——the sun is a most glorious sight, I’ve seen him rise full oft, indeed of late I have set up on purpose all the night, Which hastens, as physicians say, one’s fate; And so all ye, who would be in the right In health and purse, begin your day to date From day-break, and when coffin’d at fourscore, Engrave upon the plate you rose at four. Byron—Don Juan, Canto II., Verse CXL.
So much was our love, We would not understand what was most fit; But, like the owner of a foul disease, To keep it from divulging, let it feed Even on the pith of life. Hamlet, Act IV., Sc. I.
Diseases desperate grown, By desperate appliance are reliev’d Or not at all. Hamlet, Act IV., Sc. III.
His dissolute disease will scarce obey this medicine. Merry Wives, Act III., Sc. III.
O vanity of sickness! fierce extremes, In their continuance, will not feel themselves. Death, having prey’d upon the outward parts, Leaves them insensible. King John, Act V., Sc. VII.
What a catalogue have we here:
Now the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel i’ the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i’ the palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!
Troilus and Cressida, Act V., Sc. I.
As burning fevers, agues pale and faint, Life-poisoning pestilence, and frenzies wood, The marrow-eating sickness, whose attaint Disorder breeds by heating of the blood: Surfeits, imposthumes, grief and damn’d despair, Swear nature’s death for framing thee so fair. Venus and Adonis.
How nicely does he describe the decay of man, the second childhood, the wasting away of the organism: