The History
Of My Derangements Is Told Above In One Word:
That word is - OVERWORK.
"If any one who may not just like an actual dissection, will look at
one of Quain's 'Plates of the Bones, Muscles, and Nerves of the Human
Body,' he will see that, growing as it were out of the walls of the
stomach, there are, in our wonderful human machine, great bunches of
nerves, called, by the medicals, the 'great ganglionic system,' and he
will observe that these nerves are in intimate and inseparable
connection with the spinal cord, and the brain. Then, if he recollects
that a perpetual series of conversations and signals goes on by those
agents between the stomach and the brain - that, in fact, the two are
talking together every moment (without even the delay of that
inappreciable interval for which the electric current lingers on the
wires in its wondrous progress of intelligence) - he will see that he
cannot abuse either great organ without a 'combination of parties'
against his administration.
"My unfortunate mistake, therefore, was this: I overworked my
brain. It rebelled. Stomach joined the outbreak. Heart beat to the
rescue; and all the other corporal powers sympathised in the attempt to
put me down. They would not stand ten days' work a week, and no
Sunday, - relieved though the labour might be by the amusement of
speeches and leading articles.
"The first explosion of the conspiracy laid me fainting at the desk. A
sort of truce followed this. I consented for a few days to the terms of
the belligerents.
I rested. But resting, I was restless. Unfit to work, I was tormented
by an unnatural desire for action. Thus I roused myself early - rode to
the office (for I was too weak to walk), buried myself amidst my
letters, reports and accounts - and rushed on with the day's duties as
if all the work of the world had to be done in that one day, and that
one day was the last. But an hour or two usually settled the contest.
Head swam, heart beat, fluttered, stopped, struggled, - knees knocked
together, - and out oozed that cold clammy sweat which reminds one of
weakness and the grave. So with a pale face, anxious eye, and hollow
cheek, I had to quit the desk again and ride mournfully home, the
remainder of the day being consumed in a rest, which only increased my
melancholy feelings, because it made me more than ever conscious of my
feebleness and excitability.
"But by great care and management of myself, by desperate strivings to
get a little health, I did improve. Two hours a day at work, two
or three times a week, became two or three hours every working day of
the week. Then, as a wonderful achievement, at last I managed to endure
half a day's business at a time. And at the end of some months (one
beautiful day in August, bless the sunlight) I actually did a
whole day's work! And so, at last, I got before the wind
sufficiently to engage again in the competition of business life, with
some credit and success. None of those, however, with whom I had to
compete, and to whom work (as it should be to every man in health) was
easy and pleasant, knew the cost of many of my weary days and nights of
labour, or the nervous suffering and physical weakness; in spite of
which I endeavoured always to meet my compeers in the working world
with pleasantry, or at least with a smile.
"I had many relapses - but I hardly ever laid up for more than an hour
or two. In these cases a loll, or rather a recumbent pant, upon the
sofa, and a dose of some bitter tonic, or a strong glass of brandy,
usually brought down the palpitation, and enabled me to set to work
again as if nothing had happened. Indeed, as the eels get accustomed to
skinning, so I got used to all this; and it became at last an old
habit, and bearable.
"Thus I went on from 1846 until 1850. Four years of incessant and
various labour, relieved only by the confidence and appreciation of
those who directed, and the good feeling of those who were engaged,
like me, in the executive management of the great corporation with
which, during this (to me) memorable period of my life, I was
connected. I need not repeat how thoroughly I was sustained and
comforted by the assiduity of one of the best of women. I tried to
thank her by making light of my many miseries.
"This sort of life was, however, too great and continued a strain for a
rickety machine to last. And at times, when I gave way to those strange
thoughts about the use and end of human existence, which crowd upon the
mind in nervous disease - it seemed to me as if I could weigh and
measure the particles of vitality from my daily diminishing store -
expended in each unnatural effort of labour - as if every stroke of my
business craft represented so much of that daily shortening distance
which lay between me and the end. I felt the price I was paying for the
privilege of labour, and for its remuneration. But I thought, ever, of
my wife and little babies, and the thought roused me to a kind of
desperation, and made me feel for the time as if I could trample
weakness under foot, and tear out, break in pieces, and cast away those
miserable, oversensitive organs, which chained, cramped, and hindered
me. I like work, too. And I had a sort of shame of confessing myself
incapable. I morbidly derided the sympathising regret likely to be
shown by my friends, and I pictured the moribund predictions likely to
follow a temporary desertion of my post.
"But the estates of my mortal realm stepped in again.
"At the end of a time of hard, anxious, and difficult labours, I went
down into the country on business, and was seized, in the streets of a
little town, with violent palpitation, and with faintness.
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