"Insomnia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... secreted by intestinal bacteria and responsible for many of the symptoms of senility. It used to be thought that large doses of indol might be consumed with little or no effect on normal man, but now we know that headache, insomnia, confusion, irritability, decreased activity of the cells, and intoxication are possible from it. Comparatively small doses over a long time produce changes in organs that lead ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... 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 ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... a moment. Yes—the idea was a good one. She would be only fifteen years old by this time, and must certainly have changed to an extent of which he was at his age incapable. Besides, she had been asleep, and nervous insomnia could not be responsible for retarding the evidences of youth in her case. His agony of dread lest this great experiment fail ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... was in constant rebellion against established precedent, constantly called below to be lectured by The Roman. In revenge for which at night he made the life of Mr. Bundy one of constant insomnia, and, by soaping the stairs or strewing tacks in the hall, seriously interfered with that inexperienced young ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... burst out Walky. "Jefers-pelters, Janice Day! You've abeout give Polktown insomnia already! I sh'd say our eyes ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... his beard disheveled by his restless movements, with his angry eyes, the dignitary resembled any other angry old man who suffered with insomnia and shortness of breath. It was as if the death which people were preparing for him, had made him bare, had torn away from him the magnificence and splendor which had surrounded him—and it was hard to believe that it was ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... desperately in love with his cousin Rachel. Almost wild concerning the safety of the Moonstone which he has conveyed to her, he purloins it while under the influence of opium, taken to relieve insomnia, and gives it to the plausible villain of the book—Godfrey Ablewhite. The latter pawns it to pay his debts, and is murdered by East Indians, who believe that he still has ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... not sleep. The faithful St. Michael's kept him well aware of this fact. He lit a candle and tried to read, smoked a cigarette and then, blowing the candle out, tried to sleep. But insomnia had him fairly in her grip; to-night there was no escape from her and he lay whilst the moon, creeping through the sky, cast her ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... dead than alive, with racking pains, shiverings and exhaustion from prolonged insomnia, he was taken ashore in a Southern city and a physician summoned, who, with a promptness characteristic of the profession, administered a preparation of morphia, and the old fatal spell was renewed at once. The vitiated system ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... glitter, a dazzling and confusing phantasmagoria of life that wearies and stultifies the mental and moral nature. It induces a sort of intellectual fatigue through which we see the ranks of the victims of insomnia, melancholia, and insanity constantly recruited. Our modern brain-pan does not seem capable as yet of receiving, sorting, and storing the vast army of facts and impressions which present themselves daily. The white light of publicity is too white. We are weighed upon by ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... articles of food are so well 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, ate whatever ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... 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
... healthy and strong and all that," he explained, "but she was born with insomnia. She never could sleep. She couldn't sleep as a little baby even. But it's never hurt her any, because she's got a will, and won't let it get on her nerves. She's just about as tense as they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can't sleep, she just wills to relax, and she does relax. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... over, and I know that a few weeks one way or the other never did matter to you and won't now. Of course, it has its ridiculous side, but I really think it would comfort John Fulton quite a little if he heard that you had left Aiken. You see he's half crazy with grief and insomnia, and he's got it in his head that if Lucy had fewer other people to amuse her, she might get bored again and in sheer boredom turn again to him. But just use your influence with Lucy, if you've got any. I tell you on the honor of a cynical and skeptical man, that if things ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... WEG, - Many 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; well, I can best explain my state ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and we add: "Blessed be the man that invented cool nights to sleep in." And I have no fault to find with the full indulgence in sleep. It is good for the weary man or woman. It is well to make up arrears, to pay oneself the accumulated debts of insomnia and tossing and restlessness with an abundance of calm, dreamless, restful sleep. Nay, not only would I have men claim their arrearage, but lay in a surplus stock against future emergencies, future drafts upon their bank account ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... 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 training for ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... there 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 ...
— Options • O. Henry
... "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 ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... didn't sleep much for the next two or three nights. All through my trial and in Barlinney I had been playing a part. When the occasion demanded I could be as cool as I was with Captain Robinson. But that was a strain and it took it out of me. During these following days I was nervous; I had insomnia; I paced my cell at night. The feeling of a jail ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... directly to his berth on reaching the station, and while the car remained in the train shed, slept. The departure wakened him, and after useless striving he resigned himself to his insomnia, raised his window curtain, and lay watching the staid procession of Dutch-named towns picketting the river banks. A mimic tempest fretted the Tappan Sea, whose bravado dwindled to mere guerilla marauding in the Highlands, and vanished ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... 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 ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... up at half-past seven, and complained to her maid that she had had insomnia for twenty minutes. Having glanced at the enlarged and coloured photograph of the late William that decorated every room, she ordered a luncheon of roast mutton and rice pudding, rhubarb tart and cream, almonds and raisins, and oranges, thinking that this menu would be ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... degrees of ugliness Fred's verses were not good, but they were full of dejection Hang out the bush, but keep no tavern A familiarity which, had he known it, was not flattering His sleeplessness was not the insomnia of genius Importance in this world are as easily swept away as the sand Natural longing, that we all have, to know the worst Notion of her husband's having an opinion of his own Pride supplies some ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... disinfectants from the drugs themselves. These latter she arranged on a table by themselves—studying the labels—assuring herself of their uses. Quinine for the regular morning and evening doses, sulphonal and trional for insomnia, ether for injections in case of anemia after hemorrhage, morphine for delirium, citrite of caffeine for weakness of the heart, tincture of valerian for the tympanites, bismuth to relieve nausea and vomiting, and the crushed ice wrapped in ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... President Lincoln. Dedication 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... 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
... of 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, settling down upon morphine. Five ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... responsibility. I am now feeble with age, having served at so great a distance; I also deplore my stupidity, and am extremely apprehensive of my inability in performing the functions devolving upon me. Since the sixth or seventh moon of the year before last I have suffered from insomnia. A year ago my spirits became daily more abattu. In the second month of last year I suddenly experienced phlegm rising in my mouth, and vomited fresh red blood, without being able to stop it, so that in a trice ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... under the earth there, for all 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 up ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... wished to please the Warden of the prison, 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 ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... dead shadows stirred from the bunks, and the hollow-eyed victims of insomnia crept out to curse their tormentor. We organised an expedition to hunt him down. It was ridiculous enough, six strong men prowling for the life of one poor little insect. We did not find him, however, though we succeeded in silencing him. But ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... my first agricultural experiment. She called on me, and begged me as woman for woman in case she bought the neighbouring farm, to seclude all my animals and fowls from 5 P.M. till 10 A.M. each morning, as she must get her sleep, for, like her father, she was a life-long sufferer from insomnia. I would have done this if it were possible to repress the daybreak cries natural to a small menagerie which included chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese, besides two peacocks ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... "There was insomnia with occasional opium slumber; otherwise the mind was clear but anxious. The tongue was thickly coated, the lips were dry, ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... draw even keener attention than 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
... 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 blood ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... pillowcase, and a gray blanket of the army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probably straw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress was hillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of countless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we might share. We had, each, a prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling of the cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was an electric bulb which would be darkened at nine ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... general's friends when Natacha had sung in her low, sweet voice, "Good-night. May your eyes have rest from tears and calm re-enter your heart oppressed." The friends had certainly been made aware, by Matrena's anxious talking, of the general's insomnia, and they could not repress their tears as they listened to the poetic wish of charming Natacha. "All the same," thought Rouletabille, "no one could imagine what I have just seen. They are not dead for everyone ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... for sleeping on," she said, with a breathless effort for calm. "I found," she panted, "in my own insomnia, that merely the broken-up look of a page of dialogue in a novel racked my nerves so that I couldn't sleep. But narratives ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 his ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... went to pieces, he suffered from insomnia and did his work badly. He consulted a doctor. The prescription cost him three crowns; and such a prescription! He was to stop working; he had worked too hard, his brain was overtaxed. To stop work would mean starvation for all of them, and to ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates, till there had even come 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 ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... that these were 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
... return from Mrs. Porter's dinner, found him in his study engaged with a game of solitaire, while Hope was kneeling on a chair beside him with her elbows on the table. Mr. Langham had been troubled with insomnia of late, and so it often happened that when Alice returned from a ball she would find him sitting with a novel, or his game of solitaire, and Hope, who had crept downstairs from her bed, dozing in front of the open fire and keeping him silent company. The father and the younger daughter ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... in which 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, from which Sawyer ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... gentleman's observation as he alighted 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 ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... is that in both these passages, as in a hundred similar ones, we find Shakespeare himself praising sleep as only those tormented by insomnia can praise it. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... MUSIC.—I 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, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... eating into my flesh and veins. And this continued for eternity. You suffered for an hour, a day, a thousand years, and were no nearer to the end; ten thousand, a million years, and yet, as at the very first, it was for ever, and for ever still it would always be for ever! I suffered also from insomnia about ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... more 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
... time Chief-Justice Kotze undertook several journeys to the Free State and Cape Colony, ostensibly to rid himself of insomnia, but in reality, as results proved, in order to employ a judge for this trial. His choice eventually fell upon Mr. Gregorowski, formerly a judge in the Free State, and at that time State-Attorney to ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The modern mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... natural ills, there are two to which I never have been, and probably never shall be, subject—namely, gout and insomnia. My immunity from the former might be difficult to account for, but my exemption from the latter may, I think, be attributed to the operation of a mind at peace with all below. Nevertheless, it used to be my habit to ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... this period 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 ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... me at one time. I was always breaking down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never recovered permanently ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... bed, lying awake until long after all the rest of the world slumbered. This lying awake soon became a habit. The slightest sound broke his sleep—the gnawing of a mouse behind the mopboard, or a change in the wind; and then insomnia seized upon him. He lay there listening to the summer breeze among the elms, or to the autumn winds that, sweeping up from the sea, teased his ear with muffled accents ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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
... unbearable; she felt so unhappy. She lay quite still, with her eyes wide open, seeing the questions go round like the hands of a clock; the very words sounded as loud and distinct in her brain as the ticking of a clock. Her nerves were shattered, and life grew terribly distinct in the insomnia of the hot summer night. ... She threw herself over and over in her burning bed until at last her soul cried out of its lucid misery: 'Give me a passion for God or man, but give me a passion. I cannot ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... generally thin and pale, with a peculiar sallow, or yellowish-green color to the skin which has given rise to the term "green-sickness," or "Chlorosis." They fall easy victims to scrofula, consumption, nervous prostration, insomnia, and ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... "I've had insomnia lately," he said, after a perceptible pause. "It plays the deuce with one's nerves. I believe I need a change. This cursed country gets into one's bones if one stays out too long. I've forgotten what England looks like and I've got over the desire to go ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... of a bore," said Raffles. "The ladies have been out somewhere—trust them to spoil the show! They would get to bed before the stable folk, but insomnia is the curse of their sex and our profession. Somebody's not home yet; that will be the son of the house; but he's a beauty, who may ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... bracing. Next to capital, nothing is so timid as a king. Heine says that kings have to draw their nightcaps on over their crowns when they go to bed, in order to keep them from being stolen, and that they are subject to insomnia. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 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 ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... solitary street was presenting its usual 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 kisses ending ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... 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, and will ask to have it repeated or regularly given ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... 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 ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... Corona Lodge. The storekeeper asked Ajax outright if there were truth in the rumour that we were to be decorated with the blue ribbon, and my brother hinted mysteriously that even stranger things than that might happen. Jasperson complained of insomnia, but he said several times that he would never forget what Ajax was doing on his behalf, and I don't think he ever will. For my part I maintained a strict neutrality. Ethically considered, I was sensible that my brother's actions ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... lots better than I was, though I am still tussling with insomnia. My crazy nerves play me all sorts of tricks, but praise be I have stopped worrying. I have come at last to see that God has found even a small broken instrument like myself worth working through, and I just lift up my heart to Him every day, battered and bruised ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... 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
... 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 ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... INSOMNIA, is present in many cases; in others, there is unusual drowsiness but sleep gives neither rest nor strength; often it is disturbed by dreams that exhaust the vitality and leave the patient more tired ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Once I sought medical advice, but the doctor could discover nothing wrong with me except what might be caused by tobacco, and, following his advice, I left off smoking. He said I had no malaria; that I needed more exercise, perhaps; but he could not account for my insomnia, for I, like most patients, had concealed the vital facts in my case, and had complained of insomnia as the cause of my anxiety about ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... 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 punishments ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... there are 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 ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... the little 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
... "Argonaut" says 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; so she trained herself to laugh heartily at the least provocation, and would retire ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... of 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 ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... times we had had together. I remembered especially that evening when we had found this valley and given rein to our fancies. What horrid alchemy in the place had turned a gentleman into a brute? I thought of drink and drugs and madness and insomnia, but I could fit none of them into my conception of my friend. I did not consciously rescind my resolve to depart, but I had a notion that I would ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... lightly passed over. It is intended 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 ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... in the limbs, the temperature rises to 104 or even to 106 F., and assumes a pyaemic type. The pulse becomes rapid and weak. The tongue is dry and brown. There is profuse sweating, albuminuria, and often insomnia with delirium. Death may take place within a week, but more frequently occurs during the second ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... stickin' itself in the road to anywhere?"—all are closely scanned and noted, as they mount or descend Strood Hill in perennial procession. Dickens was himself a sturdy and inveterate pedestrian. When he suffered from insomnia he would think nothing of rising in the middle of the night and taking a thirty miles' ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... iron, soon chop it and 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. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... a talisman in insomnia and excitement—petted, in short, when it ought to have been restrained—chloral became for a time the spoilt child of psychological medicine, and, like other spoilt children, it has disappointed the fond hopes ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... that the young architect had killed himself. Garry was known to have suffered from insomnia, and was supposed to have taken an overdose of chloral. The doctor so decided, and the doctor's word was law in such MATTERS, and so there was no coroner's inquest. Then again, it was also known that he was doing a prosperous ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and there in the Metropolitan and Flatiron buildings shone an isolated and belated window light. At the Garden a Wild West show with rings and side performances had long ago disgorged its crowds and quieted its pandemonium of brass bands. Len Haswell had been walking with the aimlessness of insomnia, and asking himself over and over one question: "What changed it all?" In answer he accused himself and argued the case for the woman without whom he was too lonely to go home ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... these dialogues, nothing which smacks of the school. The discussion starts from things which they had under the eyes, often from some slight accidental happening. One night when Augustin could not sleep—he often suffered from insomnia—the dispute began in bed, for the master and his pupils slept in the same room. Lying there in the dark, he listened to the broken murmur of the stream. He was trying to think out an explanation of the pauses in the sound, when Licentius shifted under the bedclothes, and reaching ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... 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 be likely to change a sovereign for her; what tip she should give her steward; ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... common morbid phenomena he may be subject to, on which he is not likely to give information spontaneously because he is ignorant of their importance. He should be questioned about his sleep, whether he has dreams, etc. Mental sufferers nearly always sleep badly and are frequently tormented by insomnia and hallucinations. The inebriate imagines he is being pursued by disgusting, misshapen creatures, from which he cannot escape. Epileptics, and frequently also hysterical persons have peculiar obsessions. They fancy they cannot ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... debt 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 ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... condition frequently attributed to coffee, but that the authorities disagree on this ground is shown by Wiley's[196] contention, "We know beyond doubt that the caffein (in coffee) makes a direct attack on the nerves and causes insomnia." While ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... (only more purely), and if we consume the midnight oil, use perforce another system of illumination also—we burn the candle at both ends. A great novelist who adopted this baneful practice and indirectly lost his life by it (through insomnia) notes what is very curious, that notwithstanding his mind was so occupied, when awake, with the creatures of his imagination, he never dreamt of them; which I think is also the general experience. But he does not tell us for how many hours before he went to sleep, and tossed ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... was milder, but the victims raged. They swam on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the weapons of black Insomnia's armoury and became her soldiery, doing her will upon themselves. Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness. She is the fountain of the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled everlastingly, with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... finds in very many insane patients marked physical signs. There are pains, insensitive areas, hypersensitive areas, changes in the pupils of the eyes, unrestrained reflex action, and partial loss of muscular control, as shown in talking, walking, and writing. Constipation and insomnia are very early symptoms of disease in a very large ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... the case of a person suffering from insomnia. If he does not make any effort to sleep, he will lie quietly in bed. If on the contrary he tries to force himself to sleep by his will, the more efforts he makes, the more ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue |
