"... 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.
VIII. NEURASTHENIA
It was a common saying of Myson that men ought not to investigate things from words, but words from things; for that things are not made for the sake of words, but words for things.
Diogenes Laertius.
This term (properly, though not commonly, accented upon the penult), was introduced by Beard to designate the large class of over-worked and worried who crowded his consulting room. The word is derived from the Greek neuron nerve, and astheneia weakness.
Among the symptoms of this disorder have been included disorders of digestion and circulation, muscular weakness, pains, flushes and chills, and anomalous sensations of every variety. It has been especially applied to cases showing such mental peculiarities as morbid self-study, fear of insanity and the various other phobias, scruples, and doubts with which we have become familiar.