Volume 1

Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1903-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cholia. There are a few million in the world in whom these are the results of the use of the eyes at near range, but there are many more millions, clerks, sew¬ ing-women, craftsmen, artists, etc., who have no such troubles. His Symptoms.—Throughout the annotations of the unendurable are scattered the insinuations that Carlyle’s sufferings were largely the products of his disordered fancy. “ His imagined ill-health,” he says: “ He saw his ailments through the lens of his imagi¬ nation ”; “ it was in his nature ”; “ he could not con¬ ceal that he was pretty well and had nothing really to complain of ”; “ why at the acme of success and fame could he not bear and forget too ? Why indeed! The only answer is that Carlyle was Carlyle,”—a hundred such poor sneers could be gathered. But no man not eaten up with incorrigible conceit can read the pathetic record of those forty years of poignant wretchedness and doubt the reality of the suffering. The physician who has heard the same pitiful recitals of anguish from his patients recognizes the utter sincerity of Carlyle’s utterance: “ Am getting weary of suffering, feel as if I could sit down in it and say, well then, I shall soon die, at any rate.” “ I am near heartbroken. Nobody on the whole believes my report.” As regards his irritableness, melancholia, and mental misery generally, Froude says in a hundred ways and “ insinuendos ” it was all in “his nature,” that he could
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