Literary notes about ailment (AI summary)
In literature, the term "ailment" is often employed to describe not only physical maladies but also emotional, moral, and even spiritual deficiencies. Writers use the word to evoke images of tangible bodily distress—as seen when Thoreau contrasts our spending on physical aliment with our neglect of mental well-being [1]—while also extending its meaning to the realm of inner suffering; for instance, Butler likens moral decay to an ailment that one must understand in every facet to cure [2]. In some narratives, feelings such as grief and jealousy are portrayed as enduring afflictions, capturing the persistent nature of personal and societal troubles [3][4]. Moreover, authors like Hawthorne suggest that what appears as a simple bodily disease could in fact be symptomatic of a deeper, invisible spiritual ailment [5], demonstrating the word's capacity to bridge the gap between the physical and the metaphysical.
- We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment.
— from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau - It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.
— from Erewhon; Or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler - "I believe grief is, and always has been, my worst ailment.
— from Shirley by Charlotte Brontë - And for the first time in her life Honora experienced a twinge of that world-old ailment —jealousy.
— from A Modern Chronicle — Volume 05 by Winston Churchill - A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
— from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
