Let our finger ache, and it indues Our other healthful members even to a sense Of pain. _Othello, Act III., Sc. IV._
Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for good youth he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp, was drowned. _As You Like It, Act IV., Sc. I._
The aged man that coffers-up his gold Is plagu’d with cramps, and gouts and painful fits. _Lucrece._
* * * Shorten up their sinews With aged cramps. _Tempest, Act IV., Sc. I._
To-night thou shalt have cramps, Side stitches that shall pen thy breath up. _Tempest, Act I., Sc. II._
I’ll rack thee with old cramps, Fill all thy bones with aches. _Tempest, Act I., Sc. II._
Thy nerves are in their infancy again And have no vigour in them. _Tempest, Act I., Sc. II._
Hysteria, in Shakespeare’s time, was considered a disease common to both sexes, and was known as “_Hysterica passio_,” or more popularly termed “the mother.”
O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! _Hysterica passio_—down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element ’s below! Where is this daughter? _King Lear, Act II., Sc. IV._
Percy thinks that Shakespeare read of this disease in Harsnet’s “Declaration of Popish Impostures” while he was looking up material for his character of Tom of Bedlam. The following is taken from (p. 25) the work referred to: “Ma: Maynie had a spice of the _Hysterica passio_ as seems from his youth, hee himself termes it the _Moother_, and saith that hee was much troubled with it in Fraunce, and that it was one of the causes that mooved him to leave his holy order whereinto he was initiated and to returne into England.”
Diseases of the nervous system have not been overlooked by other writers. How excellently we have described the chief symptom of _locomotor ataxia_:
Obliquely waddling to the mark in view. _Pope._
Her cheek turn’d ashes, ears rung, brain whirl’d round, As if she had received a sudden blow, And the hearts dew of pain sprang fast and chilly O’er her fair front, like morning’s on a lily. Although she was not of the fainting sort, Baba thought she would faint, but there he err’d— It was but a convulsion, which, though short, Can never be described; we all have heard, And some of us have felt thus “_all amort_,” When things beyond the common have occurr’d. _Don Juan, Canto VI., Verse CV._