"Hypochondriac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time I hope that I am deceived by my own illness, that I am mistaken in regard to the albumen and the sugar I find, and in regard to my heart, and in regard to the swellings I have twice noticed in the mornings; when with the fervour of the hypochondriac I look through the textbooks of therapeutics and take a different medicine every day, I keep fancying that I shall hit upon something ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... all the veins of the body, recesses of the heart, nerves of the members, roots of the hair, perspiration of the substance, limbo of the brain, orifices of the epidermis, windings of the pluck, tubes of the hypochondriac and other channels which in her was suddenly dilated, heated, tickled, envenomed, clawed, harrowed, and disturbed, as if she had a basketful of needles in her inside. This was a maiden's desire, a well-conditioned desire, which troubled her sight to such a degree that she no ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... touch of a friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is the habit of people thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in exhibiting these miserable sores to any who would give themselves the pain of viewing them. A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and inward world, and caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... white with thinking, his eyes dim with trouble; for when once a man has set out to find God, he must find him or die. This was the inside reality whose outcome set the public of Glaston babbling. It was from this that George Bascombe magisterially pronounced him a hypochondriac, worrying his brain about things that had no existence—as George himself could with confidence testify, not once having seen the sight of them, heard the sound of them, or imagined in his heart that they ought to be, or even ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... for some weeks, he returned home much worse. In addition to the aggravation of his other symptoms, there were present oedematous swelling of the extremities, which were generally cold and benumbed, gnawing pain in the right hypochondriac region, and almost total loss of appetite. On examining the right hypochondrium, which he described as swollen, there was evident indication of an enlarged liver, and he complained much of shooting pain in that region during a paroxysm of cough. ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... 10. Hypochondriasis. The hypochondriac disease consists in indigestion and consequent flatulency, with anxiety or want of pleasureable sensation. When the action of the stomach and bowels is impaired, much gas becomes generated by the fermenting or putrescent aliment, and to this indigestion is catenated languor, coldness of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. In most cases this lower jaw —being easily unhinged ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... in the papers the death of Mr. Hope, and I am sure it shocked you. But it was scarcely possible that it could strike you so much as it did me. I, who had seen him but a few days before, and who had been rallying him upon his being hypochondriac. I, who had been laughing at him along with Mrs. Hope, for being, I thought, merely in the cold fit after having been in the hot fit of enthusiasm while finishing his book. He knew too well, poor man, what we did not know. I believe that I never had time ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... charms and healing-spells. These serve also to inspire hope, or the expectation of cure, in the patient's mind, and thus act as tonics; they may also be useful as a means of diverting the mind of a hypochondriac, and changing the current of his thoughts, in which sense they may ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... gossip about whither we may be gliding, for, as yet, not a soul on board of us knows—not even the Commodore himself; assuredly not the Chaplain; even our Professor's scientific surmisings are vain. On that point, the smallest cabin-boy is as wise as the Captain. And believe not the hypochondriac dwellers below hatches, who will tell you, with a sneer, that our world-frigate is bound to no final harbour whatever; that our voyage will prove an endless circumnavigation of space. Not so. For how can this world-frigate ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... protective armoury of great-coats, hessian cloaks, or umbrellas. It seemed as if a wet blanket were drawn between the sun and the earth. The atmosphere was always foggy, often perfectly wet, but never thoroughly dry. It wanted vitality; and every person that breathed it partook of its own damp, hypochondriac, inanimate character. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... attraction of repulsion. The muse who guides the dreamings of the Russian artist is a sombre and heavy-lidded lady, but most sombre, I think, when she moves in the brain of the musician. Then she wears the glooms and sables of the hypochondriac. She does not "nerve us with incessant affirmations." Rather, she enervates us with incessant dubitations. It is more than a relief to leave the crowded Promenade, after a Tchaikowsky symphony, to stroll in the dusky glitter of Langham Place, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Mr. B——, of W——, AEt. 31. After a tertian ague of 12 months continuation, suffered great indisposition for 10 months more. He chiefly complained of great straitness and pain in the hypochondriac region, very short breath, swelled legs, want of appetite. He had been under the care of some very sensible practitioners, but his complaints increased, and he determined to come to Birmingham. I found him supported ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many complaints as a hypochondriac. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... my heart, you see," she told Sara, with the martyred air peculiar to the hypochondriac—the genuine sufferer rarely has it. "It is, of course, a great deprivation to me, and I don't think either Dick"—with an inimical glance at her husband—"or Molly come up to see me as often as they might. Stairs ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... chief natural tonic, attributes it in great part to the action of the prospect of the sea upon the nervous system. 'I am fully convinced,' says he, 'that the physical effects of sea-bathing must be greatly increased by the impression on the mind, and that a hypochondriac or nervous person may be half-cured by residing on the sea-coast, and enjoying a view of the grand scenes of nature which will there present themselves—such as, the rising and setting of the sun over the blue expanse of the waters, and the awful ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... engagements. She broke them one after another without a thought, and cast her admirers away as if they had been dresses of last year's fashion. Most of them, it must be said, recovered quickly enough, but the miserable COPE became a hopeless hypochondriac, and never smiled again. He died the other day, and HERMIONE's sketch of HANKINSON was found, frayed and soiled, in an ancient pocket-book which he always carried about with him. HANKINSON'S fate seemed at first to be worse. He took to poetry, morbid, passionate, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... The hypochondriac imagines he has things the matter with him, and he becomes confirmed in his belief, he finds that so long as he lives he has something the matter with him. He no sooner gets cured of one than something else attacks him. There is no medicine like air and exercise ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... that we Christian people half enough realise how imperative a Christian duty, as well as how great a Christian privilege, it is to be glad always. You have no right to be anxious; you are wrong to be hypochondriac and depressed, and weary and melancholy. True; there are a great many occasions in our Christian life which minister sadness. True; the Christian joy looks very gloomy to a worldly eye. But there are far more occasions ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... my honour, sir,' replied the Baron, 'the lad can sometimes be as dowff as a sexagenary like myself. If your Royal Highness had seen him dreaming and dozing about the banks of Tully-Veolan like an hypochondriac person, or, as Burton's ANATOMIA hath it, a phrenesiac or lethargic patient, you would wonder where he hath sae suddenly acquired all this fine sprack festivity ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... to ask you if you would mind telling me what our friend Mr. Crawshay was talking to you about just now?" "Are you really interested?" she asked, with an air of faint surprise. "Well, if you must know, he was asking questions about my patient. He appears to be something of a hypochondriac himself, and he is very ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... miserable body, I command thee to quit thy new abode, and to return to thine ancient habitation!' This said, the sick man was ordered to withdraw, and another was brought forward in his place. This new comer said he was tormented by the melancholy vapours. In fact, he looked like a hypochondriac; one of those persons diseased in imagination, and who but too often become so in reality. 'Aerial spirit,' said the Irishman, 'return, I command thee, into the air! — exercise thy natural vocation of raising tempests, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... a little hard at Orchis, because the truth was, that until the lucky prize came to him, Orchis had gone under the nickname of Doleful Dumps, he having been beforetimes of a hypochondriac turn, so much so as to save up and put by a few dollars of his scanty earnings against that rainy day he used to groan ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... I was formed within a light That kindled in the womb of night, Of loathsome withered weeds— And fate looked on and fanned the flame, But freed me from the touch of blame, Of all my evil deeds. Enchantress waited on my birth, And bade the hypochondriac walk ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various
... a while—I especially, for none but a hypochondriac would care to admit without proof that gangrene had been forced into his system. Kazimoto grew indignant, and offered to prove the truth of his claim on some animal. But there was no living animal in sight on which to prove it. We asked him how long gangrene, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the poet had "beat his music out," though his friends "still tried to cheer him." But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac. "If I mean to make my mark at all, it must be by shortness," he said at this time; "for the men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the big things, except King Arthur, had been done." The age had not ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... every other distemper. The bodies of men are enfeebled and enervated; and it is not uncommon to observe very high degrees of irritability under the external appearance of great strength and robustness. The hypochondriac, palsies, cachexies, dropsies, and all those diseases which arise from laxity and debility, are, in our days, endemic every where; and the hysterics, which used to be peculiar to the women, as the name itself indicates, now attacks both sexes indiscriminately. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... when I was obliged to stop and lean my head on my hand. Real affliction, however, has something in it by which it is sanctified. It is a weight which, however oppressive, may like a bar of iron be conveniently disposed on the sufferer's person. But the insubstantiality of a hypochondriac affection is one of its greatest torments. You have a huge featherbed on your shoulders, which rather encumbers and oppresses you than calls forth strength and exertion to bear it. There is something like madness ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... mentioned but by this name, the "weill belovit sister" who is associated with so much of his life without one trace of human identity ever stealing through the mist that envelops her, was dead; disappearing noiseless into the grave, where it would seem her mother, Mrs. Bowes, the religious hypochondriac who had required so many solemn treatises in the shape of letters to comfort her, had preceded her daughter. Two boys, the sons of Marjory, were with their father in these panelled rooms. They both grew up, but not to any distinction; he did not spare ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after another, a little before the fire. The old women and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the other sex, whom I could almost call old women too, remarked (especially afterward, though not till both those judgements were over) that those two comets passed directly over the city, and ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... for the sympathy of devout women. At this happy juncture he fell into the company of a Mrs. Elizabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She was a religious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom she honoured with her confidence. From the first time she heard Knox preach she formed a high ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... place; strong-minded women who have broken through the trammels of the Faculty, and gone to the Water Cure in spite of the warnings of their medical men, and their friends' kind predictions that they would never live to come back; and hypochondriac men, who have tried all quack remedies in vain, and who have come despairingly to try one which, before trying it, they probably looked to as the most violent and perilous of all. And the change of life is total. You may have finished your bottle of port daily for twenty years, but at the Water ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... manner of 'faith cures' and the like—I would answer certainly not, unless the disorder happens to be in itself due to a delusion. I can imagine the hypochondriac being cured by mental stimulus." He felt that he was drawing near the point at issue, and his eyes shone ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... to-day, resolute to hear, afraid to learn the truth he dreads. I leave my reader with this patient, and my stated knowledge and my shifted responsibility. "Doctor, if I am going to be insane, I will kill myself." Good reader, pray dispose of this case. Or take the ease of a confirmed hypochondriac. He is miserable, has a hundred ailments, watches the weather, studies the barometer, has queer delusions as to diets, clothes, and his own inability to walk. The least hint of a belief that he is not as well as he was a week ago, or even a too close examination, leaves him ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... sitting beside a man for the length of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort! Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people, even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least to speak—she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make sounds, if he only barked. ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... a huge building on the opposite side of the narrow street. Gloomy and cheerless as it was in appearance, the room was in keeping with the character of the man who occupied it. Johann Mayrhofer was regarded by his acquaintance as an hypochondriac, whose general depression of spirits entered largely into his poetical writings. But those who knew him intimately were aware of a gentle and tender side to his ordinarily stern nature. He was, in fact, a 'lonely, self-contained, self-taught man'—one ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... had from early life been subject to hypochondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, and was more immediately inherited by him from his father. They had not, however, been so strong as to give uneasiness to his family. While he lived with ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... Countess Olenska, and they sat down in a corner and plunged into animated talk. Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first have paid his respects to Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers, and the Countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, Mr. Urban Dagonet of Washington Square, who, in order to have the pleasure of meeting her, had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out between January and April. The two chatted together for nearly twenty minutes; then the Countess rose and, walking alone across the ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... read at Pembroke College. Mr. Warren, the bookseller, thought it would be worth while to print a translation. Hector joined in urging Johnson to undertake it, for a payment of five guineas. Although nearly brought to a stop midway by hypochondriac despondency, a little suggestion that the printers also were stopped, and if they had not their work had not their pay, caused Johnson to go on to the end. Legrand's book was reduced to a fifth of its size by the omission of all that overlaid Father Lobo's personal account of his ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... horrible resemblance of his own coffin and mutilated corpse was in reality revealed to him by the agency of some supernatural power, or whether it was (as sceptics will say) the natural effect of his hypochondriac state of mind, producing an optical deception, we will not take upon us to determine; certain, however, it is, that with a calm voice and collected manner he described to his brother James, a scene the dreadful reality of which ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... occur, as imposing a constraint upon himself, and knowing that any such chain enfeebles and almost annihilates the mental powers. Endued with exquisite sensibility, his wit never gave the smallest wound, even to the grossest ignorance of the world, or the most morbid hypochondriac bashfulness.' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Patient Fancy, which recall touches in The Ten Pleasures. She introduces a Padua doctor on the stage. She shows, in several of her plays, a curious interest in medicine, especially quack medicine. Sir Patient, a hypochondriac, thinks he is swelling up like the "pipsy" husband. Isabella, in the same play, says "keeping begins to be as ridiculous as matrimony.... The insolence and expense of their mistresses has almost tired out all but the old and doting part of mankind." It is not inconceivable that in ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh |
