Essays on hypochondriacal and other nervous affections / by John Reid.

  • Reid, John, 1776-1822.
Date:
1817
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on hypochondriacal and other nervous affections / by John Reid. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    There is no person, perhaps, who is apt to form so low an estimate of the value of hu- man existence, as a medical man practising among the poor, especially among the poor of a great city. But it is not impossible that he may exaggerate the excess of their suffer- ings, by combining, as it is natural for him to do, their external state, with those feelings which he has acquired from very different cir- cumstances and education. As the horrors of the grave affect only the living, so the mis- eries of poverty exist principally, perhaps, in the imagination of the affluent. The labour of the poor man relieves him at least from the burden of fashionable ennui: and the con- stant pressure of physical inconveniencies, from the more elegant, but surely not less in- tolerable distresses of a refined and romantic sensibihty. Even those superior intellectual advantages of education, to which the more opulent are almost exclusively admitted, may, in some cases, open only new avenues to sor- row. The mind, in proportion as it is expan- ded, exposes a larger surface to impression.