THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 605 



to a certain degree, their utmost activity is insufficient to supply the 

 needs of the organism, and the patient suffers the tortures of an ir- 

 remediable air-famine. The automatic action of the lungs has to be 

 supplemented by a desperate muscular effort, the motions of the con- 

 tracted organ become spasmodic and wheezing, the sufferer is unable 

 to breathe in an horizontal position, and after a short slumber awakens 

 with a sense of suffocation. But a chronic disposition to all these 

 symptoms in their extreme malignity may exist without a phthisical 

 diathesis, and remain latent for weeks and years. The exciting cause 

 generally operates without a moment's warning. During the labori- 

 ous digestion of a heavy dinner, or even after a moderate meal, eaten 

 on a sultry day, the process of respiration begins to alternate Avith in- 

 ert pauses, relieved at first by an occasional yawn, by-and-by only by 

 a violent gasp ; a feeling of uneasiness supervenes, the air-deficit be- 

 comes more and more perceptible, and the patient suddenly realizes 

 that he is booked for a five days' struggle with a pulmonary torpor. 

 Changes of temperature, a sudden thaw in midwinter, or a sultry day 

 after a protracted rain, have a similar tendency, but the most frequent 

 proximate cause is violent mental emotion fear, anxiety, and espe- 

 cially suppressed anger. Nothing else so strikingly illustrates the in- 

 timate interaction of mental and physical conditions as this sudden 

 pathological effect of a purely physical cause. In the same instant 

 almost, when a fit of wrath even in the form of a transient irritation 

 accelerates the throbbing of the heart, its reaction on the respiratory 

 organs betrays itself by a spasmodic gasp, the patient instinctively 

 clutches his ribs and tries to master the incipient mischief, but emo- 

 tional asthma is a form of the disease that can rarely be nipped in the 

 bud ; the primum mobile can not be revoked, and the sufferer may 

 think himself lucky to get off with a result of twenty-four hours' 

 misery. Excessive exercise lifting weights, running, wrestling, etc. 

 is merely an adjuvant of tbe fore-named cause. With his mind at 

 ease, an asthmatic may chop cord -wood on the warmest day in the 

 year, carry corn-sacks, or run up-hill till his lungs are ready to burst 

 with panting ; that panting will be entirely distinct from the ineffect- 

 ual gasps of the air-famine. But, under the depressing influence of 

 mental worry, an exhausting physical effort will bring on a fit of 

 asthma as surely as heat and exercise would result in perspiration. 



Among the rarer proximate causes are loss of blood, starvation, 

 nervous exhaustion from mental overwork, sexual excesses, and sudden 

 fright, or rather the shudder which sometimes follows the nervous 

 shock produced by a real or imaginary danger, as a slip of the foot at 

 the brink of a steep declivity, a snake-panic, the unexpected visit of a 

 stranger, etc. Nausea in some of its forms may produce an analogous 

 effect. " A young lady," says a correspondent of the London "Lan- 

 cet," "was sitting at dinner, apparently in perfect health. She par- 

 took, among other things, of some rabbit, and in about ten minutes or 



