If such a person is by nature emotional she is
sure to become more so, for even the firmest women lose self-control at
last under incessant feebleness. Nor is this less true of men; and I
have many a time seen soldiers who had ridden boldly with Sheridan or
fought gallantly with Grant become, under the influence of painful
nerve-wounds, as irritable and hysterically emotional as the veriest
girl. If no rescue comes, the fate of women thus disordered is at last
the bed. They acquire tender spines, and furnish the most lamentable
examples of all the strange phenomena of hysteria.
The moral degradation which such cases undergo is pitiable. I have heard
a good deal of the disciplinary usefulness of sickness, and this may
well apply to brief and grave, and what I might call wholesome,
maladies. Undoubtedly I have seen a few people who were ennobled by long
sickness, but far more often the result is to cultivate self-love and
selfishness and to take away by slow degrees the healthful mastery which
all human beings should retain over their own emotions and wants.
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