Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/387

 had by no means exaggerated, called in the afternoon to see the effect of his last prescription, he found her in such utter prostration of nerves and spirits, that he resolved to hazard a dose not much known to great ladies--viz. three grains of plain-speaking, with a minim of frightening.

"My dear lady," said he, "yours is a case in which physicians can be of very little use. There is something on the mind which my prescriptions fail to reach; worry of some sort--decidedly worry. And unless you yourself can either cure that, or will make head against it, worry, my dear Lady Montfort, will end not in consumption--you are too finely formed to let worry eat holes in the lungs--no; but in a confirmed aneurism of the heart, and the first sudden shock might then be immediately fatal. The heart is a noble organ--bears a great deal--but still its endurance has limits. Heart-complaints are more common than they were;--over-education and over-civilisation, I suspect. Very young people are not so subject to them; they have flurry, not worry--a very different thing. A good chronic silent grief of some years standing, that gets worried into acute inflammation at the age when feeling is no longer fancy, throws out a heart-disease which sometimes kills without warning, or sometimes, if the grief be removed, will rather prolong than shorten life, by inducing a prudent avoidance of worry in future. There is that worthy old gentleman who was taken so ill at Fawley, and about whom you were so anxious: in his case there had certainly been chronic grief; then came acute worry, and the heart could not get through its duties. Fifty years ago doctors would have cried 'apoplexy!'--nowadays we know that the heart saves the head. Well, he was more easy in his mind the last time I saw him, and thanks to his temperance, and his constitutional dislike to self-indulgence in worry, he may jog on to eighty, in spite of the stethoscope! Excess in the moral emotions gives heart-disease; abuse of the physical powers, paralysis; both more common than they were--the first for your gentle sex, the second for our rough one. Both, too, lie in wait for their victims at the entrance in middle life. I have a very fine case of paralysis now; a man built up by nature to live to a hundred--never saw such a splendid formation--such bone and such muscle. I would have given Van Amburgh the two best of his lions, and my man