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Essays on Hypochondriasis and Other Nervous Affections
Essays on Hypochondriasis and Other Nervous Affections Author:John Reid Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 26 ESSAY HI. THE FEAR OF DEATH. " Oh, our life's sweetness 1 That we the pain of death would hourly bear, Rather than die at once !" K. Lear. " The ... more »Egyptians in their hieroglyphics expressed a melancholy man by a hare sitting in a form, as being a most timorous as well as solitary creature." Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. An undue fear of death is one of the most ordinary symptoms of hypo- chondriasis, and not the least frequent perhaps amongst the causes which produce it; unless, indeed, we consider the disease as already formed, as soon as this feeling has encroached, in any inordinate degreee, upon the tranquillity of the mind. It is a circumstance somewhat remarkable, that those persons should be in general found to dread most their departure from this state of being, to whom it has proved least productive of enjoyment. The passion for life would seem to be like that for country, which is said to be felt with the greatest vivacity by the native of barren regions. Upon an apparently similar principle, after existence has lost every thing that could enliven or embellish it, we often become more enamoured of its actual deformity than we were with its former loveliness. When all is gone by, that could render the world reasonably dear to us, our attachment to it not only remains, but appears frequently to be strengthened rather than impaired, by the departure of whatever could justify its continuance. The love of life, one might fancy, in some cases, to be aproduct formed from the decomposition of its pleasures. These remarks are in no case so well illustrated as in that of many a nervous invalid, to whom the continuance of being is often only the longer lingering of torture. The unhappy hypochondriac is unwilling to lay down the burden which oppresses him...« less