Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/294

 Curiosities of Nervousness.—An interesting book might be made out of the curiosities of nervousness from a contemporary standpoint. The elder Disraeli has somewhere a chapter on the subject; but, if our memory serves us correctly, his instances trench rather upon the hysterical conditions, the monomanias, the wild fanciful delusions of the disordered imagination, than upon the prosaic features of the distemper. He instances men who could not bear the sight of old women, and fainted dead away if a grandmother showed herself; others who, if they heard a rat in the wall, took it for a ghost and got up and prayed fervently; and such things. The present age furnishes more rational imaginings, born of the daily papers, emphasized by indigestion, and riveted by the surprising eloquence of the diurnal quidnuncs. For instance, there are plenty of people living at this moment who would warmly refuse to get into bed before looking under it to make sure that no man lay there. There are others who pass the night in constant fear of fire; who, before they withdraw to their bedchambers, carefully rake out every fireplace in the house, turn off the gas, inspect every room, knock on the servants' doors and inquire through the key-holes if their candles are out; and after all this bother go to bed and lie awake until the dawn with their bedroom doors ajar, sniffing at imaginary fumes of burning, and ready to spring out and go raving mad should anything like a cry be raised—for these people never make any serious provision against fire should fire come. There are others, again, who will lie night after night in expectation of burglars. A distant footfall will court them to the window, where, cautiously pulling aside the blind by the breadth of a nose (giving scope to one eye), they will peer into the gloom and mistake some shadow for the figure of a man (wrapped in an overcoat and with a horse-pistol in every pocket), intent upon the particular window whence he is being watched. Others will be kept awake by the song of the wind about the casement, or in the empty rooms around, confounding these natural sounds with the murmur of human voices in the pantry, or on the landing just outside.

These are some of the hundred night fears beyond an ordinary imagination to express. But there are daylight fears as numerous, if not always so agonizing. What words can convey the horror felt by a certain kind of nervous people who, making a journey on a railway, are suddenly brought to a stand in a tunnel? Nothing can comfort them. Their heads shoot through the windows, their cries lacerate the gloom, and the reassuring shouts of the guard only aggravate their fright and provoke fresh yells for immediate release. Or take the mental condition of another kind of nervous persons at sea. Every roll of the vessel means imminent death. The carrying away of a water-cask, the momentary stoppage of the engines, the cry of a man on the lookout, the escape of a sail from the gaskets that confine it to the yard, and its consequent bellowing upon the gale, the abrupt shipping of a sea, nay, the tumbling of a steward down a ladder, or the fall and smash of a few plates from the leaning saloon table, will strike an indescribable horror, and lead to no end of convulsive clingings and mumblings of prayer. Indeed, it would be possible to fill every page in this journal with a catalogue of the imaginative afflictions under which nervous people labor. Old Doctor Johnson, going back to touch an omitted post, typifies a host of numerous disorders which need not be mistaken for superstitions, and which assume a vast number of shapes among us in these days. Take a pavement full of people with a ladder across it from the house-top to the curbstone. How many of the passengers will wade into the mud of the road to save themselves from passing under that ladder? The proportion of the nervous people in the world will be happily indicated by such an example. Of every hundred persons, we question if ten would, without hesitation, pass under that ladder. When a man refuses to make his will, because he fears that by doing so he will be hastening his death, are we not to attribute his cowardice to the nerves? It is a mere convenient apology to call such misgivings superstitions. No one would hope to cure a priest's faith in a winking Madonna by a course of quinine; and superstitions of the real sort are assuredly not to be corrected by medical treatment. But our latter-day nerves are to be dealt with, and