"Ailment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... roar of its rocket motors, the great vessel lifted itself laboriously from the ground, squatting on flame, filling Fletcher Monk's mind with the first real sense of fear since he learned the grim facts of his ailment ...
— Heart • Henry Slesar
... quite plain that she despaired of the child from the moment we had ascertained that it was unwell. As it happened, her presentiment was but too truly prophetic. The apothecary said the child's ailment was "suppressed small-pox"; the physician pronounced it "typhus." The only certainty about it was ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... across George Tressady coming up from the smoking-room. So she gave her news of Mrs. Allison's sudden illness to him, begging him to tell his wife, and to convey their hostess's regrets and apologies for this untoward break-up of the party. It was the reappearance of an old ailment, she said, and with quiet ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grateful in proportion to our discomfort. For my own part, however, I am no optimist. I am not fond of mortifying the flesh, and the eloquence of Socrates would fail to persuade me that a carbuncle was a cheerful companion, or the gout an ailment to be ardently desired. Yet, for all this, I cannot say that I look upon your adventure in the light of a misfortune. You have lost time, spent money, and endured a considerable amount of aggravation; but you have, on the other hand, acquired ease of manner, facility of conversation, and ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... limped. Her engine misfired continuously, and Barlow lacked the mechanical knowledge to remedy its ailment. He was satisfied to let it pound away, so long as it would revolve at all. So the boat moved slowly through that encompassing smoke at less than half speed. Outwardly the once spick and span cruiser bore every mark of hard usage. Her topsides were foul, her decks splintered by the tramping ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... practitioner, that his patients, regardless of age or sex, were all afflicted with a like malady. Many a time as he returned from a professional visit, mounted on his old roan, with his bushel measure medicine bag thrown across his saddle, in answer to my casual inquiry as to the ailment of his patient, he gave in oracular tones, the one all-sufficient reply, "only a slight derangement of the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... prejudices to air; who are pagans to the core; who, uninitiated into the false value of externals, never fail to size you up from a more spiritual point of view than do their elders; who are not oozing politics and sexuality, nor afflicted with some stupid ailment or other which prevents them doing this and that. To be in contact with physical health—it would alone suffice to render their society a dear delight, quite apart from the fact that if you are wise and humble you may tiptoe yourself, by inches, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... which I still have at times. The pain between my shoulders likewise amazed me much. Say nothing about it, for I confess I am too much disposed to be nervous. This nervousness is a horrid phantom. I dare communicate no ailment to Papa; his ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... may be termed "semi-public" action. It is in a measure the same sort of influence that in a later chapter is termed "stimulative education." For instance, a hospital for the treatment of some special ailment is needed. Private enterprise furnishes the capital, proves the success of the treatment, and then the community comes forward and supports the institution. Such helps are accepted freely and are ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... Hampshire; for his lordship passed his life in being the President of scientific and literary societies, and was ready for anything from the Royal, if his turn ever arrived, to opening a Mechanics' Institute in his neighbouring town. Lady Hampshire was an invalid; but her ailment was one of those mysteries which still remained insoluble, although, in the most liberal manner, she delighted to afford her friends all the information in her power. Never was a votary endowed with a faith at once so lively and so capricious. Each year she believed in some new remedy, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... made Challoner's acquaintance in my professional capacity. He consulted me about some trifling ailment and we took rather a liking to each other. He was a learned man and his learning overlapped my own specialty, so that we had a good deal in common. And his personality interested me deeply. He gave me the impression of a man naturally buoyant, genial, witty, whose life had been blighted by some ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... instances to show how thoroughly and readily a disease or ailment of a tree or shrub is called blight where in reality not the slightest sign ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... laid away in the neighbor's yard. The house assumed the appearance of a deserted sty. Divorce was suggested inwardly—that modern refuge to which the weak-minded flee in seeking a drastic cure for a temporary ailment; and all this disruption in two hearts which had tripped along together so smoothly and pleasantly. Surely love, misapplied, is a curse. It is surely sometimes a severe form of insanity. If so, those ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... having some slight ailment, I had driven out alone with our native servant, and we made a long tour, returning about six P.M. past Ludlow Castle, of famous Mutiny memory, and still—in the year ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... our faith-cure professors reap their richest harvest among people commonly supposed to belong to the intelligent classes. In the treatment of wounds the Cherokee doctors exhibit a considerable degree of skill, but as far as any internal ailment is concerned the average farmer's wife is worth all the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... destinies of her son, that of physical health, or, at least, nervous constitution. She was a delicate woman, very anaemic during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia, which was perhaps a symptom of this condition. The acute ailment reproduced itself in her daughter in spite of an otherwise vigorous constitution. With the brother, the inheritance of suffering was not less surely present, if more difficult to trace. We have been accustomed to speaking of him as a brilliantly ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the harm that can happen to it, by reason of ungodly or mischievous devices. If taken away, it would assuredly return hither. Should the lady have some inward ailment, let her lay it as near as may be to the part where she feels afflicted, and keep it there for a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... local coroner is he, Renowned all thereabout, and popular With many a remain. All tenderly Compiling in a game-bag the debris, He glides into the gloom and fades from sight. The dove, cured of its ailment by the shock, Has flown, meantime, on pinions strong and fleet, To die of age in some ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... up rather than tearing down, a remedy for an ailment rather than fault-finding, the greatest of men cannot be mere satirists. Shakespeare displays some fellow feeling for the object of his satire, but Jonson's satire is ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... and it becomes plain to all that her loss of colour betokens an unfulfilled desire. She plays less now than she used to do, and laughs less and loses her gaiety. But she conceals her trouble and passes it off, if any one asks what her ailment is. Her old nurse's name was Thessala, [229] who was skilled in necromancy, having been born in Thessaly, where devilish charms are taught and wrought; for the women of that country perform many a charm and ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... these fine arguments, at the end of a week I felt an ailment which I was blasphemous enough to saddle on the universal dissolvent and the new-fangled diet. I stated my symptoms to my master, in the hope that he would relax the rigor of his regimen and qualify my meals with a little wine; but his hostility to ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the impression I have of this "morbus" it was a skin-ailment particularly appropriated to beggars, who might contract it upon long exposure to filth and louse-bites. Even then, though there would doubtless be a certain amount "of discomfort about it, ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... BREVE}n ezchi, inscribed with the symbolism of the tribal mythology. With his prayer wands he rehearses the symbolic figures, praying to the mythical characters who are regarded as most efficacious in the particular ailment under treatment. In his own little kowa, or dwelling, with the painted deerskin spread before him, on which are delineated the symbolic representations of a score of gods comprising the Apache pantheon, a medicine-man will sit and croon songs and pray all day and all ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... decided to take no more risks. Alarming symptoms had not been wanting to indicate the return of a malady from which he never expected to suffer again. The grand affair with the Lady Hortense had been a dignified, chronic ailment which he had learned to endure with a becoming air of pensive resignation. The present attack threatened to be of a much more disturbing character. It was acute; it responded to no treatment, mental, moral, or physical. It was like toothache or mumps or chicken-pox, ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... no longer permitted in her drawing room, and the circle of pet robins and angel ducks had somehow wandered out of her safe keeping. An unusually pretty flock of sweetsome debutantes had thinned the bachelor ranks, and Jill Briggs's youngest boy died of some childish ailment, disturbing Beatrice more than she admitted, for some reason, and making ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... Constantinople,[8] and also to have had a house (no doubt of business) at Soldaia, in the Crimea, where his son and daughter, Nicolo and Maroca by name, were living in 1280. This year is the date of the Elder Marco's Will, executed at Venice, and when he was "weighed down by bodily ailment." Whether he survived for any length of time ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... invited to remain as Viggo's guest until he recovered. He felt so honored by this invitation that he secretly prayed he might remain ill for a month; but the wound showed an abominable readiness to heal, and before three days were past Marcus could not feign any ailment which his face and ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... beforehand the health of the patient. This manner of knowing future events exists in the angels, and by so much the more than it does in us, as they understand the causes of things both more universally and more perfectly; thus doctors who penetrate more deeply into the causes of an ailment can pronounce a surer verdict on the future issue thereof. But events which proceed from their causes in the minority of cases are quite unknown; such as casual and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... subject," he adds, "reminds me of a true story I heard in London recently. In the hospitals there, the ailment of the patient, when he is admitted, is denoted by certain letters, such as 'T. B.' for tuberculosis. An American doctor was examining these history slips when his curiosity was aroused by the number on which the letters 'G.O.K.' appeared. ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... of my ailment is this, y^t it groweth not Less with much nursinge, but is like to those fevres w^ch y^e leeches Starve, 'tis saide, for that y^e more Bloode there be in y^e Sicke man's Bodie, y^e more foode is there for y^e Distemper to feede upon.—And it is moste fittinge ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... keenly at her. He had a racial terror of physical ailment. He saw that something was wrong, but his knowledge went no further. He had never seen a woman faint, so limited had been his experience of ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... were had we never seen her!" Then the smith went away, whilst the Kazi fell down on his bed and became sick of langour for her sake, and on like wise fared it with the other three Kazis and assessors. The mediciners paid them frequent calls, but found in them no ailment requiring a leach: so the city-notables went in to the Chief Kazi and saluting him, questioned him of his case; whereupon he sighed and showed them that was in his heart, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... renowned nerve specialist knew. To him came these men broken down, some on the verge of insanity. He gave me stories of their lives, of his glimpses into their straining minds, he described their pathetic efforts to rest, their strenuous attempts to relax. He himself had some mysterious ailment, his hands kept trembling while he talked. His wife said he hadn't had a vacation of over a week in ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... bang and fury of every fight with all the artillery of epithets and similes at his command. But he was not always in a good humor or happy mood. The slight spurt of peevish susceptibility which had escaped him in their first interview was a symptom of a perpetually recurring mental ailment, half of it nervous irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness produced by the sense of his deformity. In these fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to him to be charged either with offensive pity or with ill-repressed disgust; at the very least it was an indifferent ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... sort of talk is very ridiculous. We need not talk about every ailment which attacks us as we move along toward the condition of perfect health which belongs to us! But if we do speak of indisposition, let us use ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... prophecy was fully realised. Tom Halliday awoke the next day with a violent cold in his head. Like most big boisterous men of herculean build, he was the veriest craven in the hour of physical ailment; so he succumbed at once to the malady which a man obliged to face the world and fight for his daily bread must needs have made ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... being kind to her, when she was so ill, and there was the fear of losing her? Somehow, I never thought there was much amiss with Hatty. I could not get it out of my mind that she always made the most of every little ailment, and that it was wrong of you and mother to give in to her. I never thought it would come to this." ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... as he desired, or to be as hospitable as his nature prompted, his temper became soured, and he visited his ill humours upon his wife, who, devotedly attached to him, to all outward appearance at least, never resented his ill treatment. All at once, and without any previous symptoms of ailment, or apparent cause, unless it might be over-fatigue in hunting the day before, Richard Nutter was seized with a strange and violent illness, which, after three or four days of acute suffering, brought ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the ground, you catch a frog by the head, spit into its mouth, ask it to carry away the ache, and then let it go. But the ceremony must be performed on a lucky day and at a lucky hour. In Cheshire the ailment known as aphtha or thrush, which affects the mouth or throat of infants, is not uncommonly treated in much the same manner. A young frog is held for a few moments with its head inside the mouth of the sufferer, whom it is supposed to ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... me the greatest misfortunes. My 'bambino' fell ill at the beginning of April, the doctors were unable to discover the cause of his ailment, and the poor little thing, fading away, expired in the arms of his mother, who was beside herself with despair. That was not all. A few days after my little daughter fell ill in turn, and her complaint also terminated fatally. But this even was not all. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... wrestled with Jacob, and, as the account suggests, somewhat over-stepped the bound of fair play, at the end of the struggle? Surely, we must agree with Dr. Newman that, if all these camels have gone down, it savours of affectation to strain at such gnats as the sudden ailment of Arius in the midst of his deadly, if prayerful,[63] enemies; and the fiery explosion which stopped the Julian building operations. Though the words of the "Conclusion" of the "Essay on Miracles" may, perhaps, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... that there was not much doubt of it, her general health being usually good. 'Though, now you remind me,' she added, 'I have one little ailment which puzzles me. It is nothing serious, but I ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the child should be subjected to a thorough physical examination, because it may be one evidence of a serious ailment. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... of a wife is to keep healthy. Even if she is ailing she must not complain unless through mental suggestion she desires to increase her ailments, real or imaginary. She must earnestly endeavor to discover the cause of the alleged ailment and remove it. ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... in the graveyard at midnight, in the full of the moon, just to convince Ira Spoonholler that his grandfather was keeping close to his proper plot. And here I was, prone and helpless, being powwowed not for one ailment, but for all the diseases known in Happy Valley. How I blessed Tip! When we started he should have told me of the powers of our hostess. I would rather have undergone a hundred runaways than one week with that old woman muttering ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... 'Absence from my friend is better and fitter for me'; and, 'Whatso eye doth not perceive, that garreth not heart to grieve.'" And he bowed his head towards the ground. When King Omar bin al-Nu'uman heard his words and knew the cause of his ailment and of his being broken down, he soothed his heart and said to him, "O my son, I grant thee this and I have not in my reign a greater than the Castle of Damascus, and the government of it is thine from this time." Thereupon he forthright summoned his secretaries ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... a frequent ailment, and several medicines are employed against it. The most common is to crush the leaves of the dangla (Vitex negundo L.) in vinegar made from basi, and to add to this a fourth part of urine. The patient ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... evening of life in one of the most idyllic parts of Germany, Frommel entered upon his new and honorable duties with a truly youthful vigor and enthusiasm, but alas—after a few months' stay at Ploen, owing to an old ailment which had reappeared under more alarming symptoms than ever before, he had to submit to a chirurgical operation, and it was under the knives of the surgeons that on the 9th day of November, 1896, Emil Frommel breathed his last, at ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... ailment had its origin in his habits—James Pethel did not, despite that merely pensive look of his, live his life with impunity. And by reason of that life he died. As for the manner of his death, enough that he did die. Let not our hearts be vexed that his great ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... them; but no one had thought of making provision for such troubles, mental, moral, and religious, as affect the mind; and he held that such suffering was as real, and, without proper treatment, as incurable and disastrous, as any form of physical ailment. He therefore determined to found an hospital for these unhappy ones, which should contain every requisite that Divine Revelation had suggested, or human ingenuity could devise, for the promotion of peace of mind. The idea had grown out of some great mental trouble ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... for the recovery of his ailment which he do always solemnly keep with great store of meat and Drink and company. And this is a great day with him and a troublous one with me, and to the Mayds also such as would madd a Saint. Yet all said and done a noble Dinner, enough and to spare, being a dish ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... the nerves inactive, and the patient, who otherwise feels well, finding it impossible to walk. It is also cured completely in very severe cases, by baths, ammonia applied inwardly, castor-oil, Peruvian bark, &c. A third type of this ailment is the bone-disease, kak'ke', which is exceedingly common in Japan, and is believed to be caused by unvarying food and want of exercise. It is very obstinate, but is often cured in two or three years with chloride of iron, albumen, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... a long and distressing ailment of my sight which had been pronounced incurable, and came to England, where I was introduced to Charles Keene, with whom I quickly became intimate, and it was he who presented me to Leech one night at one ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... the deplorable state in which I was when I wrote it. This state and its continuation, during three months of irritation and self-denial, so exhausted me, that I was several years before I recovered from it, and at the end of these it left me an ailment which I shall carry with me, or which will carry me to the grave. Such was the sole enjoyment of a man of the most combustible constitution, but who was, at the same time, perhaps, one of the most timid mortals nature ever produced. Such ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... meet him with a smile; but I felt that the light upon my countenance was feeble, and of brief duration. He looked at me earnestly, and, in his kind and gentle way, inquired if I felt no better, affecting to believe that my ailment was one of the body instead of the mind. But I scarcely answered him, and I could see that he felt hurt. How much more wretched did I become at this. Could I have then retired to my chamber, and, alone, give my full heart vent in a passion of tears, I might have obtained ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... medicine closet—and not be used as daily bread. For punishment is a medicine—a corrective—and when we administer it we must do in the spirit of the physician. We do not wish to be quacks and have one patent remedy to cure all evils; but, like physicians worthy of their trust, we must study the ailment and its causes, and above all must we study the patient. The same remedy will not do for all constitutions. Therefore the punishment must not only fit the crime, but it must also be made to ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... back. He had been away a fortnight, on his holiday. He was to have taken Jane with him but at the last moment she had been kept at home by some ailment of the child's. They had been married more than three years now, and they had not been separated for as many nights and days. In all his letters Brodrick had stated that he was enjoying himself immensely and could do with three months ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... family of five children, in steps, who wore bright red hoods. They liked to come and be nursed. The women had from six to a dozen peasants a day, tinkling the bell for treatment. Some came out of curiosity. To these was fed castor-oil. One dose cured them. They came with every sort of ailment. A store-keeper, who kept on selling rock candy, had a heel that was "bad" from shrapnel. One mite of a boy had his right hand burned, and the wound continued to suppurate. He dabbled in ditch-water, and always returned to Hilda with the ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... passer-by to write beneath it the Delphic sentiment: "May the man who shall read this never read anything else." The symptoms of the ailment in its most acute form are described by some Roman lover in the verses which he has left us on the wall of Caligula's palace, on ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... it. I was afraid lest my mother should swinge me on account of the apple, so for fear of her I went with my brother outside the city and stayed there till evening closed in upon us; and indeed I am in fear of her; and now by Allah, O my father, say nothing to her of this or it may add to her ailment!" When I heard what-my child said I knew that the slave was he who had foully slandered my wife, the daughter of my uncle, and was certified that I had slain her wrong. fully. So I wept with exceeding weeping and presently this old man, my paternal uncle ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... cost Otis, in the responsibility he felt and the solicitation he manifested, especially in the middle and later stages of his strenuous career, for the cause he had so keenly at heart. Pathetic is the story of the ailment that clouded his closing years; and only exculpatory can be the judgment now passed upon the man and his work when we consider what the strain was that he had long and anxiously borne and that revealed its effects in periods of sad mental alienation and incipient madness. To speak and write ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... it, his wife. For he had learned that she must die. There had followed terrible weeks. Then Judith had faced their disaster. Little by little she had won back the old intimacy with her husband; and through the slow but inexorable progress of her ailment, again they had come together in long talks and plans for their children. At this same chessboard, in this room, repeatedly she would stop the game and smiling she would look into the future. At one such time she ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... most common, the most terrible form of all, curiously enough, being treated even by Persian doctors with mercury—a treatment called the Kalyan Shingrif—but administered in such quantities that its effects are often worse than the ailment itself. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... different diseases. Surely with such a remedy as this at hand there will be no need to diagnose a case of sickness to find out what is the trouble. All we need to do is to take the regulation dose. And all patients will be treated just alike whatever their ailment. This is the quack doctor's method as it is the quack teacher's. If the teacher is unskillful or lazy the remedy for poor recitations usually is, "Take the same lesson for to-morrow." There is even no attempt to discover ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... the plea of not causing worry or expense to others, does a man or woman not put off taking necessary rest, or consulting a doctor, until a slight ailment that once would have yielded to treatment becomes ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... is also a very common complaint. It often occurs in the progress of other diseases, but is just as often a separate ailment. ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... betting. We are poisoned by generalities; our reformers, who use press and platform to enlighten us, resemble a doctor who should stop by a patient's bedside and deliver an oration on bad health in the abstract when he ought to be finding out his man's particular ailment. Let us clear the ground a little bit, until we can see something definite. I am going to talk plainly about things that I know, and I want to put all sentimental rubbish out of ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... characters the world in general contented itself merely with the word "wild," would be there only for a week or two at most. Billy would wait for Joe Pickering's letters, Clarence would drink, and watch Billy. Little Mina Villalonga, who had a minor nervous ailment, would wander about after Billy. The Parmalees would come up for a visit, and the Morans would come. Jack Torrence, spoiled out of all reason, would promise a week and come for two days; Porter Pinckard would compromise ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... gathered enough of the facts, and had to speculate only on the designs. Dr. Themison had received a visit from the husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor concerning her state of health. At an interview with the lady, laughter greeted him; he was confused by her denial of the imputation of a single ailment: but she, to recompose him, let it be understood, that she was anxious about her husband's condition, he being certainly overworked; and the husband's visit passed for a device on the part of the wife. She admitted a willingness to try a change of air, if it was deemed good ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... eyes added that there was nothing in the pathological dictionary which she would not willingly have caught for the sake of those divine, if draughty moments; but that, alas! it was more than a mere bodily ailment she ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... being herself in no "patrician" mood, but, on the contrary, in a mood that was most humanly plebeian, she quite missed the cause of his clumsy embarrassment and constraint; she suspected a sudden physical ailment. "It'll be some time, I expect," said she. "Don't bother to hang around. I'll send a note to the desk, and you can inquire—say, in half an hour ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... was plain enough, and that was that the sick lad had been allowed to droop and mope in his ailment. The serious disease was there, of course, but he had been nursed up and coddled to a terrible extent, and this had made him far worse than he would have been had he led an active country life, or been induced to exert himself a little instead of ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... in this part of Prigord there is a deeply-engrained superstitious horror of what is called a rencontre. If a person falls suddenly ill, especially if his sickness be not a familiar ailment, he will begin to probe his memory, and to ask himself if he has lately sat upon a stone or the stump of a tree. If he remembers having done so, he murmurs, unless he should be free from the popular superstition, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... carbuncle,—[In Following the Equator the author says: "The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a dictionary."]—and again lost time in consequence. It was while he was in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell: ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... began, on some Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had not played twenty bars before the attention of every one in the room was more or less seized—unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children, good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and who was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time to see when it would be decent to order round the pony-carriage which would take him back to his pale ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... significance. With all their barbarism they are near to nature and keen in locating causation. With nothing more than a superstitious basis, charms, incantations, dances, images, ceremonies, and shrines have a wonderful influence for healing. They divert the mind from the ailment, and stimulate a strong faith which awakens the recuperative forces to action, and thus cause ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... robbery or none, I'll go to him to-morrow, d'ye see, if I live as long, for this old ailment of mine. I never told you of it, old pill and potion, for fear of a swinging bill: but just grinned ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Ursula's recalcitrance and her mother's ailment contributed to disturb Mr. Egremont, and bring him home. His agent, by name Bulfinch, a solicitor at Redcastle, came to him with irrefragable proofs of gross peculation on the part of the bailiff who managed the home ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have much appreciation of the mental processes of the child. If the children are restless and nervous they are content to attribute this to naughtiness or to constipation, or to some other physical ailment. Their time is usually so fully occupied that they cannot be expected to be very zealous in reading books on the management of children. Nevertheless, in practical matters of detail a good nurse will learn ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... not like the exhibit are inclined to treat her as if she were a new historical type. The reassuring fact is, that ferment of mind is no newer thing in woman than in man. It is a human ailment. Its attacks, however, have always been unwelcome. Society distrusts uneasiness in sacred quarters; that is, in her established and privileged works. They are the best mankind has to show for itself. At least they are ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... would not rise above 0.04; while in any ordinary room imperfect workmanship and an open chimney would change it four times in the hour, reducing the percentage to 0.01, a quantity which the most inveterate enemy of water gas could not claim would do more than produce a bad headache, an ailment quite as likely to have been caused by the same factor that brought about the blowing out of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... me for medicine for his brother. I tried to find out the nature of the ailment, and decided to give him calomel, urging his brother to take it to him at once. The man had eaten a quarter of a pig all by himself, but, of course, it was said that he had been poisoned. His brother, instead ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... Number Fourteen's ailment was a rare and peculiar one, into which I need not enter here with professional precision. (I have described the case fully for my brother practitioners in my paper in the fourth volume of Sebastian's Medical ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... now dawned on Reuben that on the present occasion at least Robbie was not drunk, but sick. With the illogical perversity of some healthy people, he thought to rally the ailing man out of his ailment, whatever it might be; so he expended all the facetiousness of which he was master on ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... for absolutely correct pronunciation is fatal. The people who are afflicted with this painful ailment are as anxious about their utterance as dyspeptics about their diet. They move through their sentences as delicately as Agag walked. Their little airs of nicety, their starched cadences and frilled phrases seem as if they had just been taken ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... noticed nothing wrong with him that ain't always been wrong." Marthy spoke grudgingly, as if she resented even the possibility of Jase's having a real ailment. "He's feelin' his years, mebby. But he ain't no call to; Jase ain't but three years older 'n I be, and I ain't but fifty-nine last birthday. And I've worked and slaved here in this Cove fer twenty-seven years, now; what it is I've made ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the disease to which the term is most commonly applied, and is by far the more serious and important ailment. It is one of the diseases due to altered metabolism (see METABOLIC DISEASES). It is markedly hereditary, much more prevalent in towns and especially modern city life than in more primitive rustic communities, and most common among ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... he lacked appetite entirely, and as he had taken but an egg and a cup of coffee for breakfast, and had missed luncheon altogether, he began to question himself as to the meaning of his ailment, with sad attempt at humor. "It isn't exactly as serious as dying. Even if she reconsiders and returns my play, I can still make a living." He would not admit that any ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... to me not great things at all. You may not be able to help your spleen, but you can "cook" it; you may have qualm and headache, but in work of some sort, warlike or peaceful, there is always small beer, or brandy and soda (with even, if necessary, capsicum or bromide), for the ailment. The Renes who can do nothing but sulk, except when they blunder themselves and make other people uncomfortable in attempting to do something, who "never do a [manly] thing and never say a [kind] one," are, I ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... incompetents than will any severe, prolonged, actual sickness. People who are victims of nosophobia are probably the most miserable and wretched individuals on earth. This is essentially so because of the peculiar characteristics of the disease. It is an insinuating and insidious ailment and its progress is cumulative. When we begin to worry about our health the germ of nosophobia takes up its habitation in our midst and we never ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... and against the ravages of which those preservatives have been mainly contrived, it may be proper briefly to explain its nature, and the rather as, unless among mariners, it is little understood. First then, I would observe that the scurvy is not the ailment which goes by that name on shore. The distemper commonly, but erroneously, in this place, called the scurvy, belongs to a class of diseases totally different from what we are now treating of; and so far is the commonly received opinion, that there are few constutions altogether ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... Alcohol, two ounces Tincture Arnica, one ounce Oil Hemlock, one ounce Oil of Spike. Mix well and let stand twenty-four hours. This will cure any burn, scald, bruise, sprain or any like ailment; also aches and pains of all kinds. Apply by wetting a flannel cloth and wrapping it around ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... thick intelligence but for a glimmer it threw on another most obscure communication. She feared it might be, strange though it seemed, jealousy, a shade of jealousy affecting Miss Middleton, as had been vaguely intimated by Sir Willoughby when they were waiting in the hall. "A little feminine ailment, a want of comprehension of a perfect friendship;" those were his words to her: and he suggested vaguely that care must be taken in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... uz good now uz ever it wuz. My Missus take sech good care uv us aw de time en see a'ter us she self when we sick en I is take sech good care uv me self a'ter I leab dere dat I 'spect to be here long time from now. Ain' know no ailment tall. Coase de rheumatism is worry me right smart on uh night. Honey, dis rheumatism ain' been cause from no bad teeth. I is hab eve'y tooth in me head wha' I hab when I wuz 7 year old en dey jes uz good uz dey was den. It jes dis way, jes uz long uz I is ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... solicitude. They dreaded losing her, for having had her so long among them they hoped to keep her always, and they did, practically, for she outlived the most of them. As proof of the anxiety of her friends and the delight they experienced at her recovery from the slightest ailment, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... you know, and the scarlet fever, and the hooping-cough, and the mumps; but, surely, a mother who is with her child all night long and all day long ought to be able to see the symptoms of any and every ailment before they would be suspected by another. And if it should ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... trouble, misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. It has always seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade themselves that Ireland was chiefly suffering from want of understanding and want of sympathy on the part of England, when all the time her only ailment has been want of liberty. To adapt the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... nothing, as Felix helped him up and Lance held his crutch for him. It was his first entrance into a place of worship. They had intended to have accustomed him a little to the sights and sounds, but the weather and his ailment had prevented them. He was drawn to the porch, and there Felix partly lifted him out and up the step, while Lance took his hat for him, and as they were both wanted for the choir procession that was to usher the Bishop into church, they had to leave him in his ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... days before the one memorable day which should see us off to Bale, and how alarming a cold in the head, caught by one of us two days before the date! Would it develop into something too serious to travel upon? Surely, never did so simple an ailment command so careful a treatment or portend so formidable, or possibly formidable, a catastrophe! Breakfast in bed was the order of the last two mornings, and two visits from a doctor, who won golden opinions from the two jolly bachelors ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... have told you I am interested in him, I can trespass so far upon your courtesy as to inquire into the nature of his ailment," I said. ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is stated to have troubled her while she was at Miss W—-'s, seems to have begun to distress her about this time; at least, she herself speaks of her irritable condition, which was certainly only a temporary ailment. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a-waitin' fer Sis Tempy," Uncle Remus remarked when the little boy made his appearance the next night; "but somehow er n'er look lak she fear'd she hatter up en tell some mo' tales. En yit maybe she bin strucken down wid some kinder ailment. Dey aint no countin' on deze yer fat folks. Dey er up one minnit en down de nex'; en w'at make it dat a-way I be bless ef I know, 'kaze w'en folks is big en fat look lak dey oughter be weller dan deze yer ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... paid part of what he owed there, had been obliged to confiscate everything, caused her no uneasiness. The next week, very likely, she had other trinkets and knick-knacks, newer and prettier; and indeed, so long as she had her father, she cared for little else. In any small childish misfortune or ailment she had but to run to him to find help, and sympathy, and caresses; and she had no grief or care in these first years for which these ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... Well, that is strange, for I was frightened by her. What can it be? I wish that Mayhew had called in. Every ailment fills me with terror. I always think of her dear mother. Three months before her death, she sat with me, as we do here together, well and strong, and thanking Providence for health and strength. She withered, as it might be from that hour, and, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... idea occurred to me, and alone in my room before the mirror I tried their effect. I was satisfied; they perfectly completed the disguise of my face. With them and my white hair and beard, I looked like a well-preserved man of fifty-five or so, whose only physical ailment was a slight affection of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli |
