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Updated: June 18, 2025
The only ideas we can form of him are so devoid of object, and are at the same time so afflicting, that the only imaginations they can arrest are those of melancholy hypochondriacs, who do not constitute the majority of the inhabitants of this world. The vulgar have no conception of God; their weak brains are confused, whenever they think of him.
When to this is added the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs, Johnson and Byron it may be, something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher.
He adds, "In Fernando Po, an island which I would recommend as a sanatorium for wealthy hypochondriacs, we found an extraordinary abundance of fruit, cocoa-nuts, bananas, mangoes, delicious oranges, and pine-apples...The ivory trade on the Gaboon is very flourishing. A German firm which I visited exports, L10,000 worth per annum, the value of total exports being, L26,000.
They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called "out of a situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of the professional class shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark.
He did not view the stir of the great Babel as a man with a wholesome mind should do; and thus from his infirmities we draw a moral. The moral is not the worse, in that it opposes the trite moralities of those who would take from action its motive: the men of genius, who are not also men of ambition, are either humourists, or visionaries, or hypochondriacs.
Upon this principle I should recommend to wealthy hypochondriacs a journey in Ireland, preferably to any country in the civilized world.
If I were not an effective psychologist I could not succeed with most of them. The average medical doctor probably considers onion cases to be hypochondriacs, but they usually are not. Almost always the first symptoms that demand attention are the most life-threatening, like immune system failures, liver failures, pancreatic failures, nervous system failures and heart failures.
A doctor, for example, after carefully and expensively educating himself, must invest in house and furniture, horses, carriage, and menservants, before the public patient will think of calling him in. I am told that such gentlemen have to coax and wheedle dowagers, to humour hypochondriacs, to practise a score of little subsidiary arts in order to make that of healing profitable.
But the nursing which real and that which fancied patients require is of different, or rather of opposite, character. And the latter will not be spoken of here. Indeed, many of the symptoms which are here mentioned are those which distinguish real from fancied disease. It is true that hypochondriacs very often do that behind a nurse's back which they would not do before her face.
Moliere told the King that he had just sketched out the plot of his "Malade Imaginaire," and assured us that hypochondriacs themselves would find something to laugh at when it was played. He spoke very little about himself, but at great length, and with evident admiration, about the young poet Racine.
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