"Hypochondriac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the papers the death of Mr. Hope, and I am sure it shocked you. But it was scarcely possible that it could strike you so much as it did me. I, who had seen him but a few days before, and who had been rallying him upon his being hypochondriac. I, who had been laughing at him along with Mrs. Hope, for being, I thought, merely in the cold fit after having been in the hot fit of enthusiasm while finishing his book. He knew too well, poor man, what we did not know. I believe that I ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... upon her, through the medium of her strong but diseased imagination. And who is there who does not know how strongly the force of imagination acts? On this subject she had now become a perfect hypochondriac. She could not shake it off, it haunted her night and day; and even the influence of society could scarcely banish the dread image of that mysterious and fearful look for ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... labour. The vivacious Gaul cries out to the grave Briton, Mr. Malthus, "If I consent to employ your word labour, you must understand me," so and so! Mr. Malthus says, "Commodities are not exchanged for commodities only; they are also exchanged for labour;" and when the hypochondriac Englishman, with dismay, foresees "the glut of markets," and concludes that we may produce more than we can consume, the paradoxical Monsieur Say discovers that "commodities" is a wrong word, for it gives a wrong ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... with us,' he said gloomily. His gloom was not that of the hypochondriac, but the legitimate gloom which has its origin in a syllogism. As he uttered the words he handed the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... my honour, sir,' replied the Baron,'the lad can sometimes be as dowff as a sexagenary like myself. If your Royal Highness had seen him dreaming and dozing about the banks of Tully-Veolan like an hypochondriac person, or, as Burton's "Anatomia" hath it, a phrenesiac or lethargic patient, you would wonder where he hath sae suddenly acquired all this fine sprack festivity ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... physicians attribute one half of the deaths among the young men of that country to tobacco? that the French Polytechnic Institute had to prohibit its use on account of its effects on the mind? that men grow dyspeptic, hypochondriac, insane, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... lawyer. "Such a sacrifice! Why! that woman can't keep even a servant about her. A heartless, selfish hypochondriac! even her nieces will scarcely stay in the house with her. I think she would get you cheap at a thousand a year, Miss Kane; but you ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region a broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been measured for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used either of them. He knew a clergyman named Brayley who went up into that region with Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... demoralized the whole system. It is easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms of the face and body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an affection of the great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the epigastric region, and contraction of the right and left hypochondriac. You have noticed, too, the large size and prominence of the liver. M. Bianchon has, besides, constantly watched the patient, and he tells us that digestion is troublesome and difficult. Strictly speaking, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... producing this effect; it is true that sometimes they employed the name of Solomon, and some charms said to have been invented by that prince, or roots and herbs to which they attributed the same virtues, like as a clever physician by the secret of his art can cure a hypochondriac or a maniac, or a man strongly persuaded that he is possessed by the devil, or as a wise confessor will restore the mind of a person disturbed by remorse, and agitated by the reflection of his sins, or the fear ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... remember the terrible exclamation of the dying profligate, when a friend, to destroy what he supposed the hypochondriac idea of a spectre appearing in a certain shape at a given hour, placed before him a person dressed up in the manner he described. "Mon Dieu!" said the expiring sinner, who, it seems, saw both the real and polygraphic apparition, "il y en a deux!" The surprise of the Lord ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... than of a cold, now a cringing, cowering fellow; apparently an old man, nursing his life with pitiful tenderness, fearful that at any moment something may happen to break the hold of his aorta-walls on the stiletto-blade; a confirmed hypochondriac, peevish, melancholic, unhappy in the extreme. He keeps himself confined as closely as possible, avoiding all excitement and exercise, and even reads nothing exciting. The constant danger has worn out the last ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... their gloomy garb. He had painted what he saw; fear and hypocrisy were reflected in the eyes of that world. In the jesters, fools and humpbacks immortalized by Don Diego was revealed the forced merriment of a dying nation that must needs find distraction in the monstrous and absurd. The hypochondriac temper of a monarchy weak in body and fettered in spirit by the terrors of hell, lived in all those masterpieces, that inspired at once admiration and sadness. Alas for the artistic treasures wasted in immortalizing a period which without Velasquez ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... accident while it lasted! Then his little Daughter died on his hands; his Son had disorders, nervous imbecilities,—did not die, but did worse; went into hopeless idiotcy, and so lived for many years. Zimmermann, being dreadfully miserable, hypochondriac, what not, "his friends," he himself passive, it would seem, "managed to get a young Wife for him;" thirty years younger than he,—whose performances, however, in this difficult post, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... condition; but even Kashkine could not fathom the depth to which his thoughts had sunk. Certainly none but a Russian could, or can, comprehend the terrible reality of what must, to the inhabitants of the sunshine lands, seem the mere wilful depression of a hypochondriac. But those men and women who have dwelt all their lives beneath a sky of leaden gray, in an horizonless space of desolate, unbroken steppe; whose children and children's children must come into a heritage even heavier than their own, handed ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... unsteady, lurking eyes, suggested the bandit. No doubt, like most of his class, he was in hiding from the government authorities. He was something of a hypochondriac, and among other ailments he thought he had an animal in his stomach, which he got in there by way of a knife-stab he had received some time ago. When he came to me to get some remedy, he carried a rather fine rifle, and in spite of all his suffering, real or imaginary, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... hypochondriac angles formed between the points F, L, N, on either side the lungs are absent both in inspiration and expiration. Percussion, when made over the surface of the angle of the right side, discovers the presence of the liver, G G*. When made over the median line, and on either side ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... noted for the imbecility of his intellect. Aristides, it seems, was quite as liable to imposition. "The credulity of a Papias," says Dr. Lightfoot, "is more than matched by the credulity of an Aristides." [40:1] Such is the bishop's leading witness. Aristides was an invalid and a hypochondriac; and, in the discourses he has left behind him, he describes the course of a long illness, with an account of his pains, aches, purgations, dreams, and visions—interspersed, from time to time, with what Dr. Lightfoot estimates as "valuable ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... for a while—I especially, for none but a hypochondriac would care to admit without proof that gangrene had been forced into his system. Kazimoto grew indignant, and offered to prove the truth of his claim on some animal. But there was no living animal in sight on which to prove it. We asked him how long gangrene, injected in that ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... people are to be met at such a place; strong-minded women who have broken through the trammels of the Faculty, and gone to the Water Cure in spite of the warnings of their medical men, and their friends' kind predictions that they would never live to come back; and hypochondriac men, who have tried all quack remedies in vain, and who have come despairingly to try one which, before trying it, they probably looked to as the most violent and perilous of all. And the change of life is total. You may have finished your bottle of port daily for twenty years, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... occupation of poor Mrs. Nutter's domicile, 'I'll not object to the notices being received. There's the servant up at the window there—but you must not make a noise; Mrs. Nutter, poor woman, is sick and hypochondriac, and can't bear a noise; but I'll permit the service of the notices, because, you see, we can afford to snap our fingers at you. I say, Moggy, open a bit of that window, and take in the papers that this gentleman will hand you. There, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the pain-lines about the eyes and brow is that you can often test their genuineness. Just engage your hypochondriac or hysterical patient in lively conversation; or, on the reverse principle, wound his vanity, so as to produce an outburst of temper, and see how the lines of undying agony will fade away and be replaced by the curves of ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... This feeling, too, sometimes becomes quite uncontrollable, and the child then needs as much care and as judicious management, both bodily and mental, to bring it back to health, as would be called for in the case of some adult hypochondriac ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... . . . probably because in coloration it resembled the well-known uniform of the rifle-regiments of the British army, while in its long and projecting hypochondriac plumes and short tail a further likeness might be traced to the hanging pelisse and the jacket formerly worn by the members of those corps."— [Footnote]: "Curiously enough its English name seems to be first mentioned in ornithological ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... new purpose—the satirizing of contemporary manners and affectations by frank portrayal and criticism. In the great plays that followed, "The School for Husbands" and "The School for Wives," "The Misanthrope" and "The Hypocrite" (Tartuffe), "The Miser" and "The Hypochondriac," "The Learned Ladies," "The Doctor in Spite of Himself," "The Citizen Turned Gentleman," and many others, he exposed mercilessly one after another the vices and ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... The hypochondriac imagines he has things the matter with him, and he becomes confirmed in his belief, he finds that so long as he lives he has something the matter with him. He no sooner gets cured of one than something else ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... established there had grown intolerable; I must have told it. The sense of solitude under this aggressive and tremendous delusion was agony, hourly death to my soul. That is the secret of my talkativeness; my sole excuse for plaguing you with the dreams of a wretched hypochondriac." ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... — N. madman, lunatic, maniac, bedlamite[obs3], candidate for Bedlam, raver[obs3], madcap, crazy; energumen[obs3]; automaniac[obs3], monomaniac, dipsomaniac, kleptomaniac; hypochondriac &c. (low spirits); crank, Tom o'Bedlam. dreamer &c. 515; rhapsodist, seer, highflier[obs3], enthusiast, fanatic, fanatico[Sp]; exalte[French]; knight errant, Don Quixote. idiot ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. In most cases this lower jaw —being ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... befriend, seemed in no perceptible degree to encourage him. His mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected. Shut up in these oaken walls, chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about, at times suddenly pausing, starting, or staring, biting his lip, biting his finger-nail, flushing, paling, twitching his beard, with other symptoms of an absent or moody mind. This distempered spirit was lodged, as before hinted, in as distempered a frame. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... up to the Countess Olenska, and they sat down in a corner and plunged into animated talk. Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first have paid his respects to Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers, and the Countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, Mr. Urban Dagonet of Washington Square, who, in order to have the pleasure of meeting her, had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out between January and April. The two chatted together for nearly twenty minutes; then the ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... quite certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many complaints as a hypochondriac. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this, and brought him back to ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... mean to ecstaticise and see beatific visions: you must get the most fashionable and picturesque specialists to come and feel your religious pulse, and you must on no account neglect the subscription lists. But only those rich enough to be hypochondriac can afford such luxuries. Now, in the toiling classes there are often good ears for music, and exquisite responsiveness to religious sensations. What satisfies such natures and such wants must be cheap. The Plymouth Brethren (I ought rather to say Christian Brethren), ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... not to touch Slavery! Ah, what a dark divinity is this, that we must sacrifice to it our peace, our prosperity, our blood, our future, our honor! What an insatiable vampire is this that drinks out the very marrow of our manliness! Pardon me; this sounds like a dark dream, like the offspring of a hypochondriac imagination; and yet—have I been unjust in what I ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the chief natural tonic, attributes it in great part to the action of the prospect of the sea upon the nervous system. 'I am fully convinced,' says he, 'that the physical effects of sea-bathing must be greatly increased by the impression on the mind, and that a hypochondriac or nervous person may be half-cured by residing on the sea-coast, and enjoying a view of the grand scenes of nature which will there present themselves—such as, the rising and setting of the sun over the blue expanse of the waters, and the awful majesty of the waves ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... were drawn between the sun and the earth. The atmosphere was always foggy, often perfectly wet, but never thoroughly dry. It wanted vitality; and every person that breathed it partook of its own damp, hypochondriac, inanimate character. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... not rather a prerogative than an evil. I am sure that it is well worth while being sick to be nursed by a mother. There is nothing which I remember with such pleasure as the time when you nursed me at Aspenden. The other night, when I lay on my sofa very ill and hypochondriac, I was thinking over that time. How sick, and sleepless, and weak I was, lying in bed, when I was told that you were come! How well I remember with what an ecstasy of joy I saw that face approaching me, in the middle of people that did ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... clergyman thinks it would be very unclerical for him to wear it, though it may be as black, and is as modest, as the rest of his apparel. The young doctor timidly tries it on, and in his first walk meets the wealthy hypochondriac, his favorite patient, and the one who is trying to introduce him to practice, who seriously advises him, as a friend, not to wear that new-fangled thing,—if the poor hat had only been ugly, there would have been nothing bad in its ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... uncle overflowed with panegyrics; that I could not understand, and so turned the more readily to my organist, who, looking with contempt upon vocal efforts in general, delighted me down to the ground as in his hypochondriac malicious way he parodied the ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... inquiries come from saucer screwballs and these people are like a hypochondriac at the doctor's; nothing will make them believe the diagnosis unless it is what they came in to hear. And there are plenty of ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... the angle of the right side, discovers the presence of the liver, G G*. When made over the median line, and on either side of it above the umbilicus, N, we ascertain the presence of the stomach, M M*. In the left hypochondriac angle, the stomach may also be found to ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... nervous system these variations of sensibility become much more striking. The patient who has hyperaesthesia fears to touch a perfectly smooth surface, or he takes a knock at the door to be a clap of thunder. The hypochondriac may, through an increase of organic sensibility, translate organic sensations as the effect of some living creature gnawing at his vitals. Again, states of anaesthesia lead to odd illusions among the insane. The common supposition that the body is dead, ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... summoned to see a rich old hypochondriac at the antique university town of Bouquin-Moisi, and upon his prescribing change of air and travel as remedies, he was retained to accompany the timid patient on a tour of some weeks; it but remained, therefore, for the new doctor to continue ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... opposite side of the narrow street. Gloomy and cheerless as it was in appearance, the room was in keeping with the character of the man who occupied it. Johann Mayrhofer was regarded by his acquaintance as an hypochondriac, whose general depression of spirits entered largely into his poetical writings. But those who knew him intimately were aware of a gentle and tender side to his ordinarily stern nature. He was, ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... of his perception and left it the clearer in the middle for its concentration. In plainer language, when he was drunk he was less afraid of being laughed at, and free of that fear he was a better speaker. He was driven to drink, then, by every weakness of his character. As nervous hypochondriac, as would-be swaggerer, as a dullard requiring stimulus, he found that drink, to use his ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... my heart, you see," she told Sara, with the martyred air peculiar to the hypochondriac—the genuine sufferer rarely has it. "It is, of course, a great deprivation to me, and I don't think either Dick"—with an inimical glance at her husband—"or Molly come up to see me as often as they might. Stairs are ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... glared at me as if I were the guilty party. "She's a worry-wart," he continued. "A hypochondriac, a neurotic, an escapist, and a communist." He studied the ceiling thoughtfully. "And sometimes I ...
— Compatible • Richard R. Smith
... afflict this miserable body, I command thee to quit thy new abode, and to return to thine ancient habitation!' This said, the sick man was ordered to withdraw, and another was brought forward in his place. This new comer said he was tormented by the melancholy vapours. In fact, he looked like a hypochondriac; one of those persons diseased in imagination, and who but too often become so in reality. 'Aerial spirit,' said the Irishman, 'return, I command thee, into the air! — exercise thy natural vocation of raising tempests, and do not excite any more wind in this sad unlucky body!' ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... face white with thinking, his eyes dim with trouble; for when once a man has set out to find God, he must find him or die. This was the inside reality whose outcome set the public of Glaston babbling. It was from this that George Bascombe magisterially pronounced him a hypochondriac, worrying his brain about things that had no existence—as George himself could with confidence testify, not once having seen the sight of them, heard the sound of them, or imagined in his heart that they ought to be, or even that they might possibly be. He pronounced indeed their existence inconsistent ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Peruvians, with that audacious brute Pizarro; and the Polynesians, just for all the world like the Ancient Britons; and the American Indians and the South-sea Islanders? How petulant and young and adventurous and frisky your hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! Then, for that vice of the mind which I call sectarianism,—not in the religious sense of the word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door neighbor because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gentleman of very great respectability, who was low-spirited and hypochondriac to a degree, was at times so fanciful, that almost every rustling noise he heard was taken for an ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... pestered, as he himself would have put it, by the mysterious illness of his young wife, fretted by the presence of the children, no doubt in a measure because he felt himself to be doing an ill part by them. His grumpy silence of other days, his sardonic humour, gave place to hypochondriac complainings and outbursts of fierce temper. Pony had hurt his foot in a machine at the factory and it required daily dressing. Johnnie understood from the sounds which greeted her that the sore foot ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... in his character for the causes of his popularity. A hypochondriac by temperament, of mediocre intelligence, incapable of grasping realities, confined to abstractions, crafty and dissimulating, his prevailing note was an excessive pride which increased until his last day. High priest of a new faith, he believed himself ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose, out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... I was a hypochondriac lad; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven; and had only ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... very characters themselves seem to be infected by their creator's delight in the mysterious, the strange, and the unreal. They have no healthy activity; or, if they have, they invariably lose it in the second act; in the end, they are all hypochondriac philosophers, puzzling over eternity and dissecting the attributes of Death. The central idea of Death's Jest Book—the resurrection of a ghost—fails to be truly effective, because it is difficult to see any clear distinction between the phantom and the rest of the characters. The duke, saved ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... analyzing his physical state is called a hypochondriac. What shall we call the man who is constantly analyzing his moral state? As the hypochondriac loses all sense of health in holding the impression of disease, so the other gradually loses the sense of wholesome relation to himself ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... never saw him, and while I was in Congress I formed rather a disadvantageous idea of him. His letters received then showed him vain, and more attentive to ceremony and etiquette, than we suppose men of sense should be. I have now a constant correspondence with him, and find him a little hypochondriac and discontented. He possesses a very good understanding, though not of the first order. I have had great opportunities of searching into his character, and have availed myself of them. Many persons of different nations, coming from Madrid to Paris, all speak of him as in high esteem, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... W——, AEt. 31. After a tertian ague of 12 months continuation, suffered great indisposition for 10 months more. He chiefly complained of great straitness and pain in the hypochondriac region, very short breath, swelled legs, want of appetite. He had been under the care of some very sensible practitioners, but his complaints increased, and he determined to come to Birmingham. I ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... whilst he justifies and applauds the use which Byron had made of his work. "This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius." Afterwards (see record of a conversation with Herman Fuerst von Pueckler, September ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the more serious disorders, let us consider the hypochondriac, who harbors the insistent thought that he must be always perfectly well, that each of his sensations must conform to his ideal, and that each function must follow regulations imposed by himself. If he can ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... accessible to them. The working-man comes from his work tired, exhausted, finds his home comfortless, damp, dirty, repulsive; he has urgent need of recreation, he must have something to make work worth his trouble, to make the prospect of the next day endurable. His unnerved, uncomfortable, hypochondriac state of mind and body arising from his unhealthy condition, and especially from indigestion, is aggravated beyond endurance by the general conditions of his life, the uncertainty of his existence, his dependence upon all possible accidents and chances, and his inability ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... is cast for us all, Sir Duncan," replied Allan, looking gloomy, and arguing on his own hypochondriac feelings; "the iron hand of destiny branded our fate upon our forehead long ere we could form a wish, or raise a finger in our own behalf. Were this otherwise, by what means does the Seer ascertain the future from those shadowy presages which haunt his waking ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... this by common Experience; the first Time persons drink it, if they are full grown, it generally gives them a Pain at the Stomach, Dejection of Spirits, Cold Sweats, Palpitation at the Heart, Trembling, Fearfulness; taking away the Sense of Fulness though presently after Meals, and causing a hypochondriac, gnawing Appetite. These symptoms are very little inferiour to what the most poisonous Vegetables we have in England would occasion when dried and used in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... was ready for action, I took him in tow, and ran him in to draw the Popworth's fire—in other words, introduced him to my uncle in the library. The meeting of my tall, lank relative and the big-nosed little Jew was a spectacle to cure a hypochondriac! "Mr. Jacob Menzel—gentleman from Germany—travelling in this country," I yelled in the old fellow's ear. He of the diminutive legs and stupendous nose bowed with perfect decorum, and seated himself, stiff and erect, in the big chair I placed for him. The avuncular countenance ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... that one can't be happy without being busy. Now that I can't keep up my athletic sports I should become a pale hypochondriac without these housewifely affairs to employ me. I don't like to embroider. I can't paint china. I'm not a musician. I somehow don't care to begin to devote myself to clubs in town. I love my books and the great outdoors—and ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... phantasmal appearances, though I am inclined to doubt whether it be a sufficient explanation of the abstract phenomenon. It is easy for the arithmetician to make a key to the problems that he has devised to suit himself. An immediate and habitual confusion of the kind spoken of is insanity; and the hypochondriac is tracked by the black dog of his own mind. Disease itself is, of course, in one sense natural, as being the result of natural causes; but if we assume health as the mean representing the normal poise of all the mental facilities, we must be content to ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford—not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible—but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris—all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself about that either; ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... a lean, neat hypochondriac, highly cultivated, with fine instincts and excruciating aversions, bored by his leisure, yet incapable of action, and inconstant in every aspiration except this love of his. Whenever she refused him he sailed away, after ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... ministers. The adherents of the Austrian line were thus driven from power, and the government was intrusted to the creatures of Porto Carrero. The King left the city in which he had suffered so cruel an insult for the magnificent retreat of the Escurial. Here his hypochondriac fancy took a new turn. Like his ancestor Charles the Fifth, he was haunted by the strange curiosity to pry into the secrets of that grave to which he was hastening. In the cemetery which Philip the Second had formed beneath the pavement of the church of St. Lawrence, reposed three ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... somewhat queer disposition. Now he is joyous to the point of folly, anon gloomy as a hypochondriac. He is silent for three days at a time, or his bursts of laughter are heard in the very attics of the Tuileries. When he is on a voyage he rises at four o'clock in the morning, wakes everybody up and performs his duties as a sailor conscientiously. It is as though ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... article on Pascal) We may doubt whether there is more essential religiousness in this seeking of sorrow as a mortification,—in this monastic self-laceration and exclusion,—than in the morbid misery of the hypochondriac. Neither comprehends the whole of life, nor is adapted to its realities. Christ was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" but he was also full of sympathy with all good, and enjoyed the charm of friendship, and the light ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak—she might expect him to open his ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... this direction. Typhon, "the wind that blasts," "Darkness," and the "cold of winter," constituted the foundation of a belief in a personal Devil; and, when the time was ripe for the appearance of his satanic majesty, it required only a hypochondriac—a disordered mental organization—to formulate and project ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... compensation. Even history can show us that this has always been the case. Yesterday," she continued, "I went to a spiritual seance. I found nothing. I shall go to the next thing of the sort which any one suggests. I am like the hypochondriac with his list of patent medicines. I try them all, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... whether he had brought his cloak, his purse, and his handkerchief home with him, to which de Sigognac joyfully answered in the affirmative. In this friendly banter he soon forgot his sombre thoughts, and asked himself whether he had not been the dupe of a hypochondriac fancy, which could see nothing anywhere ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... hope that I am deceived by my own illness, that I am mistaken in regard to the albumen and the sugar I find, and in regard to my heart, and in regard to the swellings I have twice noticed in the mornings; when with the fervour of the hypochondriac I look through the textbooks of therapeutics and take a different medicine every day, I keep fancying that I shall hit upon something comforting. All that ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... full on the envelope. Her second impulse was to laugh at her adventure. She accorded full justice to Mlle. Moriaz; she knew very well that she did not resemble the first chance comer; but that her beauty would work miracles, resurrections; that a hypochondriac, merely from seeing her pass by, was likely to regain his taste for existence, scarcely appeared admissible to her. So great was her curiosity, that she took the pains to make inquiries; the flowers and the letter had been left by a little peasant, who was not of the place, and who ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... Functions.... no part or Function of the Body escapes the Influence of this tedious and long protracted Disease, whose Symptoms are so violent and numerous, that it is no easy Task either to enumerate or account for them.... No disease is more troublesome, either to the Patient or Physician, than hypochondriac Disorders; and it often happens, that, thro' the Fault of both, the Cure is either unnecessarily protracted, or totally frustrated; for the Patients are so delighted, not only with a Variety of Medicines, but ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... is he interested in emotions, thoughts, sensations,—In his mind or his body, in ideas or in feelings? For it is obvious that the man interested in his ideas is quite a different person than he who is keenly aware of his emotions, and that the hypochondriac belongs in a ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... corrosions in all the veins of the body, recesses of the heart, nerves of the members, roots of the hair, perspiration of the substance, limbo of the brain, orifices of the epidermis, windings of the pluck, tubes of the hypochondriac and other channels which in her was suddenly dilated, heated, tickled, envenomed, clawed, harrowed, and disturbed, as if she had a basketful of needles in her inside. This was a maiden's desire, a well-conditioned desire, which troubled her ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... the great difficulty of voiding them. The influence of constipation upon the functions of the liver, is indicated by the sympathy displayed between that organ and the mind. The patient manifests apprehension, mental depression, taciturnity, and melancholy, all indicative of hypochondriac ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the Athenians. His remark on history and historians. Oliver Goldsmith introduced to. Story of the publication of the Vicar of Wakefield. Johnson's birth and early life. His father. Goes to Oxford. His attainments at this time. His struggles with poverty. Becomes an incurable hypochondriac. His literary drudgery. His marriage. His school near Lichfield. Sets out for London. Effect of his privations on his temper and deportment. Engaged on the "Gentleman's Magazine." His political opinions. His Jacobite views. His poem of London. His associates. His life of Richard Savage. His dictionary. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... liberty, with a set of three beautiful rooms in that "stately pile, the new building of Magdalen College," Gibbon found nothing in Oxford to please him—nothing to admire, nothing to love. From his poor and lofty rooms in Pembroke Gate-tower the hypochondriac Johnson—rugged, anxious, and conscious of his great unemployed power—looked down on a much more pleasant Oxford, on a city and on schools that he never ceased to regard with affection. This contrast is found in the ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... and promised me upon his honour that I should have the account on Monday; but this is Tuesday, and yet I have not heard a word from him. God have mercy on me! a poor d—mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool! The sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... this name, the "weill belovit sister" who is associated with so much of his life without one trace of human identity ever stealing through the mist that envelops her, was dead; disappearing noiseless into the grave, where it would seem her mother, Mrs. Bowes, the religious hypochondriac who had required so many solemn treatises in the shape of letters to comfort her, had preceded her daughter. Two boys, the sons of Marjory, were with their father in these panelled rooms. They both grew up, but not to any distinction; he did ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the sum which had formerly, and with reason, been found fault with. The slightest symptom of illness is magnified into a serious attack by the supposed affectionate and assiduous nurse, until her master, in compliance with her advice, becomes a confirmed hypochondriac, whom she governs despotically under a show ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... the manner of 'faith cures' and the like—I would answer certainly not, unless the disorder happens to be in itself due to a delusion. I can imagine the hypochondriac being cured by mental stimulus." He felt that he was drawing near the point at issue, and ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... it," answered Bent. "He seems to be turning into a regular hypochondriac. I hope nothing is really seriously wrong with him. But anyway—this day week. And you'll play your part of best ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... yourself low and nervous, and you treat this fancy of Bale's as seriously as he does himself. The truth is, he is a hypochondriac, as the doctors say; and you will find that I am right; he will be quite well in the morning, and I daresay a little ashamed of himself for having frightened his poor little wife as he has. I will sit up with you. But our poor Mary is not, you know, very strong; and she ought to lie down ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... inferior mentality. In a case of first-cousin marriage the wife became insane and two of the children were idiotic. In a case of the marriage of cousins, themselves the offspring of cousins the husband was a hypochondriac, and seven children idiotic. In another marriage of the same class both parents were feeble-minded and the children idiotic. These are simply taken at random, and many others might be given. When we find also that in a majority of cases no report is given of the ancestry, ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... "Wonders of the Shore," endeavoured to convert mankind at large into marine naturalists; and, some time ago, there appeared in the newspapers a letter from Carlyle, regretting that he himself had not been indoctrinated into the zoology of our waysides. I have heard a man out of health, hypochondriac, and idle, recommended to begin botany, geology, or chemistry, as a diversion of his misery. The idea is plausible and superficial. An overpowering taste for any subject—botany, zoology, antiquities, music—is properly affirmed to be born with ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... faculty of eloquence, a very natural object for the sympathy of devout women. At this happy juncture he fell into the company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She was a religious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom she honoured with her confidence. From the first time she heard Knox preach she formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after of his society. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seventy or rather seventy-three years over again? To which I say, yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are, indeed, (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, how much pain have cost us the evils ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... against the faculty of medicine, and aimed at its most vulnerable point—namely, the influence used by some unworthy members of the profession to avail themselves of the nervous fears and unfounded apprehensions of hypochondriac patients. Instead of treating imaginary maladies as a mental disease requiring moral medicine, there have been found in all times medical men capable of listening to the rehearsal of these brain-sick whims as if they were real complaints, prescribing for them as such, and receiving the wages ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... movements with alarm, and began also to organize. Rhodolph, who, from his position as emperor, should have been their leader, was a wretched hypochondriac, trembling before imaginary terrors, a prey to the most gloomy superstitions, and still concealed in the secret chambers of his palace. He was a burden to his party, and was regarded by them with contempt. Matthias was watching him, as the ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... recognised him as the preacher of her dream. The lady afterwards told this to Mr. Rogers' son, when the lad turned Dissenter. Like many other of the early Nonconformist preachers, Rogers seems to have been a hypochondriac, who looked upon himself as "a broken vessel, a dead man out of mind," and eventually gave up his profession. Shower's successor, Simon Browne, wrote a volume of "Hymns," compiled a lexicon, and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Solomon did not fall at Le Cayla on the shoulders of Maurice de Guerin. After all, he was a wretched hypochondriac, and a tinge of le cahier vert doubtless ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Hypochondriac! essay the elastic flooring! It shall so pleasantly and gently jolt thee, as to shake up, and pack off the stagnant humors mantling ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... first place, a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after another, a little before the fire. The old women and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the other sex, whom I could almost call old women too, remarked (especially afterward, though not till both those judgements were over) that those two comets passed directly over the city, and that so very near the houses that it was plain they imported something peculiar to the city alone; ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... hypochondriac who goes along turning his head from side to side, seeking salutes? That's the celebrated governor of Pangasinan, a good man who loses his appetite whenever any Indian fails to salute him. He would have died if he hadn't issued the ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... a little hard at Orchis, because the truth was, that until the lucky prize came to him, Orchis had gone under the nickname of Doleful Dumps, he having been beforetimes of a hypochondriac turn, so much so as to save up and put by a few dollars of his scanty earnings against that rainy day he used to groan ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Mr. Duncan, when he resolved to penetrate the almost unknown region of the west. No hypochondriac papa or aristocratic mamma, can I introduce, but a hale, robust yeoman, who looks upon himself as in the prime of manhood, though nearly fifty years of age, and who boasts of never having consulted a physician or taken a drug. Mrs. Duncan wore ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... Lewis had from early life been subject to hypochondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, and was more immediately inherited by him from his father. They had not, however, been so strong as to give uneasiness to his family. While he lived with me in Washington I observed ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... or collection of diseases, is the root of his troubles. This alarms but interests him; he studies other advertisements, sends for pamphlets, and so becomes familiar with a few medical terms. He then takes a "treatment", and talks of his "complaint" and how he "diagnosed" it. He has become hypochondriac. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... his Tristam Shandy, says, "Whenever a man's conscience does accuse him (as it seldom errs on that side), he is guilty, and unless he is melancholy and hypochondriac, there is always sufficient ground for the accusation. But the converse of the proposition will not hold true," that if it does not accuse, the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... friends were excluded by their physical conditions from the activities of life. Mme de La Fayette, who was perhaps something of a hypochondriac, tossed all day among the pillows of that golden bed with the extravagance of which the austerity of Mme de Maintenon upbraided her. La Rochefoucauld, tormented by the gout, lay stretched at her side in his long chair, and ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... as they even now in moments of heightened fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their country and speak of England, France, or America, as if they were real beings, so did Dante habitually.[185] He saw all his thoughts as distinctly as the hypochondriac sees his black dog, and, as in that, their form and color were but the outward form of an inward and spiritual condition. Whatever subsidiary interpretations the poem is capable of, its great and primary value is as the autobiography of a human soul, of yours and ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... ordinary occasions; we will not fatigue our readers by entering into any other detailed account of the domestic economy of the establishment. We will therefore proceed to events, merely premising that the mysterious tenant of the back drawing-room was a lazy, selfish hypochondriac; always complaining and never ill. As his character in many respects closely assimilated to that of Mrs. Bloss, a very warm friendship soon sprung up between them. He was tall, thin, and pale; he always fancied he had a severe pain somewhere or other, and his face invariably ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... fellow! I wish I could believe that his own conviction (as he told me) is true, and that death only means a larger government for him to administer. Anyhow, it is better to wind up that way than to go growling out one's existence as a ventose hypochondriac, dependent upon the condition of a few square inches of mucous membrane for one's heaven ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... sloppy—we lie in bed, we dawdle, we eat too much, we moon over our work. All that is obviously no good, and all sensible people try to pull themselves up. When you have found out what suits you, do it boldly; but the man who admires discipline for its own sake is a sort of hypochondriac—a medicine-drinker. I have a friend who says that if he stays in a house, and sees a bottle of medicine in a cupboard, he is always tempted to take a dose. 'Is it that you feel ill?' I once said to him. 'No,' he said; 'but I have an idea that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hypochondriac humor of Oliver, in his young years, is otherwise indisputably known. The Huntingdon Physician told Sir Philip Warwick himself, He had often been sent for at midnight; Mr. Cromwell was full of hypochondria, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... irrational: 2. his having lost his wits, that is, his understanding or judicial power; but not his reason or the use of his senses,—(such was Don Quixote; and, therefore, we love and reverence him, while we despise Hudibras): 3. his being out of his senses, as in the case of a hypochondriac, to whom his limbs appear to be of glass, although all his conduct is both rational, or moral, and prudent: 4. Or the case may be a combination of all three, though I doubt the existence of such a case, or of any two of them: ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... cerulean, cerulific, sapphire, sapphirine, amethystine, turquoise, ultramarine, sky-colored; livid, ecchymosed; rigorous, severe; (Colloq.) melancholy, downhearted, depressed, despondent, dejected, low-spirited, dispirited, hypochondriac, chapfallen, gloomy, (Colloq.) gloomy, inauspicious, dismal, depressing; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the objects of his spite, and exaggerating the small atom that has arrayed itself against the universe. It is a species of insanity, wherein a mind has lost perception of the correct relationship between different existences. The poor hypochondriac who imagined himself a mountain was a living satire on many of his fellow-creatures, who differ only in being able to keep similar ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... hermetically sealed at night. Is he a believer in the godliness of cleanliness? I have just read of two people who married after a six week's acquaintance, knowing nothing of each other's antecedents, personal habits, caprices or principles. The man proved to be a regular hypochondriac, taking medicine constantly, at one time with five doctors prescribing for him. He counted his pulse at every odd moment, and looked at his tongue instead of at the eyes of his wife, as he had done when a lover. He had a dread of pure air, and was ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... physician should never lose sight of the natural tendency of our inclinations, nor forget to ascertain if our penchants are painful in themselves, or improving to health. A little wine, or a few drops of liquor, brings the smiles to the most hypochondriac faces. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... in the head, palpitation of the heart, with unusual beatings and small throbbings of the arteries in the temples, back and neck, which often cast them into fevers when the humour is over vicious; also loathing of meat and the distention of the hypochondriac part, by reason of the inordinate effluxion of the menstruous blood of the greater vessels; and from the abundance of humours, the whole body is often troubled with swellings, or at least the thighs, legs and ankles, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... to see the poet's expression. He was inclined to take offence that Dr. Rivals should consider him a mere hypochondriac, and again to be equally annoyed when Dr. Hirsch insisted upon his having a hundred diseases, each one with a worse name than ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet |
