Word: symptom
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Headache is not a disease but a symptom. Like a heavy hammer beating on the temples, headache plays a chorus to an almost limitless number of ailments, can be caused by infections, high blood pressure, bad ventilation, brain concussion, intoxication. Last week, at New York's Academy of Medicine, authorities on headaches discussed recent research...
...except that it runs in families, may be caused by many conditions, ranging from nervous excitement to allergy for certain foods, such as eggs or chocolate. The headaches may come on every day or once a year; Dr. Palmer himself suffered three attacks every week for many years. Characteristic symptom of migraine is violent, pulsating pain on one side of the head, caused by irritation of nerves of the blood vessels in the head. If a doctor examines the interior of his patient's eye with an ophthalmoscope during an attack, he can occasionally see a spasm...
About five years ago, Dr. Palmer read about some British scientists who discovered that pigeons deprived of vitamin B I developed the symptoms of violent headaches, suffered severe pain on exposure to strong light, loud noise. The pigeon disease seemed so similar to human migraine that Dr. Palmer had a hunch his own headaches were caused by lack of B 1 . The vitamin deficiency, he believed, upset body metabolism, produced a poisoning of body tissues. Migraine, Dr. Palmer concluded, is only a symptom of this toxemia...
Despite his perfunctory tribute to electricity, Pierre Mercadier did not really have confidence in progress or even in social stability. He was an egoist, individualist, amoralist-a sort of living symptom of creeping social sickness. He had a sizable fortune from his father, but taught history in the provinces to make a little extra. Pierre himself gambled in the stockmarket, but he was no wizard. He lost money...
Agee's bad manners, exhibitionism and verbosity are a sort of author's curse at his own foredoomed failure to convey all he feels. Conventional acceptance of his book would be "the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again." His real aim is to enforce the realization that the Gudgers, the Ricketts and the Woods, whose hopeless, subhuman lives he reverently exposes, are now alive, human brothers of the reader, sharers of "certain normal predicaments of human divinity...