"Atrophy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... becoming stone like that. His is a case in point, and a good one, because the atrophy is coming about not from physical disease, or from any dissipation. You would call him sane and full of fire. He was. He married three years ago. Their life was full, too, like ours, and precious. They did not throw it away; they were wise guardians of all its possibilities. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... beloved one. He put it on paper, he played it, but speak it he could not. Here is a point that reveals Chopin's native indecision, his inability to make up his mind. He recalls to me the Frederic Moreau of Flaubert's "L'Education Sentimentale." There is an atrophy of the will, for Chopin can neither propose nor fly from Warsaw. He writes letters that are full of self-reproaches, letters that must have both bored and irritated his friends. Like many other men of genius he suffered all his life from folie de doute, indeed ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... who boast that they cannot sing have very often, by the simple denial of their ability, ensured a kind of mental atrophy in the function. It is quite a usual thing for us to fasten unnecessary limitations upon ourselves by refusing to believe in our own powers, and most of us have a large stock of very real inhibitions, which prevent us from doing things otherwise well within our capacity. ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... which waste away or shrink when not used as nature provided. For instance, perhaps you have had or have seen persons that had a fractured leg or arm and on account of not being able to use the leg or arm the muscles wasted away (Atrophy), until they were used normally for sometime, when the muscles again came back to their ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... before forty years of age, sixty per cent between forty and sixty, and twenty per cent between sixty and eighty. Thus the early period of decline, the transition stage between full functional vigor and declared atrophy (wasting) of the glands, is clearly the period of greatest danger; precisely the period in which the gland-cells, though losing their function,—and income,—have still the strength to inaugurate a rebellion, and ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... from San Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting the Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring each other. This proposal ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally terminating in almost complete atrophy of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... friend's predicament to discuss socialism....I rather like the idea though of the strong man having the opportunity to prove himself stronger than Life...find out what, he was put on earth and endowed with certain characteristics for...rather a pity all that should atrophy....However—what shall my friend do? Continue to live with a man ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... with atrophy of the organ of common-sense rose in his place in the halls of legislation and pointed with pride to his Unblotted Escutcheon. Seeing what it supposed to be the finger of scorn pointed at it, the Unblotted Escutcheon turned black with rage. Seeing the Unblotted Escutcheon ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... of these reasons, the negative one, is that aesthetic pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving inactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. But before entering on this ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... obey if it wishes to develop normally and in health—that it neglect the exercise of no member of its body, deny gratification to no natural impulse. Each member must fill the function, that it is intended for by Nature, on penalty of atrophy and disease. The laws of the physical development of man must be studied and observed, the same as those of mental development. The mental activity of the human being is the expression of the physiologic composition of its ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... that, in the lifetime of the individual, increased use of structures leads to an increase of their functional efficiency; while, on the other hand, disuse leads to atrophy. The arms of a blacksmith, and the legs of a mountaineer, are familiar illustrations of the first principle: our hospital wards are full of illustrations of the second. Again, we know that the characters of parents are transmitted to their progeny by means of heredity. Now the hypothesis in ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... relations available if the individual will put himself in the way of enjoying them. Good morals are dependent on right associations. Human beings need the stimulus of good society, otherwise the mind vegetates or broods upon real or fancied wrongs until the moral nature is in danger of atrophy or warping. Family feuds develop, as among the Scotch highlanders or the mountain people in certain parts of the South. Lack of social sympathy increases as the interests become self-centred; out of this characteristic grow directly such evils as petty lawlessness, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... yet discovered the caudal man, except as the ever-fertile Mr. Stanley heard of one in Africa? And where is his monkey that first lost the prehensile power to climb trees? For bear in mind that it was the loss of this prehensile power that resulted in the caudal atrophy of our monkey progenitors, who became men simply because they were tailless monkeys! They had lost their power to climb trees, and accordingly had no longer any use for tails to let themselves down from the limbs. A "beneficent necessity" therefore, according to Mr. Emerson, dropped the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the phenomenon must be looked for in the race character; and whatever the higher education may accomplish in the remote future, it can scarcely be expected to transform nature. But does it at present atrophy certain finer tendencies? I think that it unavoidably does, for the simple reason that, under existing conditions, the moral and mental powers are overtasked by its requirements. All that wonderful national spirit of duty, of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... promote natural excretions, can be no recommendation of what is generally used; for this constant effect must render them too copious, and thus, according to all physical experience, the blood must be thickened in the greater vessels, which frequently terminates in an atrophy. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... had never taken before. You taught me to be human. I told Isabel so. She—poor girl—" he stopped a second, and she saw that momentarily he was moved; but he continued almost at once—"she was grateful to you too," he said. "You removed the outer crust at a single stroke—just in time to prevent atrophy. Of course," he glanced down at the letter under his hand, "it was a more or less painful process, but it may comfort you to know that it didn't go quite so deep with me as I thought it had at the time. There's ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... subtly to everything in his environment, but his response must be characteristic; he must sustain his personality and become more himself through the years. He alone is vital in the social scheme who lets nothing in him atrophy and who persists in being varied from all others in the scale of character to the degree of variability that was ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... past history. What sort of character-development has so far been going on? Commonly it happens that there has been no spiritual effort that is worth thinking about; but that does not mean that nothing spiritual has been happening. It means on the contrary that there has been going on a spiritual atrophy, the spiritual powers have been without exercise and will be difficult to arouse to activity. In such a case as that spiritual awakening will be followed by a long period of spiritual struggle against habits of thought and action which ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... throwing doubt on the original theory of Evolution? They admit the possibility of the modification of species through natural selection, but they dispute the theory that any broad change takes place in the genera of organisms. They do not even admit the possibility of the atrophy, through long disuse, of organs of which the animal no longer has need. They are forced to admit that many species and genera have become extinct—so much is proved by the skeletons of prehistoric beasts found from time to time under the earth's surface. But what they dispute is that there ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... enriches the world to our eyes and minds, by revealing to us the marvels, delights, tendernesses and suggestions which are all around us in man and nature; it keeps alive our better part in places and circumstances when that better part might perish with disease and atrophy; it continually irrigates with benign influences the mind which might grow arid and barren, and so it enables all the little seeds and buds of our intellectual and moral nature to germinate and produce ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... that they will not make allowances. All men make very large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium. But there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish, like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire. The first is, that the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of the country among its inhabitants shall be so conducted that no crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults who are not ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... cortical substance, or even to the tubular. The kidneys are occasionally much larger than usual, without any other change of structure; or simple hypertrophy may affect but one of them. They are subject to atrophy, which may be either general or partial; or one of the kidneys may be completely wanting, and this evidently the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... for I ordered dinner, Waiting to the very last, Twenty minutes after seven, And 'tis now the quarter past. 'Tis a dinner which Lucullus Would have wept with joy to see, One, might wake the soul of Curtis From death's drowsy atrophy. ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... it on Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and the interesting, amusing life led by the wife of a man in Rodney's position, which had brought her always into contact with people and ideas. Much more amusing than grinding at intellectual work of her own, but it apparently caused the brain to atrophy. And she was, anyhow, tired of doing nothing in particular. After forty you must have your job, you must be independent of other people's jobs, of human and social contacts, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... lady, and his knowledge stood him in no stead in the Bush; and first he lost his money, and he fashed himself terrible about that, and then he lost a child or two, and then he lost his wife, and he came back to us a broken-hearted man, with no wish to live. The doctor may call it atrophy, but I will call it what the Scripture calls it, a broken and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... only. The diaphragm is a musculo-fibrinous organ and depends for blood and nerve supply above its own location, and that supply must be given freely and pure for nerve and blood or we will have a diseased organ to start with; then we may find a universal atrophy or oedema, which would, besides its own deformity not be able to rise and fall, to assist the lungs to mix air with blood to purify venous blood, as it is carried to the lungs to throw off impurities and take on oxygen previous ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... in various American colleges that a fundamental and most injurious error was made in relieving trustees and faculty from responsibility, and concentrating all in the president. The result, in many of these institutions, had been a sort of atrophy,—the trustees and faculty being, whenever an emergency arose, badly informed as to the affairs of their institutions, and really incapable of managing them. This state of things was the most serious drawback to President Tappan's ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... act and to think, each after his kind. The horse rejoices in the liberty of acting like a horse, and not like an ox; and man enjoys the privilege of acting the part of a man, and not of a disembodied spirit. If the limbs of the former are struck by an atrophy, we do not expect him to win the race. If the brain of the latter is blasted by disease or deterioration, we cannot expect the fruits of a sound and vigorous organism. When we say that a person with a brain vitiated by an accumulation of hereditary defects ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... need to—make a song about it!" winced the Senior Surgeon. "It's just about the crudest case of complete muscular atrophy that I've ever seen!" ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... other interests sink into atrophy; thenceforward, for example, there appears in Bonaparte's nature no trace of the Corsican patriot. The one faint spark of remaining interest seems to have been extinguished in an order that Pozzo di Borgo and his friends, if they had not escaped, should be brought to ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... circuit, their impregnable strength, their countless towers, arrogating to themselves the circumference of a day's journey—and all for what? To guard a city, which, once dropsied with grandeur, has now shrunk with the disease into comparative atrophy; a city, which, having boastfully demanded their aid, has now abandoned them for miles. It is as though one should wrap a triumphal robe about a corpse, or place a giant's helmet upon a skeleton's skull. It is no poetical figure to look upon them as an eternal satire upon the great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... will be rewarded a thousand times. Interest in the vague sentimental fantasies of extra-mundane existence, in pathological or hysterical flights from the realities of our earthliness, will have through atrophy disappeared, for in that dawn men and women will have come to the realization, already suggested, that here close at hand is our paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity. Not by leaving it and our essential humanity ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... of it; a great accumulation of the sensorial power of association occurs, which is exerted on the pulmonary and cutaneous absorbents by reverse sympathy, and produces a great absorption of the fluid effused into the cellular membrane in anasarca, with dry skin; constituting one kind of atrophy. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... by every one that a part of the body which is much used tends to increase in size, or strength, and similarly that a part which is not used tends to atrophy. It is further found that such changes are progressive in the race, in many cases. Man's brain has steadily increased in size, as he used it more and more; on the other hand, his canine teeth have grown smaller. Can this ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... one, the deep-seated principles of humanity and chivalry in war. It had been done gradually and systematically—scientifically, in fact, and in the majority of cases it succeeded in producing a state of atrophy of the moral sense that was altogether admirable—from a ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... such a way as to ensure an exact equilibrium between all the parts concerned, one organ will get more than its share, another less. My law of the compensation of organs is founded on these principles" (i., Lecon 16, p. 12). "The atrophy of one organ turns to the profit of another; and the reason why this cannot be otherwise is simple, it is because there is not an unlimited supply of the substance required for each special purpose."[115] The nutritive material ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... jointly with him a classical work on the nervous system of vertebrates in 1825. Desmoulins made at least one discovery of epochal importance. He observed that the brains of persons dying in old age were lighter than the average and gave visible evidence of atrophy, and he reasoned that such decay is a normal accompaniment of senility. No one nowadays would question the accuracy of this observation, but the scientific world was not quite ready for it in 1825; for when Desmoulins announced his discovery to the French Academy, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... can be right and wrong expression. If a man permits his life to run riot and only the animal side of his nature is allowed to express itself, he is repressing his highest and best, and the qualities not used atrophy ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... painful that I could not put on a shoe or even a slipper, so that I had to hop about with only a sock over it. The doctor on board had told me that I was suffering from beri-beri, and although I tried not to believe him I was gradually forced to the conclusion that he was right. In fact, atrophy set in by degrees—one of the characteristics of beri-beri being that after a time you feel no pain at all. You can dig a pin into the affected part, or pluck off all the hairs without feeling the slightest pain. I was in a bad ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to be remote, and Nikky meant to be firm and very, very loyal. Which shows how young and inexperienced they were. Because any one who knows even the beginnings of love knows that its victims suffer from an atrophy of both reason and conscience, and a ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for an army officer to get out of the desk habit, and caution, conservatism, sureness, seem even in time of crisis to be more important than a bit of daring. In my Department, I figure that it takes about seven years for the nerve of initiative and the nerve of imagination to atrophy, and so, perhaps, it is in other departments. It took five months for one of our war bureaus to get out a contract for a building that we were to build for them. Fifteen men had to sign the contract. And of course we have been impatient. But ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... they constitute a distinct advance over the characteristics of the other nations of the earth, it becomes the manifest duty of the school to do its share in perpetuating these ideals and prejudices and standards. Once let these atrophy through disuse, once let them fail of transmission because of the decay of the home, or the decay of the school, or the decay of the social institutions that typify and express them, and our country must go the way of Greece and Rome, and, although our blood ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition, or of atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert's offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Cointet Brothers, paper manufacturers, applied to the authorities for the second printer's license in Angouleme. Hitherto old Sechard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business. Sechard thought joyfully when he heard the news that the coming struggle with the Cointets would be fought out ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... nations that the office of the interpreters exists. When, as from time to time happens, a child is born with some powers of articulation, he is set apart, and trained to talk in the interpreters' college. Of course the partial atrophy of the vocal organs, from which even the best interpreters suffer, renders many of the sounds of language impossible for them. None, for instance, can pronounce v, f, or s; and as to the sound ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... past the incomplete. One side of their nature has undergone atrophy, with the result that they have lost touch with their living fellow men ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... boundless joy! You, who will learn all of love's meaning presently, and what it makes of existence, and what God meant by giving it to us mortals. You are intended by nature to be a complete woman if you did but know it—but such a life, tied to that half fish man, would atrophy all that is finest in your character. You would grow really into what they are trying to make you appear—after years of hopelessness and suffering. Do you not feel all ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... found a family, and ability which has not 5000 pounds a year, its power will be less year by year, and at last be gone, as so much kingly power is gone—no one knows how. Its danger is not in assassination, but atrophy; not abolition, but decline. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... supernaturalism. Assuming that originally there existed what was accepted as good evidence for the existence of a supernatural, it is hardly credible that every subsequent generation went on accepting it merely because one generation received evidence of its existence. As organs atrophy for want of exercise, so do beliefs die out in time for want of proof. Some kind of evidence must have been continually forthcoming in order to keep the belief alive and active. It is not a question of whether the evidence was good or bad. All evidence, it is important ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... that man was made to struggle—to use all his powers. If he rests too long beside the still backwaters of life, in fairy-like dales, they're apt to atrophy, and he finds himself slack and nerveless when he goes out to face the ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... physician, joined to his youth, and the goodness of his constitution, the force of the distemper at last abated, yet could not be so intirely eradicated, as not to leave a certain pressure and debility upon the nerves, by some called a fever on the spirits, which seemed to threaten either an atrophy or consumption; his complexion grew pale and livid, and his strength and flesh visibly wasted; and what was yet worse, the vigour of his mind decayed, in proportion with that of his external frame, insomuch that, falling into ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... say to the colonel—I suspect the cause of her illness is rather a spiritual one. She has evidently a strong mental constitution; and this strong frame, so to speak, has been fed upon slops; and an atrophy is the consequence. My hope in your plan is, partly, that it may furnish a better mental table for her, for the time, and set her foraging in new ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... Athletic atleta. Athlete atleto. Atlas landkartaro. Atmosphere atmosfero. Atom atomo. Atomism atomismo. At once tuj. Atone rebonigi. Atonement rebonigo. Atrocious kruelega. Atrocity kruelego. Atrophy atrofio. Attach alligi. Attachment alligo. Attack atako. Attack ataki. Attain atingi. Attain (to) trafi, atingi (al). Attainment akiro. Attempt atenci. Attempt atenco. Attendants (retinue) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... they are less capable of it. Their muscular movements are feebler, and soon bring on fatigue; their actions are slow and painful. Even old men whose mental vigour is unimpaired admit their muscular weakness. The physical correlate of this condition is an actual atrophy of the muscles, and has for long been known to observers. I have found that the cause of this atrophy is the consumption of the muscle fibres by what I call phagocytes, or eating cells, a certain ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... came in, and jigs and reels succeeded each other with such rapidity, that, notwithstanding the copious supplies of whiskey, the drummer's arms failed him, and the fifer had almost blown himself into an atrophy. Did I dance? To be sure I did, and right merrily too. I had such pleasant, fair-haired, rosy, Hebe-like instructresses, ready to tear each other's eyes out to get me for a partner. Then, they talked Irish so musically, and put the king's English to death so charmingly that, notwithstanding ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... to freedom, the light of day, and the calyx of flowers; the workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity. The queen's brain turns to pulp, that the reproductive organs may profit; in the workers these organs atrophy, to the benefit of their intelligence. Nor would it be fair to allege that the will plays no part in all these renouncements. We have seen that each worker's larva can be transformed into a queen if lodged and fed on the royal ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of the upland plains, every fertile huerta of the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... variety and recreation and to dearth of intellectual stimulus than to hard labor, severe as this often is. Age is more than the flight of the years, the stoop of the form, or the hardening of the arteries; it is also the atrophy of the intellect and the fading away of the emotions resulting from disuse. The farmer needs occasionally to have something more exciting than the alternation of the day's work with the nightly "chores." And his wife should now and then have an opportunity to meet people other ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... apposite, approbation, appurtenance, aquatic, aqueous, aquiline, arbitrary, archaic, arduous, aromatic, arrear, articulate, ascetic, asperity, asphyxiate, asseverate, assiduity, assimilate, astringent, astute, atrophy, attenuate, auditory, augury, auscultation, austerity, authenticate, authenticity, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,—as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,—or, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... weak point in Hatha Yoga is that action on this line cannot reach beyond the astral plane, and the great strain imposed on the comparatively intractable matter of the physical plane sometimes leads to atrophy of the very organs, the activity of which is necessary for effecting the changes in consciousness that would be useful. The Hatha Yogi gains control over the bodily organs with which the waking consciousness no longer ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... brought up in the Early Victorian epoch, he would have cast off his old skin, and made his court to Marlborough House, in partnership with the American woman and the Jew banker. Common-sense dictated it; but Adams and his friends were unfashionable by some law of Anglo-Saxon custom — some innate atrophy of mind. Figuring himself as already a man of action, and rather far up towards the front, he had no idea of making a new effort or catching up with a new world. He saw nothing ahead of him. The world was never more calm. He wanted to talk with Ministers about the Alabama ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... face glossy, verging to a darkish hue; aspect of the face terrible, and with a fixed look; with acumination or pointing and contraction of the pulps of the ear. And there are many other signs, as pustules and excrescences, atrophy of the muscles, and particularly of those between the thumb and forefinger; insensibility of the extremities; fissures, and infections of the skin; the blood, when drawn and washed, containing black, earthy, rough, sandy matter. ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... declare and make manifest his personal aptitudes, and it will not happen, as it does to-day, that many peasants, sons of the people and of the lower middle class, gifted with natural talents, will be compelled to allow their talents to atrophy while they toil as peasants, workingmen or employees, when they would be able to furnish society a different and more fruitful kind of labor, because it would be more in ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... grandsire was from the wrong side of the Border—one Bullsegg, who came hither as a steward, or bailiff, or ground-officer, or something in that department, to the last Girnigo of Killancureit, who died of an atrophy. After his master's death, sir,—ye would hardly believe such a scandal,—but this Bullsegg, being portly and comely of aspect, intermarried with the lady dowager, who was young and amorous, and possessed himself of the estate, which devolved on this unhappy woman by a settlement ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... day who simply could not believe that anyone could think a thing wrong and yet do it. His biographer said, very shrewdly, that his sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music—that he did not possess even the common liberty of right and wrong. That's a bad case of atrophy! You must not, of course, be at the mercy of your moods, but you must not be at the mercy of your ethical habits either. Of the two, I am not sure that the habit isn't ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hear that most of the Quakers die of stupidity—actually and literally? I was assured of the fact the other day by a very intelligent physician, who practised twenty years among them, and informs me that few of the richer sort live to be fifty, but die of a sort of atrophy, their cold blood just stagnating by degrees among their flabby fat. They eat too much, he says; take little exercise; and, above all, have no nervous excitement. The affection is known in this part of the country by the name of the Quaker's disease, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... professional distinction. Covet the best. Be satisfied with nothing less than the highest professional work of doctor, politician, or teacher. But beware of the imprisoning effect which sometimes comes of this very success in professional life, the atrophy of sensibility, the increasing incapacity for sympathy, for public spirit, for charity,—an incapacity which makes some men of the highest endowments among the least serviceable, least loving, and least loved of a community. "If," says the apostle, "in the ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... was procured, but he pronounced her system so debilitated and detoned as hardly probable to outride the shock, the nervous centres being depressed and atrophy setting in. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Chalky deposits in Shoulder joints, Arm joints, Hand joints, Atrophy of the muscles of Arms, Shoulders, Stiffness of all those joints, Insomnia, Excruciating pains most of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he said. "I'll admit you don't look very hungry. But how about the appetite for other things, for success in life, for the appreciation of intelligent men and for their companionship? Is there no danger of what you fellows call atrophy? Men's intellects can only maintain a proper level by rubbing ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... the sweet creature was falling into an atrophy. So she carried the forlorn damsel post haste to the Black Rock for the recovery of her health, or her heart. Clementina, my dear, no reproachful looks; in your secret soul do not you know, that I could not do a young lady a greater favour ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... a counterpoise to sociocracy. We must beware of any organisation, be it internationalist or pacifist, which claims to subjugate and atrophy the living forces of man. The political ideal is a genuine federalism which shall respect individualisms. As the old saying has it: Let everything ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... support of clinical or laboratory experience, the beneficial action being at least neutralized by undesirable effects produced elsewhere. The continued use of large doses of alcohol produces chronic gastritis, in which the continued irritation has led to overgrowth of connective tissue, atrophy of the gastric glands and permanent cessation of the gastric ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rest of her life seems a matter of growth or of atrophy, according to your point of view. She grew more scientific, as she fancied, but she lost the freshness and inspiration of her earlier novels. The reason seems to be that her head was turned by her fame as a moralist and exponent of culture; so she forgot that she "was born to please," ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Him is life, a will which is burdened with its own selfhood, an imagination which paints the misty walls of this earthly prison with awful shapes that terrify and faint hopes that mock, a heart that hungers for love, and a reason which pines in atrophy without light. And all these the gospel which is lodged in our hands meets. It addresses itself to nothing in men that is not in man. Surface differences of position, culture, clime, age, and the like, it brushes ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... motion what was one of the great food-producing machines of the world. We have also seen something of the political organization which, with far wider ambitions before it, is at present struggling to prevent temporary paralysis from turning into permanent atrophy. We have seen that it consists of a political party so far dominant that the Trades Unions and all that is articulate in the country may be considered as part of a machinery of propaganda, for getting those things done which that political party considers should be done. In ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... proficiency in any particular subject invariably leads to atrophy in other directions. A man who eats and breathes and dreams Toxins, for instance, who lives so much in Toxins that he corresponds almost daily with learned and unintelligible Germans; who knows so much about Toxins that when he enters, with shabby trousers and a small hand-bag, ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... fever, but a fall of temperature below the normal standard. Having regard to which train of symptoms it is fair to suppose the acorn will afford in the human subject a useful specific medicine for the marasmus, or wasting atrophy of young children who are scrofulous. The fruit should be given in the form of a tincture, or vegetable extract, or even admixed (when ground) sparingly with wheaten flour in bread. The dose should fall short of producing any of the above symptoms, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... of the great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, are believed to have been introduced several hundreds of years previously. This contact with and importation from China undoubtedly had a marked effect in inducing what I may term atrophy in the development of the Japanese language as also the growth of its own literature, that is a literature entirely devoid of Chinese influences. Indeed it is impossible to speculate on what might have been the development ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... kingdom is full of mountebanks, empirics, and quacks. We have quacks in religion, quacks in physic, quacks in law, quacks in politics, quacks in patriotism, quacks in government—High German quacks, that have blistered, sweated, bled, and purged the nation into an atrophy. But this is not all; they have not only evacuated her into a consumption, but they have intoxicated her brain, until she is become delirious; she can no longer pursue her own interest, or, indeed, rightly distinguish it. Like the people of Nineveh, she can ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... insufficiently patulous glottis, new corks with smaller grooves being substituted as laryngeal breathing becomes easier. Corking the cannula is an excellent orthopedic treatment in certain cases where muscle atrophy and partial inflammatory fixation of the cricoarytenoid joints are etiological factors in the stenosis. The added pull of the posterior cricoarytenoid muscles during the slight effort at inspiration restores their tone and increases the mobility of all the attached structures. By no other ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... on which all patriotic endeavour finally converges. For this purpose the failure to distinguish between the ambitions of the dynastic statesmen and the interests of the commonwealth is really a prodigious advantage, which their rivals, of more mature growth politically, have lost by atrophy of this same dynastic axiom of subservience. These others, of whom the French and the English-speaking peoples make up the greater part and may be taken as the typical instance, have had a different history, in part. The discipline of experience has left a somewhat different residue of habits ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... undeveloped condition, it is not fitted, the organ is permanently weakened and rendered incapable of its legitimate use later in life when the book is a necessity. And again, this excessive use of the eye causes an atrophy of the other organs that ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... while the interstitial cells were enormously developed, by compensatory hypertrophy in consequence of the removal of the other testis. At the same time the male instincts and the other generative organs were unchanged. In a few cases, however, Ancel and Bouin observed atrophy of the interstitial cells as well as the spermatic cells. They believe this is due to the nerves supplying the testis being included in the ligature. This is rather a surprising conclusion in view ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... way that I assumed a gradual degeneration of the food-yelk and the yelk-sac on the way from the proreptiles to the mammals. "The cenogenetic process of adaptation," I said, "which has occasioned the atrophy of the rudimentary yelk-sac of the mammal, is perfectly clear. It is due to the fact that the young of the mammal, whose ancestors were certainly oviparous, now remain a long time in the womb. As the great store of food-yelk, which the oviparous ancestors gave to the egg, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... recited—merely talking aloud in their intellectual sleep but not reflecting—China was awake and thinking hard. Japan's continued civil wars, which caused the almost total destruction of books and manuscripts, secured also the triumph of Buddhism which meant the atrophy of the national intellect. When, after the long feuds and battles of the middle ages, Confucianism stepped the second time into the Land of Brave Scholars, it was no longer with the simple rules of conduct and ceremonial of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... blithe spontaneity of the Renaissance. But they were at the same time suffering from grievous exhaustion, humiliated by the tyranny of foreign despotism, and terrorized by ecclesiastical intolerance. In their case, therefore, a sort of moral and intellectual atrophy becomes gradually more and more perceptible. The clear artistic sense of rightness and of beauty yields to doubtful taste. The frank audacity of the Renaissance is superseded by cringing timidity, lumbering dulness, somnolent and stagnant acquiescence in accepted formulae. At first ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Wycliffe's voice, or had imagined it. He would doubtless have thought it mere imagination, some accidental resemblance to which his ear had given identity, had not Cardington's manner registered a sudden emotional disturbance. He paused in his narration, like one smitten with mental atrophy and searching for the word that was about to reach his lips. His position on the inside of the walk offered a barrier between Leigh and the retreating couple, and he gave a curious impression of maintaining that position carefully ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... maintained], "or even if they might occasionally be transmitted" [which cannot, I imagine, be reasonably questioned], "a powerful support would be given to the Lamarckian principle, and the transmission of functional hypertrophy or atrophy would ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... is the process of thought, the line of argument by which the old tacticians arrived at their conclusions good and bad. In studying the long series of Instructions we are able to detach certain attitudes of mind which led to the atrophy of principles essentially good, and others which pushed the system forward on healthy lines and flung off obsolete restraints. In an art so shifting and amorphous as naval tactics, the difference between health and ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... to others the artist ministers to himself. In helping others we help ourselves. We grow strong through exercise, and only the faculties that are exercised—that is to say, expressed—become strong. Those not in use atrophy and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... simply impossible on the present occasion. I cannot, however, omit to notice how early Dr. Bucknill was in the field, as his laborious examination of a number of brains of the insane to determine the amount of cerebral atrophy and the specific gravity, bear witness, as also his demonstration of the changes which take place, not only in the brain and its membranes, but in the cord, in general paralysis; these observations, along with those of Dr. Boyd, having been ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away something ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... expect a statement of fact in an advertisement. In short, where any human activity is conventionalized, standards are arbitrarily fixed; and critical discernment grows dull if it does not altogether atrophy. It simply does not occur to the great majority of men that any activity should be judged otherwise than by comparing it with the stereotyped average of the day. This is, to be sure, only that blindness of the common mind which Socrates and ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled to ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... man's mind and will to discharge the duties nature meant to be fulfilled by her own. Unhappily nature has a way of allowing the human race to learn by its own experience, even though the lesson consume ages of time; and she has also a rule that unused faculties and functions fall into a state of atrophy. It was by such a substitution of masculine for feminine will that woman fell so far behind him whom she originally led in the race, industrial and intellectual. If they are ever to march side by side as true comrades and free partners, it must be by a ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... but its trial blew him up into a tympany, from which he was only relieved by having recourse to a drug, also of his own discovery, which, in counteracting the syrup, reduced him to an alarming state of atrophy. But the mischances of the historian do not enter into his history: and our curiosity must be still eager to open Lenglet's "Histoire de la Philosophie Hermetique," accompanied by a catalogue of the writers in this mysterious science, in two volumes: as well as his enlarged edition of the works ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... influences of an extremely powerful and continuous kind, where they concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific peripheral influence is perpetually pouring in. Even such influences as the psychical and emotional, be it remembered, must be considered peripheral."[19] The ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... looked at him with a momentary bristle of enquiry in the gentle brown eyes, and he remembered, just in time, that her husband had once held the reins in Pall Mall for half a year, when, feeling atrophy creeping on, he resigned office and died ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy has grown stale, and that the academic ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... him. The fact that there were other churches in the town less successful than his own (one or two, indeed, virtually starving) he had found it simple to account for in that their denominations had abandoned the true conception of the Church, and were logically degenerating into atrophy. What better proof of the barrenness of these modern philosophical and religious books did he need than the spectacle of other ministers—who tarried awhile on starvation salaries —reading them and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Charles Darwin, with whose name the name of Haeckel will always be linked, told with regret that in his later years he had become so steeped in scientific facts that he had lost all love for or appreciation of art or music. There has been no such mental warping and atrophy in the mind of Ernst Haeckel. Yet there is probably no man living to-day whose mind contains a larger store of technical scientific facts than his, nor a man who has enriched zoology with a larger number of new data, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... usually beginning in the medulla and resulting in more or less caseation; and that this lesion is bilateral and usually secondary to tuberculous disease elsewhere, especially of the spinal column. In the remaining cases (2) simple atrophy has been noted, or (3) chronic interstitial inflammation which would lead to atrophy; and finally (4) an apparently normal condition of the glands, but the neighbouring sympathetic ganglia diseased or involved in a mass of fibrous tissue. Other morbid conditions ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... perfect atrophy of moral sense. This heredity is a wall in which one can make as many windows as one pleases. The doctor is such a window. He considers himself as being degenerated from the nervousness of the family; it means that he is a normal man, and as such ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... with a poor cripple dying of muscular atrophy who cannot move. It stays with him all the time, and sleeps most of the day in his straw hat. To-night I saw the kitten curled up under the bed-clothes. It seems as if it were a gift of Providence that the little creature should attach itself ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... as now, as it always has been, and always will be, a good and taking title produced a host of imitations and piracies. In spite, however, of Murphy's great talents and its first blush of success, the Test soon began to languish, and died of atrophy, after a brief existence of some eight or nine months. One of the most formidable anti-ministerialist papers which, had hitherto appeared, was the Monitor. It came out upon the accession of George III., and was especially occupied ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... regiments, companies, places and date of capture, and finally, even their names. I should think that by the middle of January, at least one in every ten had sunk to this imbecile condition. It was not insanity so much as mental atrophy—not so much aberration of the mind, as a paralysis of mental action. The sufferers became apathetic idiots, with no desire or wish to do or be anything. If they walked around at all they had to be watched closely, to prevent their straying over the Dead ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... as an idolatry of persons, there is an easy answer ready for it. But considering that religion is now so far dead that it consists in little else than formalities, and that its divine truth is no longer such to half the great world, which lies, indeed, in dire atrophy and wickedness,—and if we further consider and agree that the awakened human soul is the divinest thing on earth, and partakes of the divine nature itself, and that its manifestations are also divine in whomsoever it is embodied, we can see some apology for its adoption; inasmuch ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of peace that made Ann Leighton regard this latest as the lightest of all the calamities that had fallen upon her frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought the Reverend Orme back—nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender care,—all the discarded emotions,—returned to light up her withered face and give it beauty. Night and day she stayed beside ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... sleepiness. The contrast between Aunt Judy's table service and that of the south and east coast hotels at which he spends his Fridays-to-Tuesdays when he is in London, seems to him delightfully Irish. The almost total atrophy of any sense of enjoyment in Cornelius, or even any desire for it or toleration of the possibility of life being something better than a round of sordid worries, relieved by tobacco, punch, fine mornings, and petty successes in buying and selling, passes ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... requests known unto God with thanksgivings; and yet it enjoins him not to rest in sloth, but to aspire after all that is pure and true and honorable and lovely and of good report in human life and conduct. It saves him from sin not by the stifling and atrophy of any God-given power, but by the expulsive influence of new affections; it bids him be pure even ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... dear for either patient or doctor does not exist for the rich doctor. He always has plenty of genuine cases which can afford genuine treatment; and these provide him with enough sincere scientific professional work to save him from the ignorance, obsolescence, and atrophy of scientific conscience into which his poorer colleagues sink. But on the other hand his expenses are enormous. Even as a bachelor, he must, at London west end rates, make over a thousand a year before he can afford even to insure his life. His house, his servants, and his ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw |
