PHYSIOLOGY. 61 



from a weakness or imperfection in the exercise of the organs 

 of respiration. The anxiety referred to the thorax, also, fre- 

 quently depends upon the diseased motion of the heart, which 

 we may consider chiefly as of two kinds, arising either from a 

 difficulty or resistance to its frequent evacuation, or from a 

 debility in the action itself, as in the approach to a deliquium 

 animi, which occasions a most exquisite uneasiness. But the 

 motion of the heart may also depend upon a certain general 

 resistance to its easy and free evacuations, by a constriction of 

 the arterial system, when we find the pulse small and contract- 

 ed. This I take to be the proper anxietas febrilis, as also 

 that anxiety which precedes eruptions, and follows their sudden 

 repulsion. 



" The sense of uneasiness, or load at the stomach, depends 

 either on the weakness of the stomach in its action, whence it 

 occurs in some persons from every kind of ingesta, or upon the 

 improper nature of the food presenting a difficulty to the action 

 of the stomach. Under the first head we must consider that 

 this uneasiness arises not only from the debility of the stomach 

 in evacuating itself, but also from a resistance at the pylorus, 

 straitened either by scirrhus or by spasm. Such a feeling is 

 anorexia or want of appetite, which, increased, arises to a more 

 formal anxiety, commonly known under the name of sickness, 

 which, in many instances, gradually proceeds to nausea and 

 vomiting. 



" Besides the stomach, other viscera of the epigastric region 

 may be the seat of the uneasiness or anxiety of which we speak. 

 Thus, an anxiety referred to the epigastrium may depend upon 

 a difficult passage of the blood through the system of the vena 

 portarum, from which resistance Boerhaave imagined that the 

 anxietas febrilis arises. 



" In the abdominal region I would readily think of the uterus, 

 which may, by the more or less free passage of the blood through 

 its vessels, produce an uneasiness ; and many of the feelings 

 which belong to hysteric diseases may arise from this source ; 

 but although we may suppose this, we cannot point out how 

 far or when it actually takes place. The chief seat of anxiety 

 in the abdominal region is in the intestinal canal. Here it 

 may be a question whether it may not arise from a state of de- 



