"Insomnia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comradeship which always marked Frohman's close personal relations were not lacking in those nights when the life of the valiant little man hung by a thread. When all other means of inducing sleep failed, Potter found a sure cure for insomnia. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... tell you she "didn't sleep a wink last night!" that "the eggs on this steamer are not what they ought to be," that the cook doesn't know how to boil them, and that as her husband is troubled with insomnia her son is quite likely to run down from the harbor to meet her at the landing two months hence. Then she will turn to the query by asking if you think the captain is a fit man to run this steamer; if the purser would ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... we know but little, to get at Eltham are frustrated, presumably by his curious 'defenses.' An attempt in a train fails owing to Miss Eltham's distaste for refreshment-room coffee. An attempt here fails owing to her insomnia. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... had overslept more than an hour. Indeed, she had had the first sound and prolonged sleep that had come to her since the honeymoon began; for until then she had slept alone all her life and the new order had almost given her chronic insomnia. She rang for her maid and began to dress. The maid did not come. She rang again and again; apparently the bell was broken. She finished dressing and went out into the huge, grandly and gaudily furnished salon. Harding was at a carved old-gold and lacquer desk, writing. As she entered he ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... turquoise, turned pale or became deeper in hue according to the state of the owner's health; the owner of a diamond was invincible; the possession of an agate made a man amiable, and eloquent. Whoever wore an amethyst was proof against intoxication, while a jacynth superinduced sleep in cases of insomnia. Bed linen was often embroidered, and set with bits of jacynth, and there is even a record of diamonds having been used in the decoration of sheets! Another entertaining instance of credulity was the use of "cramp rings." ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... expressive of my views; but I was tired of the subject. It was hardly a time to play with mammets or to tilt with lips, and it seemed that the matter might wait. There was a good deal of the pettishness of nervousness among us at that time, and I had my full share of it. Insomnia was prevalent, and gray hairs increased and multiplied. The time was drawing near for our meeting with Pendleton in Chicago. We had advices that he was coming in from the West, on his return from a long journey of inspection, and would pass over ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... I know or care; for there is no interest in a treasure without a Treasure Island to sail to. If there is a treasure it will never be found, for I am not interested in wealth beyond the dreams of avarice since I know that avarice has no dreams, but only insomnia. And, for the other party, my gardener would never consent to dig ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... lay around and beneath him, he heard its frightened breathing. It was not alone the unquiet slumbers of the soldiers who had fallen in the streets, the blending of inarticulate sounds produced by that gathering of guns, men, and horses; what he fancied he could distinguish was the insomnia, the alarmed watchfulness of his bourgeois neighbors, who, no more than he, could sleep, quivering with feverish terrors, awaiting anxiously the coming of the day. They all must be aware that the capitulation had not been signed, and were ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete there is also a cure for insomnia. For two awful years, I suffered from insomnia. Night after night I would go to bed apparently almost dead for sleep; it seemed as though I must sleep, but I could not sleep; oh, the agony of those two years! It seemed as if I would lose my mind if ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... I now suffered were insomnia, melancholia, heart irregularity, and a train of mental symptoms and feelings which common words could not begin to describe. It would have required an assortment of the very strongest adjectives and adverbs ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... Clapton Methodist, and afterwards set to music by a young lady who wished to bind up another wounded heart. He attempted to lie awake of nights with indifferent success, and hinted in conversation at the depressing influence which insomnia exerts over its victims. For several meals in succession he refused to eat heartily of such dishes as he did not like, and his mother felt serious anxiety as to his general state of health. She inveighed ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... to insomnia threatens, unless the Government stops the whistling for taxis, to let Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... to bed late that night, his ears tingling with the adulation of the multitude, and in his excited insomnia understanding for the first time in his life the words: "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." He realized more fully now that his shipmaster days had given him a taste for command, and that he had come into ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... four-post bed, which was being trundled along the Strand by eight stalwart footmen. On it reposed the Duke of Sleepyacres. It appears that his Grace, on return from active service, found that the confined air of an ordinary bed-room engendered insomnia. He therefore conceived the idea of sleeping in the open-air and caused his bed to be placed in the centre of the Strand, opposite the entrance to the Savoy Hotel. The presence of the sleeping nobleman might have been unnoticed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... thanks for the testimonial; many thanks for your blind, wondering letter; many wishes, lastly, for your swift recovery. Insomnia is the opposite pole from my complaint; which brings with it a nervous lethargy, an unkind, unwholesome, and ungentle somnolence, fruitful in heavy heads and heavy eyes at morning. You cannot sleep; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... life—sunk into the death-blackness of sleep with her mother limned to the last on her fading consciousness. But this mother was not the Daisy of the plains nor of the daguerreotype. They had been before Saxon's time. This that she saw nightly was an older mother, broken with insomnia and brave with sorrow, who crept, always crept, a pale, frail creature, gentle and unfaltering, dying from lack of sleep, living by will, and by will refraining from going mad, who, nevertheless, could not will sleep, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... a bit awkward," she confessed thoughtfully. "But can't you say that you have insomnia, and can't sleep unless you are above the ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... that a woman in Milpites, a victim of almost crushing sorrow, despondency, indigestion, insomnia, and kindred ills, determined to throw off the gloom which was making life so heavy a burden to her, and established a rule that she would laugh at least three times a day, whether occasion was presented or not; ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... had travelled the length of Mulberry Street had acquired a local standing and the right to be counted and rounded up by the political bosses. Now the old houses were filled with newspaper offices and given over to perpetual insomnia. Week-days and Sundays, night or day, they never slept. Police headquarters was right across the way, and kept the reporters awake. From his window the chief looked down the narrow passageway to the bottom of the alley, ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... The essential elements of their poetry will be courage, daring, and rebellion. Literature has hitherto glorified serene immobility, ecstasy, and sleep; they will extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. They declare that the world's splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, its frame adorned by great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... from an electric car at the further end of the Suspension Bridge, when he heaved a deep sigh, and remarked, "In the midst of life we are in Brooklyn." Another favourite anecdote in New York is that of the Philadelphian who went to a doctor and complained of insomnia. The doctor gave him a great deal of sage advice as to diet, exercise, and so forth, concluding, "If after that you haven't better nights, let me see you again." "But you mistake, doctor," the patient replied; "I sleep all right at night—it's in the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... of his trouble in the long, long night to face—trouble, insomnia, and the bitterness welling ever fresher with the interminable thoughts he could not suppress, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... indulged in some hostile criticisms. The painter naturally persevered in his own course. After getting into a violent passion at her silliness, he said to himself that, after all, perhaps she was right. Then began the era of doubts, twinges of reflection which brought about cramps in the stomach, insomnia, feverishness and disgust with himself. He had the courage to make some retouchings, but without much heart, and with a feeling that his work ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... in a low, passionate voice. "It seemed as though everything that meant anything had gone out of my life. I became worn out, nervous; and though the days were bad enough, the nights were a source of dread. I began to suffer from insomnia—I could not sleep. This was even before my supposed uncle came. I used to read for hours and hours in my room after I had gone to bed. But"—she flung out her hand with an impatient gesture—"there is no need to dwell on that. ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... obvious attractions. So cryptic indeed is her conduct (both for us and her friends) that it is arranged that her choice between the two men shall be decided by the test of a dream. In consequence, however, of an attack of insomnia this dream (like the duel) fails to come off and shortly after midnight her waking doubts are resolved in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... digs a hole beneath a rock, somewhere above timberline, and falls into a torpor, using no food for thirty days. Then he goes to Washington to meet the Director of Parks, after which he gets no more sleep until next fall. It is this perpetual insomnia which gives a park superintendent his haunted look. He knows he ought not to have killed his teacher, so ...
— Maw's Vacation - The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone • Emerson Hough
... modern hospital's "out-patient" department. The yearly endowment amounted to something like the equivalent of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. A novel feature was a hall where musicians played day and night, and another where story-tellers were employed, so that persons troubled with insomnia were amused and melancholiacs cheered. Those of a religious turn of mind could listen to readings of the Koran, conducted continuously by a staff of some fifty chaplains. Each patient on leaving the hospital received some gold pieces, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... his shipmates know this. Insomnia would ground him from the Exploration Service, on physiological if not psychological grounds. He had to ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... to room she went, popping her head in at one to ask if there was anything she could do for this girl, listening at the next door for sounds of insomnia, creeping stealthily on through the corridors to learn if any girl who ought to be en route for Sleepy Town had ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... understood also, that most cures are brought about simply by dieting. This, reminds me of the mistakes perpetrated on a friend of mine who called in Dr. Grave-Powders, one of the old-school physicians, to be treated for insomnia and dyspepsia. This old numskull restricted his diet, gave him huge doses of medicine, and decided most learnedly that he was daily growing worse. Concluding that he had but a short time to live, my friend threw away the nauseating medicines, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... became thinly alert and very weary in body and spirit, and I do not think I slept again. The pain in my leg that the panther had torn had been revived by the day's exertion. For the greater part of my life insomnia has not been disagreeable to me. In the night, in the stillness, one has a kind of detachment from reality, one floats there without light, without weight, feeling very little of one's body. One has a certain disembodiment and one can achieve a magnanimity of thought, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... smoky lamp, and smutted first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... cried Madge, "is Miss Wildmere so bad as that? Poor, pale victim of insomnia! By the way, do you and Mr. Arnault keep a ledger account of the time you receive? or do you roughly go on the principle of 'share and share alike'?" and with eyes flashing back laughter at his reddening face, she ran up the steps ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... Rad and I went up to our rooms. Whether it was the excitement of the evening or the coffee I had drunk, in any case I was not sleepy. I turned in, only to lie for an hour or more with my eyes wide open staring at a patch of moonlight on the ceiling. My old trouble of insomnia had overtaken me again. I finally rose and paced the floor in sheer desperation, and then paused to stare out of the window at the peaceful moonlit picture ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... everybody's pardon (nobody knew what for) he complimented everybody in sight, explained the forged letter, dilated on state politics, set the Irish question on the right end, cleared Bacon[42] of all hostility to me, declined tea because he had insomnia and explained just how it works to keep you awake, danced more and declared himself happy and bowed himself out—well pleased. He's as funny a cuss as I've seen in many a day. Lord Cowdray, who was telling Mexican woes to Katharine ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... "Now I say that the preaching about sex-hygiene that is going on in recent books and in the periodical press is immoral in its tendency. It is like saying, 'Don't lie, for if you do, you won't sleep at night, and insomnia is bad ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... are occasional, though very rare, cases in which it is impossible to use faradism at all by reason of the insomnia and nervousness which result even after very careful and gentle application of the current. On the other hand, some patients find the effect of the electric application so soothing as to promote sleep, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... of her Things and more Coin and applied for an advanced Degree in the Grand Lodge of the Knights and Ladies of Insomnia. ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... there were lines in his face which time might have drawn twenty or thirty years later. His lips made a straight line, and his eyes, although he had hardly slept three hours a night for as many nights, had a look in them that was not to be accounted for by ordinary insomnia. ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... resigned, owing to ill-health, with a pension of L120. After his retirement he spent a nomadic life wandering from Nice to Venice, and from the Engadine to Sicily, ever in quest of health and sunshine, racked by neuralgia and insomnia, still preaching in the desert, still plunging deeper and deeper into solitude. And as the world refused to listen to him, Nietzsche became more and more convinced of the value of his message. His last book, "Ecce Homo," an autobiography, contains all the premonitory ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... something that prevents me from answering your two letters, which are important and dear to me, especially the last. First it was Baturlin, then bad health, insomnia, then the arrival of D——, the friend of H—— that I wrote you about. He is sitting at tea talking to the ladies, neither understanding the other; so I left them, and want to write what little I can of all that I think ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... in insomnia, and a fearful heat in the head; for several days he seemed like one stunned, but his youth and health stood him in hand, he rallied, and, undaunted, again sallied forth to the woods with dog and gun. In three years' time his portfolio was ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... sensignifa. Insincere nesincera. Insinuate proponeti. Insipid sengusta. Insist insisti. Insnare allogi, kapti. Insobriety malsobreco. Insolent insultema. Insoluble nesolvebla. Insolvent nepagokapabla. Insomnia sendormo. Insomuch tial ke. Inspect ekzameni. Inspector inspektoro. Inspiration inspiro. Inspiration (breath) enspiro. Inspire enspiri. Inspire inspiri. Instalment partpago. Install logxigi. Instance ekzemplodoni. Instance ekzemplo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... to the ranch-house. I find H. Ogden, Esquire, lying asleep on his little cot bed. I guess he had been overcome by anti-insomnia or diswakefulness or some of the diseases peculiar to the sheep business. His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed like a second-hand bicycle pump. I looked at him and gave vent to just a few musings. 'Imperial Caesar,' says I, 'asleep in such a way, might shut his ...
— Options • O. Henry
... soaking the old man's feet or tucking up the covers around the invalid mother. While other maidens were in the cotillon, they were dancing attendance upon rheumatism and spreading plasters for the lame back of the septuagenarian, and heating catnip tea for insomnia. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... bears on the actual purpose in hand: in the first example, if the success of the railroad president arises from the power of understanding men and of philosophic insight into large problems, the reasoning will probably be valid; in the last example, if applied to insomnia due to overwork, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Her symptoms all pointed to the nervous system as the fons et origo mali. First general debility, that concealed but ubiquitous leader of innumerable armies of weakness and ill, laid siege to her, and captured her. Then came insomnia, that worried her nights for month after month, and made her beg for opium, alcohol, chloral, bromides, any thing that would bring sleep. Neuralgia in every conceivable form tormented her, most ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... fact causing her sleepless nights. Mr. Rose, who was suffering from the same form of insomnia, had taken her into his confidence, and she—ultimately—took me ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... for obesity, gout, rheumatism, and sluggish metabolism, because it is felt that the shorter ultra-violet rays may be harmful. These rays are said to increase the pulse, respiration, temperature, and blood-pressure and may even start hemorrhages and in excessive amounts cause headache, palpitation, insomnia, and anemia. These same authorities condemn sun-baths to the naked body of the tuberculous, claiming that any cures effected are consummated despite the injury done by the energy of short wave-length. There is no doubt that these rays are ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... life, Enid Crofton had only had one attack of insomnia. During the ten days that had followed her husband's sudden death—for the inquest had had to be put off for a day or two—she had hardly slept at all, and the doctor who had been so kind a friend during that awful time, had had to give ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... symptoms in a quiet corner. They described their strange shiverings down the spine; the curious fits of hunger that came on before meals; the dislike to crossing the road when there was an accident; the inability to sleep, sometimes taking the form of complete insomnia for as much as twenty minutes in the early morning. They pitied each other cordially, though neither listened to the other's symptoms, except in exchange ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... too weak. The second finger pulse of the right wrist is superficial and devoid of vigour, as the spleen must be affected injuriously by the liver. The weak action of the heart, and its febrile state, should be the natural causes which conduce to the present irregularity in the catamenia, and insomnia at night; the poverty of blood in the liver, and the sluggish condition of that organ must necessarily produce pain in the ribs; while the overdue of the catamenia, the cardiac fever, and debility of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... have been quite so positive as that," he said, "even then; but I cannot deny that this ridiculous fancy haunted me for many hours when I was endeavoring to snatch a little sleep amid the insomnia that a too active brain produced. Yes, there were moments when these two beings with greenish eyes, sinuous movements, golden hair, and mysterious ways, seemed to me to be blended into one, and to be merely the double manifestation of a ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... all. They are supposed to be sung by a mediaeval prisoner who cannot sleep; and who, to beguile the tediousness of his insomnia, sets any words that come into his head to the tune of the chime which marks the hours from a neighboring belfry. I tried to fancy that his name was Pasquier de la Mariere, and ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... cruelly ill he had slept since her coming, nor how little a man tortured by insomnia can be held responsible for his utterances; and the significance of his last words so startled her that she clutched ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... subject of sleep, we should note the benefit to be derived from regularity in sleep. All Nature seems to move rhythmically and sleep is no exception. Insomnia may be treated by means of habituating one's self to get sleepy at a certain time, and there is no question that the rising process may be made easier if one forms the habit of arising at the same time every morning. To rhythmize this important function is a long step ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... of Constantius, and smitten his vanity to the quick. He writhed with jealousy, and grew thin and sleepless and sick. At the same time he sustained defeat after defeat in his own campaign in Asia against the Persians. Musing, during nights of insomnia, the emperor blamed himself ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... with almost no furniture, floors of varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf of books of a particular and dippable order, such as "Pepys," the "Paston Letters," Burt's "Letters from the Highlands," or the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the Church of the Covenant. Growing Insomnia. Resolves to try the Water-cure. Its beneficial Effects. Summer at Newburgh. Reminiscences of an Excursion to Palz Point. Death of her Husband's Mother. Funeral of her Nephew, Edward ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... air of repose about it when we arrived. Before we had been in residence twenty-four hours most of the repose had vanished 'like a dutiful bream,' as Adrian expressed it. However, nothing unduly outrageous happened till last night, when Adrian had a fit of insomnia and amused himself by unscrewing and transposing all the bedroom numbers on his floor. He transferred the bathroom label to the adjoining bedroom door, which happened to be that of Frau Hoftath Schilling, and this morning from seven o'clock onwards the old lady had a stream ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... characteristics—furious exaltation, constant over-excitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and single-mindedness of purpose constrained and ruled by a fixed idea. In addition to this, he displays the usual physical symptoms, such as insomnia, a pallid complexion, hot-headed, foulness of dress and person,[3101] with, during the last five months of his life, rashes and itching all over his body.[3102] Issuing from ill-matched stock, born of a mixed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... when some subtle ailment had begun to sap it. The change was less in his muscular strength than in his nerves and his mental vigor. He found himself growing peculiarly irritable; his failures excited spasms of blind fury which left him weak and spent; he began to suffer the depressing tortures of insomnia. At times the nerves in his face and neck twitched unaccountably, and this distressing ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... intelligence that nothing remotely resembling an attempt to smuggle anything ashore had ever been made; still, it would be awkward in the extreme if one or more of them should happen to be troubled with insomnia on that particular night, and elect to pass the sleepless hours on deck: but Don Hermoso might be trusted to attend to that matter when he should arrive on board about four o'clock, or a little after, as he did, accompanied by Senora Montijo ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... aspect, the breeze was gently moving the leaves. A solemn peace seemed to be spreading itself through space. The houses appeared wrapped in slumber, but behind the closed windows might be surmised the insomnia of the reddened eyes, the sighs from hearts anguished by the threatened danger, the tremulous agility of the hands preparing the war outfit, perhaps the last loving greetings exchanged without pleasure, with ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... last the conference came to an end and Vicenti rose to go, Roddy declared himself too excited to sleep and volunteered to accompany the doctor to his door. But the cause of his insomnia was not General Rojas but the daughter of General Rojas, and what called him forth into the moonlit Alameda was his need to think undisturbed of Inez, and, before he slept, to wish "good-night" to the house that sheltered ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... coral was a good guard against the evil eye and sail-cloth from a shipwrecked vessel tied to the right arm was a preventive as well as a cure for epilepsy. There is almost no end to such instances. The list of charms and incantations is quite as curious. There are forms of words which will cure insomnia and indeed, if one may trust current observation, forms of words not primarily so intended may ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... Why don't you make him go?" [691] She occasionally met her husband's friends, Mr. and Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mr. Payne. One day at some dinner it transpired in the course of conversation that Mr. Payne had all his life been an habitual sufferer from insomnia. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... days with an obscure disorder of the brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by ill-considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion. His disease took many forms—insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight, incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that "he never saw a perfectly well day during his entire literary career." Even when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the limit of his ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... gesture she pushed these thoughts from her as though they were tangible things. No, no! she would not be beaten! Insomnia, narcotics and stimulants had unnerved her for the time, but she was strong enough to pull herself together and stay the circumstances which threatened to swamp her midway in her career. Bolstered for the moment by this ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in the woods is pleasant. The eager, nervous straining for sleep gives way to a delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... 1816 she returned to Paris, and spent a number of months very happily in her old style—in the society of the salon. Though devoured by insomnia, enervated by the use of opium, and besieged by fear of death, she accepted all invitations, and kept open house herself, receiving in the morning, at dinner, and in the evening; and though at night she paced the ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... he retrogrades into something fit only for the scrap-heap. The history is the same in all cases, although it may be more or less prolonged. The discomfort, occasional slight illnesses, the gradual loss of effective thought and power to concentrate, lack of appetite, unreasonable temper, insomnia, nerve diseases, and perhaps a complete nervous and physical breakdown if the conditions are not recognized in time, are the varying ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... unsatisfying slumber which sometimes follows a night of insomnia I was awakened by the laughter and shouts of children. When I looked out I saw brooding above the hollow a still gray day, in whose light the woodlands of the park were all in sombre brown, and the trout stream between its sedgy banks glided dark ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... this out to Coleridge, who told Wordsworth that he could not sleep all the next night for thinking of it. What months of insomnia must he not have suffered from the ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... forty the devil entered into Owen. It came in the form of insomnia. Loss of sleep will make any man irritable and unreasonable, but hardly dishonest. With the sleeplessness, however, came the temptation to take drugs. Owen shifted from one narcotic to another, finally, ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... many anxious allusions, which may indicate that Haydn was suffering from insomnia, unless you are inclined to give them a more subtle significance. But to the quotations, with regrets that ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... tinkling its quarter miles in the great silence of the sea. I don't mean to say that our passengers dreamed aloud of Almayer, but it is indubitable that two of them at least, who could not sleep, apparently, and were trying to charm away the trouble of insomnia by a little whispered talk at that ghostly hour, were referring in some way or other to Almayer. It was really impossible on board that ship to get away definitely from Almayer; and a very small pony tied up forward and whisking its tail inside the ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... wonderful cures. Shell-shock, insomnia, nervous depression, lumbago, suicidal mania, family life—anything." Neville's attention was straying to Grandmama, who was coming slowly towards them down the path, leaning on her stick, so she did not see Mrs. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... Sitz-baths at a temperature from 110 to 90 F. may be taken just before retiring throughout the pregnancy. The frequency and duration of the bath as well as the temperature should be regulated by the attending physician. In cases of intense nervousness and insomnia these baths have an excellent sedative effect. A pregnant woman must never under any circumstances take ocean baths, since there is always great danger that the shock of the waves will cause an abortion. Sea-voyages should be avoided because of the severe nausea and ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... occupied an adjoining chamber, and was ever on the watch, ready to respond to the faintest call. Again, it was he who respectfully intervened whenever his Holiness sat up too late or worked too long. But on this point it was difficult to induce the Pope to listen to reason. During his hours of insomnia he would often rise and send Squadra to fetch a secretary in order that he might detail some memoranda or sketch out an encyclical letter. When the drafting of one of the latter impassioned him he would have spent days and nights over it, just as formerly, when claiming proficiency in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Up on the twelfth floor of this hotel there's a big, old-fashioned bedroom. In half an hour I can have that room made up with the softest linen sheets, and the curtains pulled down, and not a sound. That room's so restful it would put old Insomnia himself to sleep. Will you let me tuck you away ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... epilepsy, alcoholic mania, delirium tremens, tremors, hallucinations, insomnia, vertigo, mental and muscular debility, impairment of vision, mental depression, paralysis, a partial or total loss of self-respect and a departure of the power of self-control. Many minor difficulties arise from mere functional ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... for sight or sense of her, to assure him that—in spite of qualms and indecisions—he had chosen aright. Conviction grew that directly the veil of sleep fell he would see her. It magnified his insomnia from mere discomfort to a baffling inimical presence withholding him from her:—till utter weariness blotted out everything; and even as he hovered on the verge of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... I lived alone with a faithful coloured servant by the name of Sawyer, was not a house to which I could think of bringing a bride, much less so dainty a one as Edith Bartlett. Being a sufferer from insomnia, I had caused a secret sleeping chamber to be built of stone beneath the foundation, and when even the silence of this retreat failed to bring slumber, I sometimes called in a professional mesmeriser to put me into a hypnotic sleep, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... rend it and scatter it. Each passer-by carries away a little of it on a threadbare coat, a worn muffler, or coarse gloves rubbing against each other. It drenches the shivering blouses, the waterproofs thrown over working dresses; it blends with all the breaths, hot with insomnia or alcohol, buries itself in the depths of empty stomachs, penetrates the shops which are just opening their doors, dark courtyards, staircases, where it stands on the balusters and walls, and fireless garrets. That is why so little of it remains out-of-doors. But in that open, stately ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... and effective than those of his immediate successors. He understood the use of enemas and artificial feeding. In cases of insanity he recognized that improvement followed the use of narcotics in the treatment of the accompanying insomnia. He recognized also morbid illusions. He recommended lotions and salves for the treatment of some ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... having learned from the prisoner the real cause of his sufferings, which sometimes assumed an acute form of violence and threats. During one of these painful minutes, when K.'s will power was weak, as a result of insomnia, from which he was suffering, I seated myself on his bed and treated him in general with fatherly kindness, and he blurted out everything to me right ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... ceremony, that a daughter was born to them. To celebrate the event, I suppose, Ruiz executed one or two brilliant forays clear away at the rear of our forces, and defeated the detachments sent out to cut off his retreat. General Robles nearly had a stroke of apoplexy from rage. He found another cause of insomnia than the bites of mosquitoes; but against this one, senores, tumblers of raw brandy had no more effect than so much water. He took to railing and storming at me about my strong man. And from our impatience to end this inglorious ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... have you any clear idea in your minds as to what this divinely denounced sleep is? Sleep is good and necessary in our bodily life. We would not live long if we did not sleep; we would soon go out of our mind; we would soon lose our senses if we did not sleep. Insomnia is one of the worst symptoms of our eager, restless, over-worked age. "He giveth His beloved sleep"; and while they sleep their corn grows they know not how. But sleep in the great exhortation-passages of the Holy Scriptures does not mean rest and restoration; it means in all those passages insensibility, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... danger that I foresee in all this work that I have planned is that it may produce overstimulation. Some one was telling me that the trees on the Embankment there in London are dying of arboreal insomnia. The light of the sun keeps them awake all day, and the electric lights keep them awake all night. So the poor things are dying from lack of sleep. Macbeth had some trouble of that sort, too, as ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... to his own admission, his money was a source of great annoyance to him. He was not out of debt but once, and then, before he fully realised it. So unusual was the condition, that he could not sleep; the first thing he did in the morning was to borrow right and left for fear another attack of insomnia might interfere with his ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... my Aunt Jerusha the credit of saying at this point that her method of putting me to sleep was efficacious. I do not ever remember having retained consciousness past the third paragraph of her remedy for insomnia. ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind. Then Pete Leddy's final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield's attitude in answer rose out of the pantomime in ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... is now over eighty years old having been born in 1803. He is strong and healthy. How has he preserved his vigorous constitution? The editor of Scribner gives the answer: "The hall windows of his house are open, winter and summer, and none but open grate-fires are allowed. Insomnia never troubles him, for he falls asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow. His appetite and digestion are always good, and he has not lost a meal in ten years. What an example to the men who imagine it is hard work that is killing them in this career ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... the tortures of insomnia, the pains of violent rheumatism, the dreadful imprisonment of a partial paralysis. I was in and out of hospitals. I spent months on my back, entertained only by my lurid memories. My mind became starved ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... as it often is every day, the quality of the blood will suffer seriously, and many individuals are the victims of neuralgic pains, headaches, nervousness, insomnia, anemia, and general broken health as a direct ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... off so many American journalists, sometimes, it would seem, almost before their time (but that is a matter of opinion), is unknown in London. A man who reads the "London Times," regularly and conscientiously, is guaranteed forever against insomnia. London "Punch" is a paper which the severest ascetic may read, all through Lent, without danger ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... both these passages, as in a hundred similar ones, we find Shakespeare himself praising sleep as only those tormented by insomnia can ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... have become his bitterest enemies; they wag their venomous tongues at banquets, in conversation, in the confessional, in sermons, in lectures, at court, in vehicles and ships. The minor enemies, like troublesome vermin, drive him to weariness of life, or to death by insomnia. He compares his tortures to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. But his is worse, for there is no end to it. For years he has daily been dying a thousand deaths and that alone; for his friends, if such there are, are ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... was. He was tempted to rise and make a light and look at his watch, but he felt that the effort and the blow of the glare on his eyes might confirm his insomnia. He lay and wondered, consumed with curiosity as to the hour—as if that knowledge could ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... have been troubled with insomnia, or wakefulness or disturbing dreams, have been enabled to secure sound sleep by merely relaxing the muscles and repeating mechanically, without effort at anything more, some formula descriptive of what is desired. The ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... being, as yet, unknown quantities to young Tom Verity, it followed that insomnia, with its thousand and one attendant miseries, was an unknown quantity likewise. Upon the eve of the stiffest competitive examination those, now outlived, years of tutelage had imposed on him, he could still tumble into bed secure of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... gazed for a moment at Kendrick as if trying to collect his thoughts. Then he explained that he had been troubled with insomnia and got up to smoke a cigarette. He had been fool enough to perch up on the brass rail at the rear of the private car, thinking the fresh air might make him sleepy. The train had been hitting up a fast pace on a down grade and ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... group assembled near him, finishing his survey upon Tommy's burning countenance. "Yes—Monck," he said. "He's staying with Barnes at Khanmulla to see this affair through. If I were Mrs. Monck I should be pretty anxious about him. He says it's insomnia." ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... satisfied that my telegram would put some insomnia in Ninety-sixth Street when the great work closed for the night at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the protector of the household returned to rest those tired wheels that had been whirring fast in his head since 2 P. M., short-belted to the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... "I cannot understand, John; it is absurd to say that you cannot sleep on a feather-bed. Mr Hare told me you complained of insomnia, and there is no surer way of losing your health. It is owing to the hardness of those college mattresses, whereas ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... whatever the precise mechanism by which the effects are produced, constipation does result in a lowering of the resistance to disease. More frequent fits, colic, foul breath, headache right across the forehead, lost appetite, drowsiness, skin eruptions, irritability, insomnia, melancholia and anaemia (especially the "green sickness" of women, usually connected with menstrual irregularities) are but a few of many ills partly or wholly due to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... recently noticed a paragraph in a Medical Journal advising persons suffering from Insomnia to try a musical box in their bed-rooms; and I therefore purchased a rather expensive one, which plays six tunes, with drum and trumpet accompaniment. Something seems to have gone wrong with the mechanism, as, after ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... be sleeping constantly. And if anyone cared for them, they would eat without waking, but some also were neglected, and these would die directly through lack of sustenance. But those who were seized with delirium suffered from insomnia and were victims of a distorted imagination; for they suspected that men were coming upon them to destroy them, and they would become excited and rush off in flight, crying out at the top of their voices. And those who were attending them were ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... it?" railed Kate. "Isn't poor Nora permitted to cough, if she is disposed to cough? She's in there doing the room for me. I'm going to try sleeping in there—isn't insomnia a fearful thing? But the fussiness ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... be in any respect different through all eternity from what it was during the first few hours? After how many hours does oblivion begin to be an evil? The man who loves to sleep yet hates to die might justly be granted everlasting life with everlasting insomnia." ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... psychoneuroses are of many forms.[3] To some people "nerves" means nervous prostration, breakdown, fatigue, weakness, insomnia, the blues, upset stomach, or unsteady heart,—all signs of so-called neurasthenia or nerve-weakness. To others the word "nerves" calls up memories of strange, emotional storms that seem to rise out of nowhere, to ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... uneasy. Since the day before he had thought of Therese. He had all night dreamed and yearned over her image. He saw her again, delightful, but in another manner, and even more desirable than he had imagined in his insomnia; less visionary, of a more vivid piquancy, and also of a mind more mysteriously impenetrable. She was sad; she seemed cold and indifferent. He said to himself that he was nothing to her; that he was becoming importunate ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... the normal, and a feeling of heat. The individual has a high warm color, does not sleep well, becomes or remains thin no matter how much he or she eats, is abnormally susceptible sexually, may suffer from a definite insomnia, is emotional, and perspires freely. Alert, neurotic or high-strung, magnetic, and imaginative are some of the descriptive adjectives applicable. The eyes are bright and prominent, large and beautiful, when they have not reached the stage entitled "pop-eyed." ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... reconciliation with her former friends who now ruled Paris and France with a relentless and perpetually bloodstained hand. No wonder that during the night which followed the receipt of this momentous document, Demoiselle Candeille suffered gravely from insomnia. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... *Insomnia*, or sleeplessness, on account of its effects upon the nervous system, is to be regarded as a serious condition, and hygienic means for relieving it should be diligently sought. Having its cause in nervousness, a disturbed circulation ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... The twenty-third—! He was a tall, youngish man, narrow-shouldered, rather commonplace-looking, with beautiful blue eyes, and a timid, winning, deprecatory manner. I told him I was suffering from insomnia. After raking over my grandfathers again and bringing the family history down by stages to the very moment I was shown into his office he said he should have to ask me to undergo a thorough physical—! But I was tired of being slapped and punched and breathed on and prodded, and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... Tinkleby and his comrades were designated a set of rowdy jackasses; and they replied to the compliment by declaring that a fraternity of live donkeys was better than a collection of stuffed owls, and advising Heningson to patent his discourse as an infallible cure for insomnia. Cutting allusions to the "Literary Society" and sarcastic retorts were exchanged in the corridors and playing-field; and so ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... a whisper of insanity. Certainly there was something hardly human about the colonel's wolfish pursuit of pleasure, and his chronic resolution not to go home till morning had a touch of the hideous clarity of insomnia. He was a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair still startlingly yellow. He would have looked merely blonde and leonine, but his blue eyes were sunk so deep in his face that they looked black. They were a little too close together. He had very long yellow ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... of a psychic character, but the psychic symptoms predominate. There may be headache, capricious appetite, or complete loss of appetite, considerable loss of flesh, or on the contrary very sudden and rapid putting on of fat, great irritability, insomnia, profuse perspiration; hot flashes throughout the body, and particularly in the face, which make the face "blushing" and congested, are particularly frequent. Then the woman's character may be completely ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... restlessly upon her pillow, saw the naughty moonbeams, got up, and went softly to the tent door. All the desert was bathed in light. She gazed out as a mariner gazes out over the sea. She heard jackals yelping in the distance, peevish in their insomnia, and fancied their voices were the voices of desert demons. As she stood there she thought of the figure in the mirage, and wondered if mirage ever rises at night—if, by chance, she might see it now. And, while she stood wondering, far away across the sand there floated up a silvery haze, ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... strangers to each other), had assumed attitudes of serious amiability round our table. A waiter approached for orders and it was then, in relation to my order for coffee, that the absolutely first thing I learned of Captain Blunt was the fact that he was a sufferer from insomnia. In his immovable way Mills began charging his pipe. I felt extremely embarrassed all at once, but became positively annoyed when I saw our Prax enter the cafe in a sort of mediaeval costume very much like what Faust wears in the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... swollen glands or sticky eyes. that people usually think of when they think "allergic reaction." Food allergies can cause many kinds of symptoms, from sinusitis to psychosis, from asthma to arthritis, from hyperactivity to depression, insomnia to narcolepsy—and commonly the symptoms don't manifest immediately after eating. Frequently, allergic reactions are so low grade as to be unnoticeable and may not produce an observable condition until many years of their grinding down the vital force has passed. When the condition finally ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... suffer largely from despondency, insomnia, and a feeling of martyrdom. Like the Positive type of the same Mount, they are also much inclined towards rheumatism and disorders brought on through ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... telling you nothing new when I say that Aristotle, Pliny, all the sages of antiquity, attributed medical and divine virtues to them. According to the pagans, agate and carnelian stimulate, topaz consoles, jasper cures languor, hyacinth drives away insomnia, turquoise prevents falls or lightens the shock, amethyst ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... surprised him one night while he was watering with his tears the ink he was putting to so sorry a use. She had been aware that he sat up late at night—his sleeplessness was not the insomnia of genius—for she had seen the glare of light from his little lamp burning later than the usual bedtime of the chateau, in one of the turret ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... received a letter from her which much alarmed us. It was written from Naples and dated October 25. John, she said, had been ailing of late with nervousness and insomnia. On Wednesday, two days before the date of her letter, he had suffered all day from a strange restlessness, which increased after they had retired for the evening. He could not sleep and had dressed again, telling her he would walk a little in the night air to ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... side, and for some of them this position is awkward at first. Frequently the pressure makes it necessary to get up several times during the night to empty the bladder. In a few cases also the compression of the chest interferes somewhat with breathing. When insomnia is due to the pressure of the womb against neighboring parts of the body, it can be partially counteracted by getting into a comfortable position; but it is also necessary to have the surroundings as conducive to sleep as possible. Thus anyone will be much more likely to ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... than any other the Emperor rose often in the night, put on his dressing-gown, and worked in his cabinet: frequently he had insomnia, which he could not overcome; and when the bed at last became unbearable, he sprang from it suddenly, took a book and read, walking back and forth, and when his head was somewhat relieved lay down again. It was very rarely he slept ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... lighted, the igloo is soon comparatively warm, and in the arctic regions, when men are tired out from a long march, they generally fall asleep easily. Insomnia is not one of ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... estranged her colleagues at the theatre, and as a result of all this, and also on account of her unfortunate choice of a role, her appearance was a failure. There could be no question of her being taken on at that theatre. Although her weakness increased, and she suffered from constant insomnia, she still tried, in her magnanimity and her shame, to hide from me the awkwardness of her situation. She went to a cheaper inn, the 'Stadt Frankfurt,' where she intended to wait and see the result of sparing ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... to fret, and his power to sleep at length failed him. Then a strange desire to possess a rose seized him—perhaps because he knew it to be his mother's favourite flower. Whatever the cause, the longing increased his insomnia, and as he did not say, perhaps did not know, that the want of a rose had anything to do with his complaint, no one at first thought ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... to be worth $200,000,000, but it is mostly in land and houses and does not pay two per cent." [Footnote: Related in the New York "Times," issue of December 9, 1885.] In the same breath that he boasted of his wealth he would bewail the ill-health condemning him to be a victim of insomnia and indigestion. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... dome and gilt crosses, but it is all very mournful and depressing, especially to one fresh from Europe. This train has one advantage, there is no rattle or roar about it, as it steals like a silent ghost across the desolate steppes. As a cure for insomnia it would be invaluable, and we therefore sleep a good deal, but most of the day is passed in the restaurant. Here the military element is generally engrossed in an interminable game of Vint[1] (during the process of which a Jew civilian is mercilessly rooked), ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... down on the camp again. The whole world was hard as iron. The men kept close to the Big Chimney all day long, and sat there far into the small hours of the morning, saying little, heavy-eyed and sullen. The dreaded insomnia of the Arctic had laid hold on all but the Colonel. Even his usually unbroken repose was again disturbed one night about a week later. Some vague sort of sound or movement in the room—Kaviak on a raid?—or—wasn't that ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... could not; but its morbid excess could, especially when taken in time. Advice was generally called in too late. However, here the only serious symptom was the Insomnia. "We must treat her for that," said he, writing a prescription; "but for the rest, active employment, long walks or rides, and a change of scene and associations, will be all that will be required. In these cases," resumed Mr. Osmond, "connected as they are with Hyperaemia, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... haw!" burst out Walky. "Jefers-pelters, Janice Day! You've abeout give Polktown insomnia already! I sh'd say our eyes was purty ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... great pain and anxiety now opened for him. But his neurasthenia increased; he suffered from insomnia, obscure cerebral discomfort, stammering, chronic conjunctivitis, inability to concentrate his attention, and dejection. Meanwhile his homosexual emotions strengthened, and assumed a more sensual character. He abstained from indulging them, as also from onanism, but he was often ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... enough, this climate gives me insomnia. Probably it is the mixture of the cold and the long twilight (I can read at 9.30), and the ridiculous habit of growing light again at about three in the morning. I am beginning to have a fellow feeling with the chickens ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... would lay down and take up at least a score of times, nights of voluptuous weariness which he enjoyed till daybreak like some secret orgie, cramped up in that tiny room, his eyes troubled by the flickering yellow light, while he yielded to the fever of insomnia and schemed out new social schemes of the most absurdly ingenuous nature, in which woman, always personified by Miette, was worshipped by the nations ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... punishment of insomnia, it only exists in Chinese and English prisons. In China it is inflicted by placing the prisoner in a small bamboo cage; in England by means of the plank bed. The object of the plank bed is to produce insomnia. There is no other object in it, and it invariably ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... seems to be done most easily by children, it is an excellent food, but where sweets are over-eaten, and not properly digested, they give rise to a great accumulation of gas in the intestine, and produce in many persons a marked acidity of the stomach, frequently accompanied by severe insomnia. Nothing so quickly relieves such sleeplessness, caused by a "sour stomach," as allowing ten or fifteen grains of ordinary cooking-soda to slowly dissolve in the mouth and swallowing the saliva rendered alkaline ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... simply as the sugar that lures the random bee. The hero, living in Boston in 1887, is supposed to fall asleep in a deep, underground chamber which he has made for himself as a remedy against a harassing insomnia. Unknown to the sleeper the house above his retreat is burned down. He remains in a trance for a hundred and thirteen years and awakes to find himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. Kind hands remove him from his sepulcher. He is revived. He finds himself under the care of a certain learned ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... have been 'another awful effect of the spiritual delusion' to chronicle. The honest verdict of the first century would have been: 'Another possessed of devils or devil-crazed.' The wretches well knew that insomnia is an excellent ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... take kindly to his enforced retirement? Far from it. With all the querulous impatience of an octogenarian, full of whims, sick in soul and body, suspicious, irritable, dying inch by inch, a prey to insomnia, his neuralgic pains, his swollen veins, in short, a crabbed old man, awaiting the call—behold now our great Otto von Bismarck, and mark well to what narrow limits his ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... had her former attitude of robust equality with her sister. Vanity is full of resources when it is wounded. But her attacks of sudden faintness she could not control; they represented the only genuine feature of her indisposition,—at least they, and the continued insomnia which was an ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... pressed heavily upon him, and Mr. Wace does not think that he was altogether free from occasional intemperance. He had begun life in a comfortable position, he was a man of fair education, and he suffered, for weeks at a stretch, from melancholia and insomnia. Afraid to disturb his family, he would slip quietly from his wife's side, when his thoughts became intolerable, and wander about the house. And about three o'clock one morning, late in August, chance directed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... trainer soon found that I was being overworked, I had some "let up" of this strenuous system. The extra work in addition to the regular afternoon practice, made my days pretty severe going and when night came I was not troubled with insomnia. ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... believed, when he was on his feet again, that his life was wrecked for ever. He did suffer from insomnia, even with his splendid sea-seasoned constitution, for months, which proved the poignant insistency of his grief, making thinking a disease instead of a healthy function. He performed his duties mechanically, rigidly, like an engine stoked from the outside. He no longer ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... the cause is absolutely necessary. In order to discover the cause it is sometimes essential to study the child's whole routine in order to be able to tell exactly just what is causing the apparent insomnia. It may be necessary to change the method of feeding, to regulate the studies and the exercises, and to suggest changes regarding the sanitary and hygienic environment of the child's life. Mothers must ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... 9. Bookstall. (Books) "highly recommended for insomnia; friends we never speak to, and always cut if we want ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... favorable symptoms, I was secretly convinced that I had forfeited what little mental health I had retained; but was consoled by the fact that I slept all night and a part of the day: I had suffered from insomnia since my duties ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... strange temperament. He found something very pathetic in that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate through her rooms the livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of insomnia seemed to make itself heard in every ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... which is identical to that of external suggestions. An idea, a sentiment, dominates the mind, overcomes all its antagonists and produces a strong suggestive effect on the whole nervous system in the direction which it symbolizes. The idea of being unable to sleep often produces insomnia; the idea of sexual impotence may at once inhibit erection and render coitus impossible. The idea of yawning makes one yawn; that of coitus provokes erections; the idea of shame causes blushing; that of fear ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... was insomnia. I could never sleep at the right time and I was always dead tired on duty. Once I worked forty-three hours at a stretch and after that I had to do a guard in our trench. I felt sleepy all of a sudden. I pinched myself and banged the butt of my rifle ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... Insomnia is not a bane of our modern civilization alone. This little book shows that our ancestors craved and sought sleep just as we do. Here is a prescription to cure sleeplessness, which might be tried by any wakeful soul of modern times, since it requires neither rubies, pearls, nor ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... An African insect (Glossina morsitans) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... of stout nerves, seldom troubled by insomnia, but he had not slept. His scouts had told him that there were Indians in the forest ahead. One or two incautious explorers had been wounded by bullets fired from hidden places. He and the best men with ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... unless you make a study of diseases so rare that nobody has them. Discover a new disease, and save the life of some solitary nigger who brought it to Liverpool, and you'll be a baronet in a fortnight and a member of all the European academies in a month. But study colds, indigestion and insomnia, and change a thousand lives a year from despair to felicity, and no authority will take the slightest notice of you ... As with physical, so with mental diseases—or spiritual, if you like to call them so. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... the malady that never afterwards left him came also, and, seated motionless at his side, gazed at him with its threatening countenance. He suffered from terrible headaches, followed by nights of insomnia. He had nervous attacks, which he soothed with narcotics and anesthetics, which he used freely. His sight, which had troubled him at intervals, became affected, and a celebrated oculist spoke of abnormality, asymetry of the pupils. The famous young man trembled in secret ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of scouts, was harassed nearly to insomnia over the change in his friend. At the bottom of the mystery there must be inspiration for a glowing line, and with pen ready poised over the violet fluid of romance, it was disheartening to have the solution elude him. He proposed ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... It was nothing pertaining to myself or my adventures; and I had never heard of a ship being found deserted with all boats in place. It was something I must have heard at some time and place that bore no relation to the sea and its mysteries. It tormented me; I worried myself into insomnia that night, thinking about it, but at last fell asleep, and awakened in the morning with ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... long time before he fell asleep, but he did so at last, for Insomnia is a demon who rarely finds his way into Arcadia. But, all at once, he was awake again,—broad awake, and staring into the dark, for a thousand voices seemed to be screaming in his ears, and eager hands were shaking, and plucking at window and lattice. He started ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... badly edited, ignorantly edited, from the beginning. The selection of the beds is given to some hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia. Nothing is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so difficult to make. Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no ship ever does or ever did. In Noah's Ark the beds were simply ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "Insomnia," said Pearce, huskily. "I can't sleep. Suppose you saw me at work through the window?" There was almost an eager haste in ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... Mr. Jardine appeared at this moment He questioned Towler as to the possibility of tranquillising his patient; and he found that the sedatives prescribed by Dr. Mallison had ceased to exercise any beneficial effect. Nights of insomnia and restlessness had been the rule with the patient ever since Towler had been in ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon |
