"Atrophy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... think, each after his kind. The horse rejoices in the liberty of acting like a horse, and not like an ox; and man enjoys the privilege of acting the part of a man, and not of a disembodied spirit. If the limbs of the former are struck by an atrophy, we do not expect him to win the race. If the brain of the latter is blasted by disease or deterioration, we cannot expect the fruits of a sound and vigorous organism. When we say that a person with a brain vitiated by an accumulation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... as the lightest of all the calamities that had fallen upon her frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought the Reverend Orme back—nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender care,—all the discarded emotions,—returned to light up her withered face and give it beauty. Night and day she stayed beside the Reverend Orme, ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... great food-producing machines of the world. We have also seen something of the political organization which, with far wider ambitions before it, is at present struggling to prevent temporary paralysis from turning into permanent atrophy. We have seen that it consists of a political party so far dominant that the Trades Unions and all that is articulate in the country may be considered as part of a machinery of propaganda, for getting those things done which that political party considers ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... aesthetical anatomy of Greek Art has a melancholy pleasure, like a surgeon, in watching its slow, but inevitable atrophy under the incubus of Rome. The wise, but childlike serenity and cheerfulness of soul, so tenderly pictured in the white stones from the quarries of Pentelicus, had, it is true, a certain sickly, exoteric life in Magna Graecia, as Pompeii and Herculaneum have proved to us. But the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... selling, the market which her productions are always struggling to enter through every opening in the tariff wall, for exclusion from which no distant market either in England or elsewhere can compensate her, the want of which brings on her commercial atrophy, and drives the flower of her youth by thousands and tens of thousands over ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... as well as to sermons, may not be neglected. Our faculties, like our jaws, atrophy if we do not use them to bite with. The Carnegie libraries have emphasized a fact that is to education and the colleges what social work is to medicine and the hospitals. We were running south some years ago on our long northern trip before a fine leading wind, when suddenly we noticed a ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the doctrine of Lu Chin-Yuan, namely that truth can be obtained by meditation. To express intuitive knowledge, he used the expression Liang Chih[698] (taken from Mencius). Liang Chih is inherent in all human minds, but in different degrees, and can be developed or allowed to atrophy. To develop it should be man's constant object, and in its light when pure all things are understood and peace is obtained. The phrases of the Great Learning "to complete knowledge," "investigate things," and "rest in the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... bigger than that of a wren, and it is hidden away under the skin. The instances might be multiplied a thousandfold. In the same way then any mental faculty becomes atrophied if it is unused. Bad company is that which produces this atrophy of the finer powers; and it is strange to see how soon the deadly process of shrinkage sets in. The awful thing to think of is that the cramp may insensibly be set in action by a company which, as I have said, is composed of rather estimable people. Who can forget Lydgate in "Middlemarch"? There ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the negative one, is that aesthetic pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving inactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. But before entering on this discussion I would beg my reader to call to mind that curious saying ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... should not die? What if this nameless languor, this mysterious atrophy, taken vigorously in hand by Dr. Jedd, should be vanquished, and the ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... I could go, and when did go, I found him much worse than I had imagined him to be. There was no virulent disease of any particular organ, but he was slowly wasting away from atrophy, and he knew, or thought he knew, he should not recover. But he ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... it to the beloved one. He put it on paper, he played it, but speak it he could not. Here is a point that reveals Chopin's native indecision, his inability to make up his mind. He recalls to me the Frederic Moreau of Flaubert's "L'Education Sentimentale." There is an atrophy of the will, for Chopin can neither propose nor fly from Warsaw. He writes letters that are full of self-reproaches, letters that must have both bored and irritated his friends. Like many other men of genius he suffered all his life from folie de doute, indeed his was what specialists ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that make us different. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... I had to hop about with only a sock over it. The doctor on board had told me that I was suffering from beri-beri, and although I tried not to believe him I was gradually forced to the conclusion that he was right. In fact, atrophy set in by degrees—one of the characteristics of beri-beri being that after a time you feel no pain at all. You can dig a pin into the affected part, or pluck off all the hairs without feeling the slightest pain. I was in a bad way, although I never laid up for an entire day. From the moment ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... 'em—dragging my idleness and viciousness and my stupidity and my money at my heels. I tell you, Kathleen, this is no good. There's a stench of money everywhere; there's a staler aroma in the air, too—the dubious perfume of decadence, of moral atrophy, of stupid recklessness, of the ennui that breeds intrigue! I'm deadly tired of it—of the sort of people I was born among; of their women folk, whose sole intellectual relaxation is in pirouetting along the danger mark without overstepping, and in concealing it when they do; of the overgroomed ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... was made to struggle—to use all his powers. If he rests too long beside the still backwaters of life, in fairy-like dales, they're apt to atrophy, and he finds himself slack and nerveless when he goes out to face the ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... a man who suffered from atrophy of the purse, or atrophy of the opinions; but whatever the disease some plausible Latin, or imitation-Latin name must be found for it and also ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... diet was injurious, even if the quality brought by the change was better. That milk fresh from the udder was the best. The Talmud describes jaundice and correctly ascribes it to the retention of bile, and speaks of dropsy as due to the retention of urine. It teaches that atrophy or rupture of the kidneys is fatal. Induration of the lungs (tuberculosis) was regarded as incurable. Suppuration of the spinal cord had an early, grave meaning. Rabies was known. The following is a description given of the dog's condition: 'His mouth is open, the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... by him to the same cause as that which has given rise to species, we have enumerated his chief contributions to the advance of the question. On the other hand, from his ignorance of any power in Nature competent to modify the structure of animals, except the development of parts, or atrophy of them, in consequence of a change of needs, Lamarck was led to attach infinitely greater weight than it deserves to this agency, and the absurdities into which he was led have met with deserved condemnation. Of the struggle for existence, on which, as we shall see, Mr. Darwin lays ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... transmitted" [which no one that I know of has maintained], "or even if they might occasionally be transmitted" [which cannot, I imagine, be reasonably questioned], "a powerful support would be given to the Lamarckian principle, and the transmission of functional hypertrophy or atrophy would thus ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... to the simple life of primal innocence and wonder that had ever brimmed the heart of the Irishman, acknowledged while not understood, might have slumbered itself away with the years among modern conditions into atrophy and denial, had he not chanced to encounter a more direct and vital instance of it even than himself. The powerfully-charged being of this Russian stranger had summoned it forth. The mere presence of this man quickened and evoked this faintly-stirring ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... mamma that the sweet creature was falling into an atrophy. So she carried the forlorn damsel post haste to the Black Rock for the recovery of her health, or her heart. Clementina, my dear, no reproachful looks; in your secret soul do not you know, that I could not do a young lady a greater favour than to give her a plausible ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... that there has been no spiritual effort that is worth thinking about; but that does not mean that nothing spiritual has been happening. It means on the contrary that there has been going on a spiritual atrophy, the spiritual powers have been without exercise and will be difficult to arouse to activity. In such a case as that spiritual awakening will be followed by a long period of spiritual struggle against habits of thought and action which we have already formed, a period in which ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... ranks of "fogyism," is due far more to lack of variety and recreation and to dearth of intellectual stimulus than to hard labor, severe as this often is. Age is more than the flight of the years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries; it is also the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the emotions resulting from disuse. The farmer needs occasionally to have something more exciting than the alternation of the day's work with the nightly "chores." And his wife should now and then have an opportunity ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... of the talking nations that the office of the interpreters exists. When, as from time to time happens, a child is born with some powers of articulation, he is set apart, and trained to talk in the interpreters' college. Of course the partial atrophy of the vocal organs, from which even the best interpreters suffer, renders many of the sounds of language impossible for them. None, for instance, can pronounce v, f, or s; and as to the sound represented by th, it is five generations since the last interpreter lived who could ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Shakespeare"! "The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet a man who, when a subject is ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Leaves and Berries.—The leaves have very rarely been given internally; notwithstanding they are recommended (in the Ephem. natur. curios. vol. ii. obs. 120.) against the atrophy of children; their taste is nauseous, acrid, and bitter. Externally they have sometimes been employed for drying and healing ichorous sores, and likewise for keeping issues open. The berries were supposed by the ancients to have a purgative and emetic quality; ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... form, will account for the infinite diversity in structure and function of the mouths of insects. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that the general pattern of an organ might become so much obscured as to be finally lost, by the atrophy and ultimately by the complete abortion of certain parts, by the soldering together of other parts, and by the doubling or multiplication of others,—variations which we know to be within the limits of possibility. In the ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... the lifetime of the individual, increased use of structures leads to an increase of their functional efficiency; while, on the other hand, disuse leads to atrophy. The arms of a blacksmith, and the legs of a mountaineer, are familiar illustrations of the first principle: our hospital wards are full of illustrations of the second. Again, we know that the characters of parents are transmitted ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... and first he lost his money, and he fashed himself terrible about that, and then he lost a child or two, and then he lost his wife, and he came back to us a broken-hearted man, with no wish to live. The doctor may call it atrophy, but I will call it what the Scripture calls it, a broken ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... have been the invention of a syrup, in which he had great confidence; but its trial blew him up into a tympany, from which he was only relieved by having recourse to a drug, also of his own discovery, which, in counteracting the syrup, reduced him to an alarming state of atrophy. But the mischances of the historian do not enter into his history: and our curiosity must be still eager to open Lenglet's "Histoire de la Philosophie Hermetique," accompanied by a catalogue of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... my right arm by injecting into it a preparation that would produce atrophy of the muscles. I can produce ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... believe, between ourselves, his grandsire was from the wrong side of the Border—one Bullsegg, who came hither as a steward, or bailiff, or ground-officer, or something in that department, to the last Girnigo of Killancureit, who died of an atrophy. After his master's death, sir,—ye would hardly believe such a scandal,—but this Bullsegg, being portly and comely of aspect, intermarried with the lady dowager, who was young and amorous, and possessed himself of the estate, which devolved on this unhappy woman by a settlement of her umwhile ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... attached) were unchanged; while the interstitial cells were enormously developed, by compensatory hypertrophy in consequence of the removal of the other testis. At the same time the male instincts and the other generative organs were unchanged. In a few cases, however, Ancel and Bouin observed atrophy of the interstitial cells as well as the spermatic cells. They believe this is due to the nerves supplying the testis being included in the ligature. This is rather a surprising conclusion in view of the ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... ATROPHY of the heart is the opposite to hypertrophy, and signifies a wasting away of the muscular substance, and a diminution in the thickness of the walls of the heart. Its power is diminished in proportion to the degree ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Jesus of Nazareth and human life? It is best brought out, when we realize what he has made of Christian society, and contrast it with what the various religions have left or produced in other regions—the atrophy of human nature. ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... gone the process must have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess he's come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that intellectual ability is among them—what we call intellectual ability. He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental make- up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That's the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos's experience, and I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Shop the workers are getting an education by doing things. Work should be the spontaneous expression of a man's best impulses. We grow only through exercise, and every faculty that is exercised becomes strong, and those not used atrophy and die. Thus how necessary it is that we should exercise our highest and best! To develop the brain we have to exercise the body. Every muscle, every organ, has its corresponding convolution in the brain. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... ACUTE YELLOW ATROPHY. (Malignant Jaundice).—This is fortunately a rare disease. There is rapid progress, and it is fatal in nearly all cases. The liver is very small and flabby. The symptoms are many and are hard to differentiate. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... break out or strike inward with fatal results. When Sunday night came, Mitchell was about ready to fare forth with gun and mask and take conversation away from anybody who had it to spare. He had begun to fear that his vocal cords would atrophy. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... madness—solitary confinement has the power to unmake men's minds and leave them idiots. If he neglect his conscience, it will run off into lawlessness and vice. Or, lastly, if it is his soul, it must inevitably atrophy, drop off ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... of the body atrophy; they become diminished in size, and the microscopic examination shows absence or diminished numbers of the cells which are peculiar to them. The most striking example of this is seen in the sexual glands of females, ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... of the abdominal muscles. Holding the abdomen together by means of a corset may serve its own purpose, but does less than nothing in the crisis of motherhood. The corset indeed conduces to the atrophy of the most important of all the voluntary muscles for the most important crisis of a woman's life. "Some of the slower Spanish dances" are commended for the development of the abdominal muscles, but one would rather recommend swimming, the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... require a counterpoise to sociocracy. We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist, which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... expression of thought and emotion. It is a pity that this should be so, for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this world of superficial observers, who go deep enough into the springs of man's action to distinguish the external symptoms of heart-cancer from ossification, or to learn ihe difference between satiety and atrophy. A night of nervous sleeplessness, a day of irresolution and dread, had aggravated almost beyond her control the restlessness which in Mabel was the unerring indication of unhealthiness of mind and body. To sit still was impracticable; to talk connectedly and easily ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... say to you what I could not well say to the colonel—I suspect the cause of her illness is rather a spiritual one. She has evidently a strong mental constitution; and this strong frame, so to speak, has been fed upon slops; and an atrophy is the consequence. My hope in your plan is, partly, that it may furnish a better mental table for her, for the time, and set her foraging in new ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... attention. How Tacitus would have delighted in this example of the 'inertia rusticorum'! It is a great mistake to imagine that dwellers in quiet districts are more easily excited by any event than are dwellers in packed cities. On the contrary, the very absence of 'sensations' produces an atrophy of the senses. It is the constant supply of 'sensations' which creates a real demand for them in cities. Suppose that in our day some specially unpopular clergyman were martyred 'at the corner of Fenchurch Street,' how the 'same ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... calyx of flowers; the workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity. The queen's brain turns to pulp, that the reproductive organs may profit; in the workers these organs atrophy, to the benefit of their intelligence. Nor would it be fair to allege that the will plays no part in all these renouncements. We have seen that each worker's larva can be transformed into a queen if lodged and ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional side of one's nature. So far as he could judge, his mind had become in his later years a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, and that atrophy had taken place in that part of the brain on which the higher aesthetic tastes depend. Curiously enough, however, he retained his relish for novels, and for books on history, biography, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... office, perquisites, gratuities, and promotion. He never spoke of anything but of his duties, either at the office, or at home—he had married the portionless daughter of one of his colleagues. His mind, which was in a state of atrophy from his depressing daily work, had no other thoughts, hopes or dreams than such as related to the office, and there was a constant source of bitterness that spoilt every pleasure that he might have had, and that was the employment of so many naval officials, tinsmiths, as they ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... weak point in Hatha Yoga is that action on this line cannot reach beyond the astral plane, and the great strain imposed on the comparatively intractable matter of the physical plane sometimes leads to atrophy of the very organs, the activity of which is necessary for effecting the changes in consciousness that would be useful. The Hatha Yogi gains control over the bodily organs with which the waking consciousness no longer concerns itself, having relinquished them to ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... progress, as exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably. The streets dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of the town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in the first stage of its creation. Land-holders set up poles on lost patches of ground, and, plaintively advertising that they ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... or this may be confined to the cortical substance, or even to the tubular. The kidneys are occasionally much larger than usual, without any other change of structure; or simple hypertrophy may affect but one of them. They are subject to atrophy, which may be either general or partial; or one of the kidneys may be completely wanting, and this evidently the consequence ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in New England liked to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly repeated deals with the efforts of some acrid spinster—or wife long widowed—to keep a young girl from marriage, generally out of ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... apostasy, apparatus, apparition, appellate, appertain, appetency, apposite, approbation, appurtenance, aquatic, aqueous, aquiline, arbitrary, archaic, arduous, aromatic, arrear, articulate, ascetic, asperity, asphyxiate, asseverate, assiduity, assimilate, astringent, astute, atrophy, attenuate, auditory, augury, auscultation, austerity, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... comes the travel year, and many are still students until twenty-four or twenty-five. Most are still, in a sense, students throughout life, but it is thought that, unless responsible action is begun in some form in the early twenties, will undergoes a partial atrophy. But the full swing of adult life is hardly attained until thirty is reached. Men marry before the middle thirties, and the women rather earlier, few are mothers before five-and-twenty. The majority of those who become samurai ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... wasted in aimless motion. Play, in this sense, is a sign of imperfect adaptation. It is proper to childhood, when the body and mind are not yet fit to cope with the environment, but it is unseemly in manhood and pitiable in old age, because it marks an atrophy of human nature, and a failure to take hold of the opportunities ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... taken up with a poor cripple dying of muscular atrophy who cannot move. It stays with him all the time, and sleeps most of the day in his straw hat. To-night I saw the kitten curled up under the bed-clothes. It seems as if it were a gift of Providence that the little creature should attach itself ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... least they have lived. If we are to live hereafter, as to which no one is certain, we are faced at our temporal death with the fact that, born into this world with certain faculties, instincts, appetites, and senses, we have let most of them atrophy, and the rest rot, by many contributory causes, of which the chief is over-eating. If I die, to live again, I have it behind me that I have lived well already. I am that much to the good. And, that others may have the ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... rather like the idea though of the strong man having the opportunity to prove himself stronger than Life...find out what, he was put on earth and endowed with certain characteristics for...rather a pity all that should atrophy....However—what shall my friend do? Continue to live with ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... Cologne negotiations had been dragging their slow length along. Few persons believed that any good was likely to result from these stately and ponderous conferences; yet men were so weary of war, so desirous that a termination might be put to the atrophy under which the country was languishing, that many an eager glance was turned towards the place where the august assembly was holding its protracted session. Certainly, if wisdom were to be found in mitred heads—if the power ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Renaissance. But they were at the same time suffering from grievous exhaustion, humiliated by the tyranny of foreign despotism, and terrorized by ecclesiastical intolerance. In their case, therefore, a sort of moral and intellectual atrophy becomes gradually more and more perceptible. The clear artistic sense of rightness and of beauty yields to doubtful taste. The frank audacity of the Renaissance is superseded by cringing timidity, lumbering dulness, somnolent and stagnant acquiescence in accepted formulae. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... severe illness, and was a softened woman: she sent Fanny off to keep Zoe company. That poor girl had a bitter time, and gave Doctress Gale great anxiety. She had no brain fever, but seemed quietly, insensibly, sinking into her grave. No appetite, and indeed was threatened with atrophy at one time. But she was so surrounded with loving-kindness that her shame diminished, her pride rose, and at last her agony was blunted, and only a pensive languor remained to show that she had been crushed, and could not be again the bright, proud, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... acquired one. Marrying from reason a man whose mental insufficiency is very apparent, she made herself love him out of pity and a sense of protection. Up to the present time, by means of a certain atrophy of heart, she had succeeded, without one failure, in making Monsieur de l'Estorade perfectly happy. With the same instinct, she had exaggerated the maternal sentiment to an almost inconceivable degree, until in that way she had fairly stifled all the other ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... patient or doctor does not exist for the rich doctor. He always has plenty of genuine cases which can afford genuine treatment; and these provide him with enough sincere scientific professional work to save him from the ignorance, obsolescence, and atrophy of scientific conscience into which his poorer colleagues sink. But on the other hand his expenses are enormous. Even as a bachelor, he must, at London west end rates, make over a thousand a year before he can afford even to insure his ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... gradual atrophy of the whole administrative machine. The Austrian government was not consciously tyrannical, even in Italy; and Francis himself, though determined to be absolute, intended also to be paternal. Nor would the cruelties inflicted on the bolder spirits who dared to preach reform, which made the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... a little more than sixteen, came a letter to tell that she was wasting away in either atrophy or consumption, and that the doctors said the only hope for her was home and native air. Poor child! what home was there for her, with her sister-in-law absorbed in the care of her brother, whose imbecility was no spectacle ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... value is the process of thought, the line of argument by which the old tacticians arrived at their conclusions good and bad. In studying the long series of Instructions we are able to detach certain attitudes of mind which led to the atrophy of principles essentially good, and others which pushed the system forward on healthy lines and flung off obsolete restraints. In an art so shifting and amorphous as naval tactics, the difference between health and disease must always ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... apparently useless structures. I confess, however, that it has often appeared to me that the facts of Dysteleology cut two ways. If we are to assume, as evolutionists in general do, that useless organs atrophy, such cases as the existence of lateral rudiments of toes, in the foot of a horse, place us in a dilemma. For, either these rudiments are of no use to the animal, in which case, considering that the horse has ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the man, and therefore it is necessary that he should resist it. If he does so resist, if he declines to yield himself to the feelings suggested to him, the particles within him which need those vibrations become apathetic for lack of nourishment, and eventually atrophy and fall out from his astral body, and are replaced by other particles, whose natural wave-rate is more nearly in accordance with that which the man habitually ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... flood of eulogy will be supplied by Sir ALMROTH WRIGHT, who, taking the view that the simplicity with which logarithms can be handled is leading the nation inevitably towards mental atrophy, will introduce the question, "The Logarithm: is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... life, parasitic or predatory, at the expense of others. The parasites refute the vulgar prejudice that evolution is by the measure of man, progressive; adaptation is indifferent to better or worse, except as to each species, that its offspring shall survive by atrophy and degradation. The predatory species flourish as if in derision of moral maxims; we see that though human morality is natural to man, it is far from expressing the whole of Nature. Animals, at first ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... gathered knowledge where she listed; her further faculty flashed forth fine rays at unexpected intervals to cheer her, and her hungry heart also began to seek satisfaction. For Beth was by nature well-balanced; there was to be no atrophy of one side of her being in order that the other might be abnormally developed. Her chest was not to be flattened because her skull bulged with the big brain beneath. Rather the contrary. For mind and body acted and reacted on each other favourably, in so far as the conditions ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... be a sad day for this or for any people when there shall have come in them an atrophy of the religious nature; when they shall have suppressed the need of communication, no matter how vague, with a supreme power in the universe; when the ties which bind men of similar modes of thought in the various religious organizations shall be dissolved; when men, instead of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... People do not seem able as yet to understand that a man is really "punished," in the popular sense of that word, unless they can see him publicly whipped. It does not seem to them to mean anything because a man deteriorates, because the highest and finest qualities in him atrophy and threaten to die out. I used an illustration in my sermon two weeks ago to which I shall have to recur again, to see if I can make it mean more than it did then. It is the story of Ulysses who fell into the hands of the famous sorceress, and whose companions were turned into swine. ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... generic appellation of staggering bobs, are in nine cases out of ten transferred to the butcher, whose stall, if it contain nothing else, is sure to furnish an abundant supply of dead animals, which you might easily mistake for cats that have perished by atrophy. ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough House, in partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker. Common-sense dictated it; but Adams and his friends were unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom — some innate atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as already a man of action, and rather far up towards the front, he had no idea of making a new effort or catching up with a new world. He saw nothing ahead of him. The world was never more ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... constitution, the force of the distemper at last abated, yet could not be so intirely eradicated, as not to leave a certain pressure and debility upon the nerves, by some called a fever on the spirits, which seemed to threaten either an atrophy or consumption; his complexion grew pale and livid, and his strength and flesh visibly wasted; and what was yet worse, the vigour of his mind decayed, in proportion with that of his external frame, insomuch ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his service while he was still in petticoats. Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland's maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the boy's shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... unimpaired, and he was able to walk after being a few minutes on his feet; when first rising he was very unsteady. Knee-jerk lost, no reinforcement. No sexual power. Some difficulty in emptying the bladder. Examination showed slight atrophy of both optic nerves, Argyll-Robertson pupil, and myosis. He was ordered two weeks' rest in bed, with massage, cool sponging daily, and galvanization of the areas of neuralgia. After two weeks he was ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... the honourable and gallant Member out at the Front?" they will lose half their savour. He will be as dull as Io without her gad-fly. Mr. "Boanerges" STANTON is happily still with us, but with no pacifists to bellow at I fear that his vocal chords will atrophy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... as closely related to atrophy of the optic nerve with deep excavation. No line of demarcation can be drawn between them, except by reserving the term of glaucoma for cases that depart from the pure type, terminating in glaucoma of ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... undeveloped condition, it is not fitted, the organ is permanently weakened and rendered incapable of its legitimate use later in life when the book is a necessity. And again, this excessive use of the eye causes an atrophy of the other organs that ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... be for a long, long time,' she said, thinking aloud as she often did, and adding with the callousness that sometimes comes with age—arising not from hardness, but from the atrophy of the emotions—'and, of course, she ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Admiralty War Orders had deliberately rejected, one by one, the deep-seated principles of humanity and chivalry in war. It had been done gradually and systematically—scientifically, in fact, and in the majority of cases it succeeded in producing a state of atrophy of the moral sense that was altogether admirable—from a German point ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... originally there existed what was accepted as good evidence for the existence of a supernatural, it is hardly credible that every subsequent generation went on accepting it merely because one generation received evidence of its existence. As organs atrophy for want of exercise, so do beliefs die out in time for want of proof. Some kind of evidence must have been continually forthcoming in order to keep the belief alive and active. It is not a question of whether the evidence was good or bad. All evidence, it is important to bear in mind, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... recommendation of what is generally used; for this constant effect must render them too copious, and thus, according to all physical experience, the blood must be thickened in the greater vessels, which frequently terminates in an atrophy. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... there is an easy answer ready for it. But considering that religion is now so far dead that it consists in little else than formalities, and that its divine truth is no longer such to half the great world, which lies, indeed, in dire atrophy and wickedness,—and if we further consider and agree that the awakened human soul is the divinest thing on earth, and partakes of the divine nature itself, and that its manifestations are also divine in whomsoever it is embodied, we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,—as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,—or, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... common as ours? It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit's plays. Impossible that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as In the Ranks and Harbour Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled—the miser in the old castle ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the development of the muscles, which waste away or shrink when not used as nature provided. For instance, perhaps you have had or have seen persons that had a fractured leg or arm and on account of not being able to use the leg or arm the muscles wasted away (Atrophy), until they were used normally for sometime, when the muscles again came ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... (waste matter), to filter out some things, to break up and alter others, and to expel them from the body in the form of bile. There are certain diseases in which the liver suddenly declines to do any more work. Acute atrophy of the liver is the name of this condition, and when it arises death rapidly results from suppression of the secretion of bile. It brings about a state of things called acholia; the patient is actually poisoned by the non-removal of those ingredients ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... frequent, and the patient becomes reconciled to his immobility. It is probable that after passing several months or years in a state of immobility fakirs no longer experience any desire to change their position, and even did they so desire, it would be impossible owing to the atrophy of their muscles and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... you need to—make a song about it!" winced the Senior Surgeon. "It's just about the crudest case of complete muscular atrophy that ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert's offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... to declare and make manifest his personal aptitudes, and it will not happen, as it does to-day, that many peasants, sons of the people and of the lower middle class, gifted with natural talents, will be compelled to allow their talents to atrophy while they toil as peasants, workingmen or employees, when they would be able to furnish society a different and more fruitful kind of labor, because it would be more in Harmony with their ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... must be looked for in the race character; and whatever the higher education may accomplish in the remote future, it can scarcely be expected to transform nature. But does it at present atrophy certain finer tendencies? I think that it unavoidably does, for the simple reason that, under existing conditions, the moral and mental powers are overtasked by its requirements. All that wonderful national spirit of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... if the average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... to any special line of study is liable to lead to forgetfulness of other, even kindred, lines—almost, in extreme cases, to a kind of atrophy of other parts of the mind. There is the example of Darwin and his self-confessed loss of the aesthetic tastes he once possessed. Nor are scientific studies the only ones to produce such an effect. The amusing ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... and a cynic. Moreover, I'm a creature of whims and inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he treacherously deepens it—but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with a flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... the insufficiently patulous glottis, new corks with smaller grooves being substituted as laryngeal breathing becomes easier. Corking the cannula is an excellent orthopedic treatment in certain cases where muscle atrophy and partial inflammatory fixation of the cricoarytenoid joints are etiological factors in the stenosis. The added pull of the posterior cricoarytenoid muscles during the slight effort at inspiration restores ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... boy or girl; but a false start, a bad beginning for the children of the very poor who happen to possess brain power is fatal. Their talents get no chance, for they are never used, consequently they atrophy, or, worse still, are used in a wrong direction and possibly for evil. Good is changed into evil, bright and useful life is frustrated, and the State loses the useful power and influence that should result from brains ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... would have done at ordinary times. To counteract the malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the boy's mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition, calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any human being against whom it was directed. It was a practice well known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... there file past the incomplete. One side of their nature has undergone atrophy, with the result that they have lost touch with their living ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... organs have the appearance of immaturity; the shape of the capitulum is specially modified for its reception between the scuta of the hermaphrodite, and several of the valves have not been developed. This atrophy of the valves, is carried much further in S. rostratum. In Ibla, many of the parts are embryonic in character, but others mature and perfect; some parts, as the capitulum, thorax, and cirri, are ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia, and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet, to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and he will certainly die, if he does not take freely ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... there, thou old miserly cony-catcher!" answered the captain, taking a bale of dice from the sleeve of his coat; "I must always keep company with these damnable doctors, and they have made me every baby's cully, and purged my purse into an atrophy; but never mind, it passes the time as well as aught else—How say ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... by the wife of a man in Rodney's position, which had brought her always into contact with people and ideas. Much more amusing than grinding at intellectual work of her own, but it apparently caused the brain to atrophy. And she was, anyhow, tired of doing nothing in particular. After forty you must have your job, you must be independent of other people's jobs, of human and social contacts, however amusing ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... have, a single friend among them. He was repelled by the hardness, the dryness, the egoism of the intellectuals—(except for the very few who were following a real vocation, or were absorbed by a passionate enthusiasm for scientific research). That man is a sorry creature who has let his heart atrophy for the sake of his mind—when his mind is small. In such a man there is no kindness, only a brain like a dagger in a sheath: there is no knowing but it will one day cut your throat. Against such a man it is necessary to be always ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... association occurs, which is exerted on the pulmonary and cutaneous absorbents by reverse sympathy, and produces a great absorption of the fluid effused into the cellular membrane in anasarca, with dry skin; constituting one kind of atrophy. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... was in regard to the effect of electricity on plant life. He referred particularly to the fact that it was his aim to discover the law of growth and atrophy among plants. Such a discovery had a great bearing on the future of agriculture and would revolutionise world thought. Electricity, he explained and illustrated, would promote or retard the growth of life by reaction. In England and other countries electricity ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... that they cannot sing have very often, by the simple denial of their ability, ensured a kind of mental atrophy in the function. It is quite a usual thing for us to fasten unnecessary limitations upon ourselves by refusing to believe in our own powers, and most of us have a large stock of very real inhibitions, which prevent us from ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... upland plains, every fertile huerta of the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... Mammals (1877), and sought to show in this way that I assumed a gradual degeneration of the food-yelk and the yelk-sac on the way from the proreptiles to the mammals. "The cenogenetic process of adaptation," I said, "which has occasioned the atrophy of the rudimentary yelk-sac of the mammal, is perfectly clear. It is due to the fact that the young of the mammal, whose ancestors were certainly oviparous, now remain a long time in the womb. As the great store of food-yelk, which the oviparous ancestors gave to the egg, became superfluous ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... voluptuous aspects of Hinduism, such as find expression in sculpture elsewhere. All the buildings, and especially the modern temple of Kali, which was in process of construction when I saw the place, testify to the atrophy and paralysis produced by erotic forms of religion in the artistic and intellectual spheres, a phenomenon which finds another sad illustration in quite different theological surroundings among the Vallabhacarya sect at Gokul ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... forests and mountains were torn from their roots, and cast into the sea. They inflamed the passions of men, and caused them to commit the most unheard-of excesses. They laid their ban on those who enjoyed the most prosperous health, condemned them to peak and pine, wasted them into a melancholy atrophy, and finally consigned them to a premature grave. They breathed a new and unblest life into beings in whom existence had long been extinct, and by their hateful and resistless power caused the sepulchres ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The discipline of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Unblotted Escutcheon turned black with rage. Seeing the Unblotted Escutcheon turning black with what he supposed to be the record of his own misdeeds showing through the whitewash, the Orator fell dead of mortification. Seeing the Orator fall dead of what they supposed to be atrophy of the organ of common-sense, his colleagues resolved that whenever they should adjourn because they were tired, it should be out of respect to the memory of him who had so frequently ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... not driven him, as it so often does, to other women—to that wild waste which leaves behind it a barren and ill-natured soil exhausted of its power, of its generous and native health. There was a strange apathy in his senses, an emotional stillness, as it were, the atrophy of all the passionate elements of his nature. But because of this he was the better poised, the more evenly balanced, the more perceptive. His eyes were not blurred or dimmed by any stress of emotion, his mind worked in a cool quiet, and his forward tread had leisurely decision ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... percentages, barely twenty per cent of the cases occur before forty years of age, sixty per cent between forty and sixty, and twenty per cent between sixty and eighty. Thus the early period of decline, the transition stage between full functional vigor and declared atrophy (wasting) of the glands, is clearly the period of greatest danger; precisely the period in which the gland-cells, though losing their function,—and income,—have still the strength to inaugurate a rebellion, and a sufficient ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... (Literal Bulbo-nuclear Dysarthria and Anarthria).—Patients who have lost control over the muscles of speech through bulbo-nuclear paralysis, stammer before they become speechless, and along with paralysis and atrophy of the tongue occur regularly fibrillar contractions of the muscles of the tongue. The tongue is no longer regulated by ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... to be a service peculiarly fitted for men of letters, was illustrated in Hawthorne's career in many ways and on several occasions, but nowhere more plainly than in the period of his five years of atrophy from the time he entered the consulate till the composition of "The Marble Faun." He wrote vigorously in his note-books, from time to time, but such composition was the opiate it had always been for his higher imaginative and ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... contributions to this department abroad and at home would be simply impossible on the present occasion. I cannot, however, omit to notice how early Dr. Bucknill was in the field, as his laborious examination of a number of brains of the insane to determine the amount of cerebral atrophy and the specific gravity, bear witness, as also his demonstration of the changes which take place, not only in the brain and its membranes, but in the cord, in general paralysis; these observations, along with those of Dr. Boyd, having been ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... smart boy," he said. "I'll admit you don't look very hungry. But how about the appetite for other things, for success in life, for the appreciation of intelligent men and for their companionship? Is there no danger of what you fellows call atrophy? Men's intellects can only maintain a proper level by rubbing up ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... diseases are other ultimate results of the habit; and these congestions to which it gives rise unduly hasten the advent of puberty. Any decided enlargement of the labia and clitoris in a young girl may be taken as a positive evidence of the existence of the habit of self-abuse. Sterility, and atrophy of the breasts—their deficient development—when the vice is begun before ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... developed in the process of learning is subject to the wasting effects of time. It is subject to the law of "atrophy through disuse". Just as a muscle, brought by exercise into the pink of condition, and then left long inactive, grows weak and small, so it is with the brain connections formed in learning. With prolongation of the condition ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... out of the desk habit, and caution, conservatism, sureness, seem even in time of crisis to be more important than a bit of daring. In my Department, I figure that it takes about seven years for the nerve of initiative and the nerve of imagination to atrophy, and so, perhaps, it is in other departments. It took five months for one of our war bureaus to get out a contract for a building that we were to build for them. Fifteen men had to sign the contract. And of ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... operation necessary? Will the child not outgrow its adenoids? Usually the adenoid growths atrophy or dry up after the age of puberty. Adenoids are not uncommon in adults, however. The surgeon general of the army reports that during the year 1905, out of 3004 operations on officers and enlisted men in service, there were 225 operations on ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... The loss is not all loss. The game of life is one in which we gain by losing, and lose by gaining. In The Ghost's Bargain with the Haunted Man it was a part of the agreement that the man should forget all the sorrows he had ever known. In that atrophy of the heart which followed in that frozen seal which bound down every rill of human sympathy and pity, I know that there is the presentment of a great and lasting truth. No man's nature is ripened until he has known many ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray |
