Ut locuples moriaris, egenti vivere fato!
The covetous man thought he gave good advice to the spendthrift, when he said, "Live like me," who well answered him,
—————"Like you, Sir John?
"That I can do, when all I have is gone!"
Pope.
[14]. Lethi timor. The fear of death perpetually employs the thoughts of these patients; hence they are devising new medicines, and applying to physicians and quacks without number. It is confounded with hypochondriasis, Class [I. 2. 4. 10]. in popular conversation, but is in reality an insanity.
A young gentleman, whom I advised to go abroad as a cure for this disease, assured me, that during the three years he was in Italy and France he never passed a quarter of an hour without fearing he should die. But has now for above twenty years experienced the contrary.
The sufferers under this malady are generally at once discoverable by their telling you, amidst an unconnected description of their complaints, that they are nevertheless not afraid of dying. They are also easily led to complain of pains in almost any part of the body, and are thus soon discovered.
M. M. As the maniacal hallucination has generally arisen in early infancy from some dreadful account of the struggles and pain of dying, I have sometimes observed, that these patients have received great consolation from the instances I have related to them of people dying without pain. Some of these, which I think curious, I shall concisely relate, as a part of the method of cure.
Mr. ——, an elderly gentleman, had sent for me one whole day before I could attend him; on my arrival he said he was glad to see me, but that he was now quite well, except that he was weak, but had had a pain in his bowels the day before. He then lay in bed with his legs cold up to the knees, his hands and arms cold, and his pulse scarcely discernible, and died in about six hours. Mr. ——, another gentleman about sixty, lay in the act of dying, with difficult respiration like groaning, but in a kind of stupor or coma vigil, and every ten or twelve minutes, while I sat by him, he waked, looked up, and said, "who is it groans so, I am sure there is somebody dying in the room," and then sunk again into a kind of sleep. From these two cases there appeared to be no pain in the act of dying, which may afford consolation to all, but particularly to those who are afflicted with the fear of death.