Carlyle's Health - 1850

1850 was a bad year. Carlyle was writing his Latter Day Pamphlets. His biographer Froude believed that he needed a 'discharge of bile (spiritual)' between his major works. This catharsis, and the criticism that the pamphlets evoked, seemed to worsen rather than improve his health.

A Hernia and Spectacles

He tells his doctor brother in February:
'That sad concern, prolapsus [hernia] as your faculty names it, has plagued me incessantly all winter through; but I have contrived a truss, and by aid of poor Jane's needle got it put in active order, whereby the misery is very greatly helped, indeed it is almost abolished so far as the outward suffering goes. Which is real deliverance to me. My very feet have been threatening to fail me; and I have got a pair of specs this winter for the first time.'
He keeps his sense of humour, saying that his first ‘specs’ mark an epoch like his first razor, but not so joyful. Plagued by minor ills, he complains of corns on his feet, and of his shoes pinching his little toe. He asks for old patched shoes to be sent to him urgently.
Despite these new distractions, he does not forget his liver. In February he is 'not strong in the liver department' and in March he tells John that his liver is very bad and that he is only able to treat it with exercise thanks to the new truss.

Pain and Pamphlets

In May he tells Lady Ashburton that he is 'very sick; ill in body and mind'. In the same month he apologises to Lord Mahon: '....my poor nerves so tattered to pieces, I cannot venture out at all, especially on a morning, except at a ruinous expense of headaches, etc.' And in another letter two days later: 'The truth is, my liver and stomach and whole inside machinery is far out of order, which aggravates every other distress and confusion...' In June he is feeling ill in the hot weather. By July he tries to reassure his mother: 'There is fundamentally nothing whatever wrong with my health; a good spell of rest, and solitary quiet somewhere, will.... set me up again and more!'
But ten days later he is complaining and blaming his symptoms on the uproar that the pamphlets have provoked: 'My poor liver is gone almost to distraction with all this, and with the summer heats and other fell etceteras.'

On holiday at Boverton in August he cannot sleep. He had shoved up the big window in the sitting room there, causing a return of his back pain, and reports that he is walking with his back bent 'at an angle of 75 degrees but feels better in his health otherwise.'
On the 23rd of August he has fallen in a ditch while walking and hurt his 'knee-pan', and is complaining to Jane of 'flying rheumatisms' and insomnia, but hoping that the abundant porridge at Scotbrig will do him good.

A Sore Toe

Correspondence between husband and wife in September, 1850 - she in Chelsea, he at Scotbrig in Dumfriesshire Scotbrig,1998- illustrates what must have gone on between them constantly, but was only put in writing when they were apart. On the 6th he writes to Jane that he is 'a little lame in one of my feet - pain directly under the second toe (or between that and the first ditto) of my left foot; to the eye there is nothing wrong, as I said; to the feel there is a slight hardness, no bigger than a pea, and sore-ish when pressed. The only evil is, that in walking, by the unconscious effort to save this speck of disorder, I at length rather twist my leg; and so am advised to ride rather when I do not sit or saunter. It has been there above a week; I think, almost since my third day here; the origin of it is unaccountable, - unless perhaps that, the second night, my bed was wrong-made, and I had to get up; and grope about a little, without slippers, whereby probably I got some little prick in the place. A terrible matter that , is it not! Shall we summon the Royal College about it, think you? Oh Goody! Goody! [pet name for his wife]'
Just when patience with this detailed analysis of a very minor complaint is running out, it is a relief to find that Carlyle retains a sense of humour about his hypochondriasis! But Jane does not treat the matter lightly when she replies two days later:
'That toe Dear! - it may be a trifling enough matter in itself; but anything that prevents you from walking must be felt by you as a serious nuisance - I don't believe the least in the world that it has been "pricked"; if it had, you would have felt the prick at the time; I think it must be a little case of rheumatism in one particular sinew, and I would have you keep it warm with cotton, and rub it a great deal, and all up the foot, with a bit of hot flannel and some laudnum(sic) on it - that is my advice, and recollect that at C'puttock I was considered a skilful Dr;.....'
A week later Lady Ashburton is spared the details but told: 'Really I believe my liver and nervous system are far out of order.'

A Summing Up

Toward the end of this unhappy year he sums up his health in letters to his brothers. First to John:
'....the wretched state of my "digestive apparatus", which plagues me beyond all else, and sometimes won't behave handsomely at all! But that is an old story now, and I must try to make the best of it, as formerly.' And to Alex Carlyle on 15 Nov. he writes of 'sickness of body and mind', and of the 'approach of old age': 'Oh, it is an earnest tussle this Life of ours here below; and if a man's body fail him, and he gets continual grinding misery of ill-health to encompass him for thirty and odd years, and drag down every step of his poor limbs - But let me not complain.'
And finally to John again:
'Cor inquietum est, [the heart is unquiet] saith St Augustine, - especially when the bowels are gone to ruin!'

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