Travels in Europe and the East

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. Through the favour of a Divine and Superintending Providence, which has protected me in my long absence, and restored me to health, am I indebted for this opportunity of addressing myself to my fellow-citizens. To my countrymen, in truth, am I placed under lasting obligations for their very kind and flattering opinion of me; and to this, doubtless, am I greatly indebted for the many courtesies extended towards me during my residence abroad. Their sympathies for me, when my health and energies were overtasked by laborious professional duties, tended to cheer my darkest hours of despondency, in whatever land or clime I travelled or sojourned. The efficacy of foreign travel, as a remedial measure, is felt in a particular manner in that distressing class of maladies commonly known as Nervous Diseases. They are, for the most part, imputable to exhausted excitability, from over exertion of the mental and corporeal faculties, undermining that primary source of life, of sensation, and motion?the brain. The pressure of unremitted and severe application had, in my own case, wrought a dangerous dilapidation of all the vital forces. The digestive organs partook largely of the general debility; and, as is usual in such cases, a train of alarming symptoms were produced, which closely counterfeited, by sympathetic influence, all the phenomena of radical organic disease. Though our medical judgment, under such circumstances, may come to the full conviction that no serious lesion or injury of an organic character exists, and that the symptoms may be legitimately deducible solely from those of an atonic or debilitated condition of the nervous functions, yet is the foe-simile to real disease so ex- f act and perfect, and the sufferings of the patient, both in bpdy and mi...