Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/72

62 permitted, by want of due control, to pass into a disposition of almost persistent or chronic anger, so that every trifle in his way was a cause of unwarrantable irritation. Sometimes his anger was so vehement that all about him were alarmed for him even more than for themselves, and when the attack was over there were hours of sorrow and regret, in private, which were as exhausting as the previous rage. In the midst of one of these outbreaks of short, severe madness, he suddenly felt, to use his own expression, as if his "heart were lost." He reeled under the impression, was nauseated and faint: then, recovering, he put his hand to his wrist, and discovered an intermittent action of his heart as the cause of his faintness. He never completely rallied from that shock, and to the day of his death, ten years later, he was never free from the intermittency. As a rule he was not conscious of the intermittency unless he took an observation on his own pulse, as though he were apart from himself: but occasionally after severe fatigue he would be subjectively conscious of it, and was much distressed and depressed. "I am broken-hearted," he would say, "physically broken-hearted." And so he was: but the knowledge of the broken heart tempered, marvelously, his passion, and saved him many years of a really useful life. He died ultimately from an acute febrile disorder.

The effect of anger upon the brain is to produce first a paralysis, and afterward, during reaction, a congestion of the vessels of that organ; for, if life continues, reactive congestion follows paralysis as certainly as day follows night. Thus, in men who give way to violent rage there comes on, during the acute period, what to them is merely a faintness, which, after a time of apparent recovery, is followed by a slight confusion, a giddiness, a weight in the head, a sense of oppression, and a return to equilibrium. They are happy who, continuing their course, suffer no more severely. Many die in one or other of the two stages I have named. They die in the moment of white rage, when the cerebral vessels and heart are paralyzed. Then we say they die of faintness, after excitement. Or, they die more slowly when the rage has passed and the congestion of reaction has led to engorgement of the vessels of the brain. Then the engorgement has caused stoppage of the circulation there; or a vessel has given way; or serous fluid has exuded, producing pressure, and we report that the death was from apoplexy, following upon some temporary excitement.

Hatred, when it is greatly intensified, acts much like anger in the effects it produces. The phenomena differ in that they are less suddenly developed and more closely concealed; they very rarely, in fact, come under the cognizance of the physician unmixed with other phenomena. They are made up of the symptoms of suppressed anger with morose determination, and they keep the sufferer from rest. He is led to neglect the necessities of his own existence; he is rendered