Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Atrophy   Listen
verb
Atrophy  v. t.  (past part. atrophied)  To cause to waste away or become abortive; to starve or weaken.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Atrophy" Quotes from Famous Books



... diseased; all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... to rob or to insult him." Scepticism proper fares as hardly in his hands as definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... 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 ancient days, nor was it as the ally of Buddhism. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... irritant poison, but days may elapse before any characteristic symptoms appear, and these may be mistaken for those of acute yellow atrophy of the liver. The earliest signs are a garlicky taste in the mouth and pain in the throat and stomach. Vomited matter luminous in the dark, bile-stained or bloody, with garlic-like odour. Great prostration, diarrhoea, with bloody stools. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... double sexual impulse determines the course of fetal and later development. Shattock and Seligmann ("True Hermaphroditism in the Domestic Fowl, with Remarks on Allopterotism," Transactions of Pathological Society of London, vol. lvii, part i, 1906), pointing out that mere atrophy of the ovary cannot account for the appearance in the hen bird of male characters which are not retrogressive but progressive, argues that such birds are really bisexual or hermaphrodite, either by the single "ovary" ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... unreasonable to ask—and just as it is the fashion to let their spines droop until they suggest nothing so much as Tenniel's drawing in Alice in Wonderland of the caterpillar sitting on the toad-stool—so do they let their mental faculties relax, slump and atrophy. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... of 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 from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... aplomb, apostasy, apparatus, apparition, appellate, appertain, appetency, 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, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... 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 we have already formed, a period in which ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... [16] the eyes and nostrils, excretion of much pale urine, and no 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 ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... the venerable traditions of eleven hundred years, and replacing Rome's time-honoured Mother-Church with an edifice bearing the brand-new stamp of hybrid neo-pagan architecture, the Popes had wished to signalise that rupture with the past and that atrophy of real religious life which marked ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... if she should not die? What if this nameless languor, this mysterious atrophy, taken vigorously in hand by Dr. Jedd, should be vanquished, and ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... endolymph from the semicircular canals into the cochlea. When, as a consequence of the rapid whirling movements, a great part of the endolymph is hurled into the scala tympani, the organ of Corti in the scala vestibuli is fixed and its parts are rendered incapable of vibration. The condition of atrophy which is observable in the sense cells and in the nerve elements is probably due to the impossibility of functional activity; it is an atrophy caused ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... any special line of study is liable to lead to forgetfulness of other, even kindred, lines—almost, in extreme cases, to a kind of atrophy of other parts of the mind. There is the example of Darwin and his self-confessed loss of the aesthetic tastes he once possessed. Nor are scientific studies the only ones to produce such an effect. The amusing satire in The New Republic has, perhaps, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... 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 ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... him to the same cause as that which has given rise to species, we have enumerated his chief contributions to the advance of the question. On the other hand, from his ignorance of any power in Nature competent to modify the structure of animals, except the development of parts, or atrophy of them, in consequence of a change of needs, Lamarck was led to attach infinitely greater weight than it deserves to this agency, and the absurdities into which he was led have met with deserved condemnation. Of the struggle for existence, on which, as, we shall ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... 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 kind ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... Gastrulation of Mammals (1877), and sought to show in this 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 Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... the huge penguin still exists, but it is no bigger than that of a wren, and it is hidden away under the skin. The instances might be multiplied a thousandfold. In the same way then any mental faculty becomes atrophied if it is unused. Bad company is that which produces this atrophy of the finer powers; and it is strange to see how soon the deadly process of shrinkage sets in. The awful thing to think of is that the cramp may insensibly be set in action by a company which, as I have said, is composed of rather estimable people. Who can forget Lydgate in "Middlemarch"? There ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... elector in a party primary and to fix the qualifications for the candidates, we see no federal constitutional objection to the requirement of this pledge."[6] Justice Jackson conceding that "as an institution the Electoral College suffered atrophy almost indistinguishable from rigor mortis," nevertheless dissented on the following ground: "It may be admitted that this law does no more than to make a legal obligation of what has been a voluntary general practice. If custom were sufficient authority for amendment of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... 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 of the fact that testicular grafts show active spermatogenesis. It ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... 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

... frequent, and the patient becomes reconciled to his immobility. It is probable that after passing several months or years in a state of immobility fakirs no longer experience any desire to change their position, and even did they so desire, it would be impossible owing to the atrophy of their muscles and the anchylosis of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... 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 received ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... 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

... is due far more to lack of 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 ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... improvement in transport can again set in 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 a country ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... and Shakespeare"! "The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... ourselves, his 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 ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them 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 the things that make us all alike are stronger ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... her mamma that 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 than to give her a ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... the Gangetic delta deserve a better fate than is assigned to them by Hindu and Mohammadan custom. They are kept in leading-strings from the cradle to the grave; their intellect is rarely cultivated, their affections suffer atrophy from constant repression. Yet Mr. Banerjea draws more than one picture of wifely devotion, and the instinctive good sense which is one of the secrets of feminine influence. Women seldom fail to rise to the occasion when opportunity ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... and who responds 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 his ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... 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 to returning to the heart, to be sent off ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still

... 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 Harmony with their ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... I have a shrewd suspicion that the blight has gone beyond the potato, and it is not very difficult to see how it strode onward. The little towns of the West depend entirely upon the surrounding country for their subsistence, and, when the peasantry are poor, gradually undergo commercial atrophy. Just at this moment they are in a livelier condition than usual, somewhat because the comparatively well-to-do among the peasants have taken advantage in many places of the popular cry to pay no rent, and have, therefore, for the ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... 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 his was what specialists call "a ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... and let me tell you that you're a living example of a contradiction in terms. You use your brains, Mr. Handyside, yet you smoke a cigar calculated to atrophy the keenest intellect. You, an American, chewing a vile Burmese Cheroot! Cre' nom d'un pipe! When this bubble has burst I ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... account for the infinite diversity in structure and function of the mouths of insects. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that the general pattern of an organ might become so much obscured as to be finally lost, by the atrophy and ultimately by the complete abortion of certain parts, by the soldering together of other parts, and by the doubling or multiplication of others,—variations which we know to be within the limits of possibility. In the paddles of the extinct gigantic ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... expression, a wiping out of sorrow by tears, an increase of the pleasure of joy in freely laughing, a discharge of anger in the blow or the hot word, even the profane word. There is a time and a place for these things, and to get so "controlled" that one rarely laughs or shows sadness or anger is to atrophy, to dry up. But the emotional expression makes it easy to become an habitual weeper or stormer, makes it easy to become the over-emotional type, whose reaction to life is futile, undignified and a bodily injury. For ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... life for any boy or girl; but a false start, a bad beginning for the children of the very poor who happen to possess brain power is fatal. Their talents get no chance, for they are never used, consequently they atrophy, or, worse still, are used in a wrong direction and possibly for evil. Good is changed into evil, bright and useful life is frustrated, and the State loses the useful power and influence that should ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... 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. If ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... cases occur 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 a sufficient ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... aspects. But not so strongly after one of Juan's drinks; they are distilled illusions, vain dreams still of hope. They have all the brave ring of accomplishment without its effort. But I can see the end even of them—atrophy. Soon Cytherea will go into the attic, have her nose broken, and the rats will eat the clothes from her indifferent body. Cytherea on a pearl shell in the Ionic Sea... I was one of her train, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... wits involuntarily on the people about her, she gathered knowledge where she listed; her further faculty flashed forth fine rays at unexpected intervals to cheer her, and her hungry heart also began to seek satisfaction. For Beth was by nature well-balanced; there was to be no atrophy of one side of her being in order that the other might be abnormally developed. Her chest was not to be flattened because her skull bulged with the big brain beneath. Rather the contrary. For mind and body acted and reacted on each other favourably, in so far as the conditions ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... afflicted 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

... Cologne negotiations had been dragging their slow length along. Few persons believed that any good was likely to result from these stately and ponderous conferences; yet men were so weary of war, so desirous that a termination might be put to the atrophy under which the country was languishing, that many an eager glance was turned towards the place where the august assembly was holding its protracted session. Certainly, if wisdom were to be found in mitred heads—if ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... high Renaissance, it has been for the most part only the sculptor's means. It need not be said that the personality of the artist may be as strenuous in the one case as in the other; unless, indeed, we maintain, as perhaps we may, that individuality is more apt to atrophy in the latter instance; for as one gets farther and farther away from nature he is in more danger from conventionality than from caprice. And this is in fact what has happened since the high Renaissance, the long ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... language as also its literature and the teachings 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 of Japan and in what direction that ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... favourite pots of shiny blacking, with which he paints his own shoes in the most elegant manner, and buckskin gloves stretched out on their trees, and his gorget, sash, and sabre of the Horse Marines, with his boot-hooks underneath in atrophy; and the family medicine-chest, and in a corner the very rod with which he used to whip his son, Wellesley Ponto, when a boy (Wellesley never entered the 'Study' but for that awful purpose)—all these, with 'Mogg's Road Book,' the GARDENERS' CHRONICLE, and a backgammon-board, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... 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 ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... stabbing pains in the legs; station very poor, but strength unimpaired, and he was able to walk after being a few minutes on his feet; when first rising he was very unsteady. Knee-jerk lost, no reinforcement. No sexual power. Some difficulty in emptying the bladder. Examination showed slight atrophy of both optic nerves, Argyll-Robertson pupil, and myosis. He was ordered two weeks' rest in bed, with massage, cool sponging daily, and galvanization of the areas of neuralgia. After two weeks he was allowed to get up gradually, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... and turned to an atrophy. In that gradual decay she often told Lady Mary she was awakened from a dream of vanity; she saw how much a desire to gain the applause of a few people had made her forget the more necessary aim of obtaining the ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott

... 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 ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... lumen may be narrowed at one side and not at the other, allowing the artery to expand irregularly from the force of the heart beat. As the disease continues, the internal elastic layer is lost, the muscular coat begins to atrophy, and then small calcareous granules may begin to be deposited, which may form into plates. In the large arteries, the advance of the process differs somewhat. There may be more actual inflammatory signs, fatty degeneration may occur, and even a ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... to which it gives rise unduly hasten the advent of puberty. Any decided enlargement of the labia and clitoris in a young girl may be taken as a positive evidence of the existence of the habit of self-abuse. Sterility, and atrophy of the breasts—their deficient development—when the vice is begun ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton

... part of its duty is to purify the blood from debris (waste matter), to filter out some things, to break up and alter others, and to expel them from the body in the form of bile. There are certain diseases in which the liver suddenly declines to do any more work. Acute atrophy of the liver is the name of this condition, and when it arises death rapidly results from suppression of the secretion of bile. It brings about a state of things called acholia; the patient is actually ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... require 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 be after ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... in this way: that the introduction of Free Trade in 1865 soon produced a state of atrophy in Germany; this was checked for a time by the French war indemnity; but Germany needed a permanent cure, namely, Protection. It is true that his ideal of national life had always been strict and narrow—in fact, that of the average German official; but we may doubt whether he had in view solely ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... 'em—dragging my idleness and viciousness and my stupidity and my money at my heels. I tell you, Kathleen, this is no good. There's a stench of money everywhere; there's a staler aroma in the air, too—the dubious perfume of decadence, of moral atrophy, of stupid recklessness, of the ennui that breeds intrigue! I'm deadly tired of it—of the sort of people I was born among; of their women folk, whose sole intellectual relaxation is in pirouetting along the danger mark without overstepping, and in concealing it when they do; of the overgroomed ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... useless the architect's and builder's plans, throw down the mechanic's tools, the artist's brush, the sculptor's chisel, the writer's pen, still the orator's tongue, make null and void the legislator's high emprise and draw a line of atrophy across the unfolding processes ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman

... 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 thus ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... Dysarthria and Anarthria).—Patients who have lost control over the muscles of speech through bulbo-nuclear paralysis, stammer before they become speechless, and along with paralysis and atrophy of the tongue occur regularly fibrillar contractions of the muscles of the tongue. The tongue is no longer regulated by ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... 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 discussion I would beg my reader to call ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... ruining much—all is empty, vapid, useless to God and man. The tawdry shell, the valueless husk, of ancient Chinese life is here still, remains untouched in many places, as will have been seen in previous chapters; but the soul within is steadily and surely, if slowly, undergoing a process of final atrophy. But yet the proper opening-up of the country by internal reform and not by external pressure has as yet hardly commenced in immense areas of the Empire far removed from the imperial city of Peking. And the ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... lasses 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 ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... its 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 ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... exhibited under the form of building, halted miserably. The streets dwindled feebly, as they receded from the center of the town, into smaller and smaller houses, and died away on the barren open ground into an atrophy of skeleton cottages. Builders hereabouts appeared to have universally abandoned their work in the first stage of its creation. Land-holders set up poles on lost patches of ground, and, plaintively advertising that they were to let for building, raised sickly little ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... in vain that the spy plied him with question and suggestion, one phrase was like a galvanic current to this inert atrophy of muscle and mind. "Look here, old man," the intruder said at length, baffled and in despair, "you mark my words!" The brawny form had come close in the shadow and towered over the recumbent and helpless creature, speaking impressively through ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... that marriage has become a social atrophy, and I never want to be guilty of irrevocably skewering two ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr

... who live in and for the expression of thought and emotion. It is a pity that this should be so, for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the facts and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... 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 organs. The complete health of the former is ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... flood of eulogy will be supplied by Sir ALMROTH WRIGHT, who, taking the view that the simplicity with which logarithms can be handled is leading the nation inevitably towards mental atrophy, will introduce the question, "The Logarithm: is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various

... sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice. I do not mean by reading the Bible what, I am afraid, is far too common, reading a scrap of Scripture as if it were a kind of charm. But I would most earnestly press upon you that muscle and fibre will distinctly atrophy and become enfeebled, if Christian people neglect the first plain way of hiding the word in their heart, which is to make the utterances of Scripture as if incorporated with their very being, and part ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... 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 ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... had observed 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 administration at the University ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... persistent eye-stalks, as typical examples. That the variation would be unequal seems almost self-evident from the varying rapidity and extent of the effects of use and disuse on different tissues and on different parts of the general structure. The optic nerve may atrophy in a few months from disuse consequent on the loss of the eye. Some of the bones of the rudimentary hind legs of the whale are still in existence after disuse for an enormous period. Evidently use-inheritance could ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball

... 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. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... 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 this, little ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn

... I could go, and when did go, I found him much worse than I had imagined him to be. There was no virulent disease of any particular organ, but he was slowly wasting away from atrophy, and he knew, or thought he knew, he should not recover. But ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... well 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 ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald

... 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

... races on other planets that complete degeneration and final 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 ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... either break out or strike inward with fatal results. When Sunday night came, Mitchell was about ready to fare forth with gun and mask and take conversation away from anybody who had it to spare. He had begun to fear that his vocal cords would atrophy. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... the ovaries, uterus, external genitals and the breasts can, of course, not be prevented, but that atrophy is a slow and gradual process, and is not in itself the cause of the various distressing symptoms that we ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... obtainable through the 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

... colour of the 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 above are those ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope

... nine cases out of ten transferred to the butcher, whose stall, if it contain nothing else, is sure to furnish an abundant supply of dead animals, which you might easily mistake for cats that have perished by atrophy. ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... 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 a deep melancholy, he ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... his ineptitude, however, is the waste and atrophy of his best powers through disuse. Thus the early settlers of the Coachela Valley fought hunger and thirst while rivers of water ran away a few feet below the surface of ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... Will the child not outgrow its adenoids? Usually the adenoid growths atrophy or dry up after the age of puberty. Adenoids are not uncommon in adults, however. The surgeon general of the army reports that during the year 1905, out of 3004 operations on officers and enlisted men in service, there were 225 operations on the nose, mouth, and pharynx, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... inflamed the passions of men, and caused them to commit the most unheard-of excesses. They laid their ban on those who enjoyed the most prosperous health, condemned them to peak and pine, wasted them into a melancholy atrophy, and finally consigned them to a premature grave. They breathed a new and unblest life into beings in whom existence had long been extinct, and by their hateful and resistless power caused the sepulchres to give up ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... 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 ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... own excretions) gains the mastery of the vital forces at any period of life, the mucous membranes are likely to be first affected by inflammation of catarrhal character; then the serous membranes of the body. Mal-assimilation, mal-nutrition, cell-atrophy, are symptoms of the giving way of the vital energies to the invasion of the filth and bacterial poisons absorbed from ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... in which he had great confidence; 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 ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... 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 ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... darkness the more you see. You see more at the end of a day than after a few hours, and at the end of a year, still more. The eye, perhaps, changes in some degree for just this purpose. But a prolonged use of the visual mechanism tends to hypertrophy— or atrophy, as the eyes of deep-sea fishes show. It is well, in any event, to be careful about contradicting the testimonies of patients who have long lived in the dark, concerning what they have seen. The power to see in the dark is so various ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... 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; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... aspects of Hinduism, such as find expression in sculpture elsewhere. All the buildings, and especially the modern temple of Kali, which was in process of construction when I saw the place, testify to the atrophy and paralysis produced by erotic forms of religion in the artistic and intellectual spheres, a phenomenon which finds another sad illustration in quite different theological surroundings among the Vallabhacarya sect at ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... country, "there are others" who are peculiar. There are many manufactories of this stuff, which is harmless, though such constant chewing can but affect the size of the muscles of the jaw if the theory of evolution is to be believed; at least there will be no atrophy of ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous

... drawn awry, his speech entirely inarticulate, his eye obscured by thick rheum, and his clothes were stained by the saliva that occasionally driveled from his lips. His legs were wasted, his breast was sunk, and his protuberant paunch looked like the receptacle of dropsy, atrophy, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... life of primal innocence and wonder that had ever brimmed the heart of the Irishman, acknowledged while not understood, might have slumbered itself away with the years among modern conditions into atrophy and denial, had he not chanced to encounter a more direct and vital instance of it even than himself. The powerfully-charged being of this Russian stranger had summoned it forth. The mere presence ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... calls, uphold the Church, and do a little needlework all her life, unless some man came along to marry her and give her emancipation. The happiness which goes with a career, even if that career fails, is saving daughters from this parentally imposed "atrophy." They are learning that to live one's own life is not necessarily to live a "bad" life, but a "fuller" life. Thus the young are teaching the Old People wisdom—the knowledge that youth has its Declaration of Rights ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... develop consumption. Yet you can study the world's health records and never find a line to prove that any man with "occupation or profession—novel reading" is recorded as dying of consumption. The humped-over attitude promotes compression of the lungs, telescoping of the diaphragm, atrophy of the abdominal abracadabra and other things (see Physiological Slush, p. 179, et ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... framed in the year 1798 its law against church extension. But we know of no Church that ever recovered from fine-bodyism when the disease had once fairly settled into its confirmed and chronic state. In at least this age and country it exists as the atrophy of a cureless decline. It were well, however, that we should say what it is we mean by fine-bodyism; and we find we cannot do better than quote our definition from the first speech ever delivered by Chalmers in ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... 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, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... the value of the catch was much diminished) until some fisherman of genius conjectured that the cod lived only too contentedly in those tanks, and suffered from the atrophy of calm. The cod is by nature a lethargic, torpid, and plethoric creature, prone to inactivity, content to lie in comfort, swallowing all that comes, with cavernous mouth wide open, big enough to gulp its own body down if that ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... to occur to him that children have large powers of resistance and that some of his pupils may have won distinction in spite of his teaching and his methods of examination and not because of them. His trouble is mental and spiritual atrophy. He thinks and feels by rule of thumb, "without variableness or shadow of turning." In the matter of new methods he is quite immune. He settled things to his complete satisfaction years ago, and what was good enough for his father, in school methods, is quite good enough for him. His self-satisfaction ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... of the lacteals, atrophy. Distaste to animal food. II. Cause of dropsy. Cause of herpes. Scrophula. Mesenteric consumption. Pulmonary consumption. Why ulcers in the lungs are so difficult ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... man who suffered from atrophy of the purse, or atrophy of the opinions; but whatever the disease some plausible Latin, or imitation-Latin name must be found for it ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... 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 patience, of self-sacrifice, anciently directed to social, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... be delayed. It was a little thing, perhaps. Yet, it was capable of meaning much concerning the nature of the lad. It revealed surely a tender heart, one responsive to a pure love. And to one of his class, there are many forces ever present to atrophy such simple, wholesome power of loving. The ability to love cleanly and ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... professes to sell milk "pure from the cow." From the quality of this morning's supply, I should be inclined to fancy that that cow is suffering from an advanced stage of atrophy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various

... 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 ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... will find good material awaiting them. The English public school boy shares with all the youth of all the nations an immense store of latent idealism, which can be brought to a splendid fruition if atrophy and decay are not allowed to overtake it. But he possesses other things also, over and above this common heritage. The intellectualist has often got beyond the big ideas, if such a paradox may be allowed; ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... you,)" said the Superior, pleased at the Gordian knot being loosed, and then relapsed into his atrophy, without moving a muscle of ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton

... have a rare and wonderful voice such as might stir mankind to loftier thought and nobler ideal and thus make the world a better place. Child, how will you acquit yourself of this responsibility? Will you make the most of your great gift, using it for the benefit of countless others, or let it atrophy and perish unheard—?" ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... know—as you 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 ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... American tribes, people soon fall sick, and waste away, when they yield too much to this mania of eating earth. We found at the mission of San Borja an Indian child of the Guahiba nation, who was as thin as a skeleton. The mother informed us that the little girl was reduced to this lamentable state of atrophy in consequence of a disordered appetite, she having refused during four months to take almost any other food than clay. Yet San Borja is only twenty-five leagues distant from the mission of Uruana, inhabited by that tribe of the Ottomacs, who, from the effect no doubt of a habit progressively ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... books, as well as to sermons, may not be neglected. Our faculties, like our jaws, atrophy if we do not use them to bite with. The Carnegie libraries have emphasized a fact that is to education and the colleges what social work is to medicine and the hospitals. We were running south some years ago on our long northern trip before a fine leading wind, when suddenly we noticed a small ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... and intensely sectarian in method. Their isolation from the great currents of the world's life acts on them intellectually and spiritually as the process of in-and-in breeding does upon animals: it intensifies their peculiarities and defects. A process of atrophy or degeneration takes place; and they grow from generation to generation more isolated, sectarian, and peculiar. Unitarianism has escaped this tendency because it has accepted the modern spirit and because to a large degree its adherents ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... or shadowed by its massive church in the middle of one 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

... 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 way, although I never laid up for an entire day. From the moment I arrived ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... mental bias, they had lost the 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... able as yet to understand that a man is really "punished," in the popular sense of that word, unless they can see him publicly whipped. It does not seem to them to mean anything because a man deteriorates, because the highest and finest qualities in him atrophy and threaten to die out. I used an illustration in my sermon two weeks ago to which I shall have to recur again, to see if I can make it mean more than it did then. It is the story of Ulysses who fell into the hands of the ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... so call the souls and faculties of men. Why should there be this correspondence between Jesus of Nazareth and human life? It is best brought out, when we realize what he has made of Christian society, and contrast it with what the various religions have left or produced in other regions—the atrophy of human nature. ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... and gradually becomes more or less oval in contour. At the same time, its structure becomes more compact, the cribriform appearance of its anterior and lateral faces more or less destroyed, and the few remaining openings apparently increased in size. This atrophy of the os pedis is ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... cony-catcher!" answered the captain, taking a bale of dice from the sleeve of his coat; "I must always keep company with these damnable doctors, and they have made me every baby's cully, and purged my purse into an atrophy; but never mind, it passes the time as well as aught ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... the intermaxillary bone in man, i.e., the remnant of a part which had had to be adapted to the exigencies of the changed structure; and proved thereby that there had been a primitive similarity of structure, which had been transformed by development of some parts and atrophy of others. Goethe's sketch of an Introduction into Comparative Anatomy, which he wrote in 1795, urged by A. von Humboldt, has remained, if I may believe those competent to judge, a fundamental stone of modern science. And I may be allowed, as I am unversed in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... 7. At first there are two anterior cardinal (a.c.), and two posterior cardinal veins (p.c.) uniting to form Cuvierian sinuses (c.s.) that open into the heart just as in the dog-fish. But later the inferior cava is developed and extends backward, the posterior cardinals atrophy, the Cuvierian sinuses become the superior cavae, and the anterior cardinals the internal jugular veins. The vitelline veins (v.v.) flow, at first, uninterruptedly through the liver to the inferior cava, but, as development proceeds, a capillary system is established ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... 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 ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin

... those disorders of speech which occur as a result of degenerative processes of the central nervous system the difficulty of articulate speech precedes that of phonation. Take, for example, bulbar paralysis, a form of progressive muscular atrophy, a disease due to a progressive decay and destruction of the motor nerve cells presiding over the movements of the tongue, lips, and larynx, hence often called glosso-labial-laryngeal palsy. In this ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... His good humor rises almost to excitement before Cornelius shows signs of 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

... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... recal the finale of their interview, and having lost the thread of the rigmarole, did not know to what his silence had been supposed to assent. Next, Algernon conquered his uncle by representing Lucy as on the road to an atrophy, and persuading him that he should be much safer on the Continent with a wife than without one: and though the two ladies were harder to deal with in themselves, they were obliged to stand by the decision of their lords. Above all, he made way by his sincere habit of taking for granted whatever ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... is different—sonorous, tense, elastic; On it you might a tattoo beat, with fingers or with a stick. There's costiveness and atrophy, with features Hippocratic; When these appear, there's much to fear, all safety is erratic. Although a cordial laxative, mix'd up with some carminative, Might be prescribed, with morphia, or hops, to keep the man alive; Take care his diet's nutritive, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various

... 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 ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... inflammatory German Admiralty War Orders had deliberately rejected, one by 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 German point ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... this cultivation of the human garden they 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 behind us, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... higher present value 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 disease must always lie in a certain ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... realize that the atrophy of the word-making habit is less obvious in the United States than it is in Great Britain.... We cannot but regret that it is not now possible to credit to their several inventors American compounds of a delightful expressiveness—windjammer, loan-shark, scare-head, ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt

... in regard to the effect of electricity on plant life. He referred particularly to the fact that it was his aim to discover the law of growth and atrophy among plants. Such a discovery had a great bearing on the future of agriculture and would revolutionise world thought. Electricity, he explained and illustrated, would promote or retard the growth of life by reaction. In England ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... normal woman is sexually well-formed and her sexual feelings require satisfaction in the direction of the production of the next generation, but under the restrictive and now especially abnormal conditions of civilization some women undergo hereditary atrophy, and the uterus and sexual feelings are feeble; in others of good average local development the feeling is in restraint; in others the feelings, as well as the organs, are strong, and if normal use be withheld evils ensue. Bearing in mind these varieties of congenital development in relation to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... more seldom cured. There are few students or physicians of human nature, in this world of superficial observers, who go deep enough into the springs of man's action to distinguish the external symptoms of heart-cancer from ossification, or to learn ihe difference between satiety and atrophy. A night of nervous sleeplessness, a day of irresolution and dread, had aggravated almost beyond her control the restlessness which in Mabel was the unerring indication of unhealthiness of mind and body. To sit still was impracticable; to ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... any time iam. Atheist ateisto. Atheism ateismo. 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) sekvantaro. Attend (on) servi. Attention, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... it's gone the process must have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess he's come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that intellectual ability is among them—what we call intellectual ability. He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental make- up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... to Their Senses Gradually.—New-measurism was resorted to by the General Synod in order to revive the dying Church. The true cause of her apathy, atrophy, and decay, however, was not diagnosed correctly. It was the prevailing confessional indifference, religious ignorance, and the neglect of Lutheran indoctrination by catechization, especially of the young. Dr. Hazelius, himself a revivalist, as early as 1845, pointed out the real cause ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente

... not driven him, as it so often does, to other women—to that wild waste which leaves behind it a barren and ill-natured soil exhausted of its power, of its generous and native health. There was a strange apathy in his senses, an emotional stillness, as it were, the atrophy of all the passionate elements of his nature. But because of this he was the better poised, the more evenly balanced, the more perceptive. His eyes were not blurred or dimmed by any stress of emotion, his mind worked in a cool quiet, and his forward tread ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... penury and tattered robes in country places, dreaming to the last of a London engagement; how many wretched daubers shiver and shake in the ague-fit of alternate hopes and fears, waste and pine away in the atrophy of genius, or else turn drawing-masters, picture-cleaners, or newspaper-critics; how many hapless poets have sighed out their souls to the Muse in vain, without ever getting their effusions farther known than the Poet's Corner of a country newspaper, and looked ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and top-root, with its world-wide upas boughs and accursed poison exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... 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 is incapable of that degree of moral ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various



Words linked to "Atrophy" :   wasting away, shrivel, weakening, amyotrophia, withering, tabes, wasting, shrivel up, shrink, wither, amyotrophy



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com