which you gave mercurials, whereby the brain -and the brain of a person of hard intellectual labours too-was drawn into the plot against the individual's peace and happiness: and having "raised the devil," you think it is high time to "lay" him with opiates! The miserable nights and more miserable thoughts which occupy them, the restlessness, irritation, sense of disgust and tædium vitæ by day, that have been brought on the patient by such patch-work practice as this, we will suppose to be allayed by the opiates, the nerves are stupifiedthe disease is masked. But what becomes of the bowels? Alas! they are stupified too. The rousing" must begin once more: 66 Double, double, Toil and trouble. The "ingredients of the cauldron" are mixed again and repeatedly again, until an organic disease is established, and the patient is sent to seek health wherever he chooses: the doctor can do no more: his pharmacopoeia is at an end just at the time it has done all the mischief it can: he can face his patient no longer: so he sends him to boil at Bath, to drink the sweet-smelling waters at Harrowgate, or chicken-broth, (not made with chickens,) at Wisbaden. |