"There Was A Time, And Not A Very Distant One Either, When I Was
Utterly Ignorant Of Two Things - First, The Existence, In My Particular
Case, Of The Thing Called The Human Stomach; And Secondly, The Reality
Of Those Mysterious Telegraphic Wires - Yclept NERVES.
Often nave I
sneered at 'bilious subjects,' 'dyspepsia,' and that long string of
woes which one hears of, in such luxuriance of description, usually
over breakfast, at Clifton, Tonbridge, or Harrogate.
Like the old
Duchess of Marlborough, too, I used 'to thank God I was born before
nerves came into fashion.'
"But 'live and learn.' I have lived; and I have learnt the utter misery
which a deranged digestion and jarring nerves, acting and reacting upon
each other, can inflict upon their victims. To be laid up in bed for a
month with a violent disease is nothing. You are killed or cured; made
better, and your illness forgotten even by yourself; or quietly laid
under the dust of your mother earth, to lie there in oblivion, the busy
world moving on, unheeding, over your cold remains, till the great day
of judgment. But to have, as it were, your whole 'mind, body, soul, and
strength' turned, with a resistless fascination, into the frightened
study of your own dreadful anatomy. To find your courage quail, not
before real danger, but at phantoms and shadows - nay, actually at your
own horrid self - to feel every act of life and every moment of business
a task, an effort, a trial, and a pain.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 304 of 492
Words from 84024 to 84282
of 136421
