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Vertigo   /vˈərtɪgˌoʊ/   Listen
Vertigo

noun
(pl. E. vertigoes, L. vertigines)
1.
A reeling sensation; a feeling that you are about to fall.  Synonyms: dizziness, giddiness, lightheadedness.






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"Vertigo" Quotes from Famous Books



... he strive by some extravagant action to bring down upon himself the disdainful pity of the queen? Such a result was strongly probable, since the reason of Candaules himself, the legitimate possessor of Nyssia, had been unable to resist the vertigo caused by that superhuman beauty—he, the thoughtless young king who till then had laughed at love, and preferred pictures and statues before all things. These arguments were very rational but wholly useless, for at the same moment Candaules entered the chamber, and ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier

... had piled up on him, and now he was feeling the after-effects. Vertigo, nausea, and the black confetti—a bad spell. The whiskey—if he could only reach the whiskey. Then he remembered he was receiving a Sacrament, and struggled to get on with it. Tell him, old man, tell him of your various rottennesses and vile transgressions, if you can remember some. A sin is ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller

... corsairs and pirates. In short, without arms there would be no safety for cities, commonwealths or kingdoms. Besides, it is just to estimate a pursuit in proportion to the cost of its attainment. Now it is true that eminence in learning is purchased by time, watching, hunger, nakedness, vertigo, indigestion, and many other inconveniences already mentioned; but a man who rises gradually to be a good soldier endures all these, and far more. What is the hunger and poverty which menace the man of letters compared with the situation ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... sometimes the sublime. The career of the kaiser has been theatrical, and in the theatrical is always the absurd. The single parallel between the two lies in the fact that all young emperors stand on a peak so lofty that, do they look below, vertigo rises, while from above delirium comes. There is nothing astonishing in that. It would be astonishing were it otherwise. What does astonish is the equilibrium which the kaiser, in spite of his words, his threats and actions, has ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... it was known that Blaine was the leading candidate. All of the enthusiasm was for him. It was soon known that Conkling, Bristow or Morton could not be nominated, and that in all probability Blaine would succeed. The fact that Blaine had been attacked by vertigo, or had suffered from a stroke of apoplexy, gave an argument to those who opposed him, and this was used with great effect. After Blaine was put in nomination, and before any vote was taken, the convention adjourned, and during ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... "I have occasionally seen subjects who complained of headache, vertigo, nausea, and other similar symptoms after having been hypnotized, but these conditions were at a future hypnotic sitting easily remedied by suggestion." Speaking of the use of hypnotism by doctors under conditions of reasonable ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus

... brooding. He observes little that goes on about him and remains motionless in one spot. His face takes on an astonished expression, the gaze is vacant and indefinite. If he makes any movements at all they are hesitating, uncertain, as those of a drunken man. Vertigo and aura-like sensations appear; severe anxiety overpowers the patient, which with the entire force of a powerful affect crowds out all other concepts and sensations and dominates the entire personality. Consciousness becomes more and more clouded, soon illusions, hallucinations, and delusions ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... inscription and looked down upon the precipice below that he offered a huge reward if they took him down again alive. Although otherwise a brave man he was unaccustomed to mountaineering, and owing to the great height, had been seized with vertigo and was absolutely helpless and unable to move. With considerable difficulty he was hauled down and safely conveyed to ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... crossed his legs, folded his arms as if he was lying on a sofa, and grinned down at me. When I came to myself he was down from the ceiling, and, taking me out of the broken cane-bottomed chair, kindly enough—"Bah!" said he, "it is the smell of my medicine. It often gives the vertigo. I thought you would have had a little fit. Come into the open air." And we went down the steps, and into Shepherd's Inn, where the setting sun was just shining on the statue of Shepherd; the laundresses were traipsing about; the porters were leaning against the railings; ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... felt the vertigo of such a rough grapple with the Past. These things make brains reel. "When my old twins were two little girls in lilac frocks," ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... the bowels. Constipation being a primary symptom, there must of necessity follow numerous secondary symptoms, of which diarrhea well marks the progress of septic infection. Some of the symptoms of infection are headache, megrim, vertigo, dyspepsia, foul tongue and mouth, back-aches, stiff neck, gnawing pain or numb feeling at the lower end of the spine, biliousness, bad odor from breath and skin, muddy complexion, cold hands and feet, jaundice, neurasthenia, loss of memory, drowsy feeling, pernicious ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... I might have been prosaic enough to sleep all night, had it not been for fleas which had come up in the camping blankets. When I woke, it was light enough to see that the three muffled figures were all asleep, instead of spending the night in shiverings and vertigo, as it appears that others have done. Doubtless the bathing of our heads several times with snow ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... Griswold disregarded the warning, drank a cup of strong coffee, and went out to the lobby to get a cigar, leaving his table companions in the midst of their meal. To his surprise and chagrin the carefully selected "perfecto" made him dizzy and faint, bringing a disquieting recurrence of the vertigo which had seized him while he was searching for his negro treasure-bearer ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... is the same as when viewed in the more conventional manner, with ideas and principles right side up; the objects are the same, the events and results are the same; but there is a curious glamour over all, and the spectator has a mystical feeling of topsy-turvy, ending in vertigo and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... light in her balances, as light as dust; her little finger laid in either scale would set all flying: and she hugged herself upon her huge preponderance, and then laughed aloud to think how giddily it might be used. The vertigo of omnipotence, the disease of Caesars, shook her reason. 'O the mad world!' she thought, and laughed aloud ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... subjected to some vague motion; the resistance of the water had ceased, the waves no longer hissed under her bows, or nestled and lapped under her counter; a dreamy, irregular, and listless rocking had taken the place of the regular undulations; at times, a faint and half delicious vertigo seemed to overcome their senses; the ship ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... day. Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans were left entirely to themselves. They hardly noticed Frycollin sprawling at full length in the bow, keeping his eyes shut so that he could see nothing. And they were not attacked by vertigo, as might have been expected. There was no guiding mark, and there was nothing to cause the vertigo, as there would have been on the top of a lofty building. The abyss has no attractive power when it is gazed at from the car of a balloon or deck of an aeronef. It is not an abyss that ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... need never have emerged if he had not unveiled it to his wife. So that, when Miss Keating, in her unsteadiness, declared that there must not be a moment's doubt as to her attitude, the Colonel himself was seized with a slight vertigo. He suggested that people (luckily he got no nearer it than that)—people were, after all, entitled to the benefit of ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair

... little turn," he said, eying me nervously; "a vertigo, I believe the doctor called it. Just reach my overcoat pocket there, will you?—the left-hand side. Yes, ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... from 1849 to 1852. The more sanguine hopes of Mazzini and other of her correspondents she desires, but no longer expects, to see fulfilled. She compares the moral state of France to the Russian retreat; the soldiers in the great army of progress seized with vertigo, and seeking death in fighting with ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... there are but few perils to encounter. All airmen unite in declaring that even to the novice in an airplane there is none of that sense of dizziness or vertigo which so many people experience in looking down from high places. The flyer has no sense of motion. A speed of forty miles an hour and of one hundred miles are the same to him. As he looks down the earth seems to be slipping away from him, ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... the common carotid artery on both sides. In the course of these experiments the thought suggested itself that suppression of the carotids might prove a salutary means of reducing that form of cerebral congestion which is so prolific a source of headache and vertigo. Accordingly I made a protracted series of experiments with carotid compression upon those suffering from congestive headache, and I can only say that I have been so far pleased with the uniformly good results obtained, that I have felt ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various

... his head in his hands, turned in his tracks as if struck with vertigo. A flash of craven inspiration suggested to him an expedient not unknown to European statesmen when they wish to delay a difficult negotiation. Booted and spurred, he scrambled into the hammock with undignified haste. His handsome ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... her fairy godmother; through Mrs. Bates everything appeared possible. "You must put him on the committee," said Jane; "or you must make him a floor-manager or something." Jane's head swam with a social vertigo; she could call spirits from the vasty deep and feel perfectly ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... these centers, or infused into the capillary or the venous circulation. Usually, too, an unfortunate experiences, perhaps instantaneously, an intense burning pain in the member lacerated, which is succeeded by vertigo, nausea, retching, fainting, coldness, and collapse; the part bitten swells, becomes discolored, or spotted over its surface with livid blotches, that may, ultimately, extend to the greater portion of the body, while the poison appears to effect a greater or less disorganization ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various

... research balloons. Each of these huge balloons is lighted, so that night-flying planes will not collide with the gas bag or the instrument case suspended below. Shallett concluded that Gorman was suffering from a combination of vertigo and confusion with the light on ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe

... some thinking in their composition. I have heard him say, that Johnson required them from him on a sudden emergency, and on that account, he sat up the whole night to complete them in time; and by it he was so much disordered, that it produced a vertigo in his head.' Northcote's Reynolds, i. 89, Reynolds must have spoken of only one paper; as the three, appearing as they did on Sept. 29, Oct. 20, and Nov. 10, could not have been required ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... INDIAN POKE.—Symptoms: Violent vomiting and purging, bloody stools, great anxiety, tremors, vertigo, fainting, sinking of the pulse, cold sweets and convulsions.—Treatment: Excite speedy vomiting by large draughts of warm water, molasses and water, tickling the throat with the finger or a feather, and emetics; give oily and mucilaginous drinks, oily purgatives, ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... 1790, Zaguri wrote in reference to vertigo of which Casanova complained: "Have you tried riding horseback? Do you not think that is an excellent preservative? I tried it this last summer and I ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... consisting of assimilable elements may be considered as unwholesome food. It is rejected by the stomach, or it produces diarrhoea, or it causes vertigo or disturbance of the heart's action, or some other symptom for which the subject of it would consult the physician, if it came on from any other cause than taking it under the name of medicine. Yet portions of this unwholesome food ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... as a hymn once more resounded and carried him off with its stubborn importunate rhythm, he ceased to be master of himself, and imagined that he was at last beginning to believe amidst the hallucinatory vertigo which reigned in that travelling hospital, rolling, ever rolling ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... outline like a bow. Must have a sword, I can see the light glow Between a dark line and his leg. Vertigo ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... think of putting them into hot dish-water, and for that reason preferred washing the dishes in cold water; she required a full hour in the morning to make her toilet; she was laced so tightly that she could not stoop without vertigo; and her hoops were of dimensions which seemed to render it impossible for her to wait upon table; she was quite exhausted with the effort of ironing the table-napkins and chamber-towels: yet she could not think of 'living out' under two dollars ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... to have brought on a touch of vertigo," he explained and he had the sense, costly in self-restraint, to let his eagerly outstretched hand drop at his side, "Conscience, I think ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... and his mind prompt in the midst of tumult. He had reached that statesmanship of gambling which in Paris, let us say in passing, is the livelihood of thousands who are strong enough to look every night into an abyss without getting a vertigo. With his four hundred francs, Philippe resolved to make his fortune that day. He put aside, in his boots, two hundred francs, and kept the other two hundred in his pocket. At three o'clock he went to the gambling-house (which is now turned into the theatre of the Palais-Royal), where the bank accepted ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... This vertigo of deputyship had seized on others. The captain dreamed of it under his foraging-cap while puffing at his pipe, and the schoolmaster too in his school, and the cure also between two prayers, so that he sometimes surprised himself with his eyes towards heaven, in the act of saying, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... example, is originally a turbid sensation, of which the native shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of vertigo. In vertigo we feel that movement is, and is more or less violent or rapid, more or less in this direction or that, more or less alarming or sickening. But a man subject to vertigo may gradually learn to co-ordinate his felt motion with his real position and that of other things, and intellectualize ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... human family, I believe, has carried so much mystery into love. No other has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of woman, or been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo. Read the strange Mabinogi of Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois; its pages are, as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment. Woman appears therein as a kind of vague vision, an intermediary between man and the supernatural ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... it struck Julia like a bodily blow; she stood as if she had been turned to ice. A great weight seemed to seize her limbs, a sickening vertigo attacked her. She had a suffocating sense that time was passing, that ages were going by in that bright, glaring room, with the sea air coming in a shuttered window, and the two beds, with their smooth white pillows, so neatly turned ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris

... the ability, and what artist lacks it? In the future, there is fame for the painter, there is posterity for the poet and much good may it do them. But for the musician, particularly for the song-bird, there is the vertigo of instant applause. In days like these, days that witness the fall of empires, the future holds for the donna, for the prima donna, for the prima donna assoluta, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... went with her and the yellow glare of lamps came back. He heard the passionate applause—he saw Mary reappear and bow, a sad smile on her face—a smile which he alone could understand—her heart was full of pity for him. Then once more she withdrew, and staggering like one suffering from vertigo—the eagle-hearted youth went out of the hall and down the polished stairway like an outcast soul, descending from ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland

... Old Mr. Van Quintem had fallen from his chair, and would have dropped upon the floor, but for the strong arm of the boy Bog. He was in the act of rising from his seat for the purpose of offering his hand to Marcus, when the vertigo, from which he was an occasional ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... that painful oppression known by the name of PUNA. Drops of blood stood on the gums and lips, and respiration became hurried and difficult. However strong the will of these brave men might be, the time came at last when their physical powers failed, and vertigo, that terrible malady in the mountains, destroyed not only their bodily strength but their moral energy. Falls became frequent, and those who fell could not rise again, but dragged themselves along on ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... and found the house in a great state of excitement. Elizabeth had started to go down into the cellar with both hands full. She had been a little dizzy for several days, and meant to take a dose of herb tea, boneset being her great stand-by, when she could find time. Whether it was the vertigo, or she slipped, she lay there unconscious, and they sent ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... sets free tannic acid, powerful enough to literally tan the coats of the stomach, and bring on incurable dyspepsia. Often coffee without milk can be taken, where, with milk, it proves harmful; but, in all cases, moderation must rule. Taken too strong, palpitation of the heart, vertigo, and fainting are ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell

... to a sense of vertigo, which frequently (with me) followed the use of animal food. There is, generally, more cheerfulness ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... a force obliquely compounded with the straight course of thought which had up to that moment been guiding my footsteps. I felt as if an invisible arm had seized me and was dragging me down. I shrieked and stood trembling above the foaming water until assistance came. Here the mere idea of vertigo produced vertigo. A plank on the ground may be crossed without arousing any idea of falling; but if it is above a precipice, and we think of the distance below, the impulse to fall is very strong. Even when we are in perfect ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... a principle with Therese that "We should go to the end of our strength before we complain." How many times did she assist at Matins suffering from vertigo or violent headaches! "I am able to walk," she would say, "and so I ought to be at my duty." And, thanks to this undaunted energy, she performed acts that ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)

... belle of five-and-twenty. "What were you just saying that some of my Fanny's symptoms were, Doctor?" asked the languid mother, as if longing for a second taste of some dainty morsel. The courteous physician dropped them into her eager palm, like sugar-plums, one by one: "Vertigo, headache, neuralgic pains, and general debility." The mother sighed once genteelly at me, and then again, quite sincerely, to herself;—but I never yet saw an habitual invalid who did not seem to take a secret satisfaction in finding her child ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... with vertigo; he cocked his gun and laid it beside him. He then closed his eyes as children do in order that they may see in the resplendent night of their own imagination more stars than are visible in the firmament; then he re-opened them, and stood motionless ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... and probed the cavity, and found that it must be of considerable size. My boys wished to have the opening enlarged and to enter immediately, but this I strictly forbade; for, as I leaned forward to examine it through the opening, a rush of mephitic air gave me a sort of vertigo. "Come away, children," cried I, in terror; "the air you would breathe there is certain death." I explained to them that, under certain circumstances, carbonic acid gas was frequently accumulated in caves or grottoes, rendering the air unfit for respiration; ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss

... having many things to attend to, but his wife sometimes goes mad as the women do in Vermont. There is little variety in Nature's big wheat-field. They say that when the corn is in the ear, the wind, chasing shadows across it for miles on miles, breeds as it were a vertigo in those who must look and cannot turn their eyes away. And they tell a nightmare story of a woman who lived with her husband for fourteen years at an Army post in just such a land as this. Then they were transferred to West Point, among the hills over the Hudson, and she ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... him, held him up. Fighting down his vertigo as his breath came back, he saw that it ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett

... overhanging clouds absorb all heaviness from the air, and the winds convey them away over the pine-tree summits. The spirit of fragrance, light and fresh, remained behind, and this was Rudy's morning draught. The sunbeams—those blessing-bringing daughters of the sun—kissed his cheeks. Vertigo might be lurking on the watch, but he dared not approach him. The swallows, who had not less than seven nests in his grandfather's house, flew up to him and his goats, singing, "We and you, you and we." They brought him greetings from his grandfather's house, even from two hens, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... long list, commonly, but very improperly, termed nervous complaints, deficient nutrition, and consequently general weakness, a relaxed state of the solids, too great a tenuity of the fluids, headach, vertigo, and many other complaints, too numerous to ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... which sometimes took the place of the convulsive fit and in other cases preceded or followed it. These were pavor nocturnus, sudden sweats, heat, neuralgia, sialorrhea, periodical cephalalgia and, above all, vertigo; and these symptoms were not always accompanied by unconsciousness nor followed by coma. Sometimes the seizure was only manifested by paroxysms of rage or ferocious and brutal impulses (devouring animals alive), ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... seventh attitude is an attitude characteristic of absolute repose. It is the strongest attitude, and, consequently, that assumed by intoxication to resist a lack of equilibrium. It is the attitude of vertigo, or ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... A sensation of vertigo had been growing upon them, which, as soon as the meal was over, became nausea, and shortly after ended in vomiting. It was natural they should feel alarmed. Had only one been ill, they might have ascribed the illness to some other ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid

... to turn; seized with a vertigo, he was nearly falling, but caught himself up at once. Finally Francis called out, "Stop! which ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... think of her in this way before. Poor and comparatively obscure, I had never raised my eyes to the wide possessions said to be hers. Even now I felt myself dazzled and bewildered by the prospect so suddenly unveiled. I could scarcely, without vertigo, recall her as I had last seen her, with her hand wounded in my defence; nor, without emotions painful in their intensity, fancy myself restored to the youth of which I had taken leave, and to the rosy hopes and plannings which visit most men once only, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... suddenly as a blow between his eyes—to half stun him. What ... what was it? Not any physical impact—no, something which was dazing but still immaterial. He braced his whole body, awaiting its return, trying frantically to understand what had happened in that instant of vertigo and seeming disembodiment. Never had he experienced anything like it—or had he? Two years or more ago when he had gone through the time transfer to enter the Arizona of the Folsom Men some ten thousand years earlier—that moment of transfer had been ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton

... nightfall. He left in the fashion of his coming, by the tunnel. Plutina immediately replaced the boughs, and, when she had eaten and drunk, again seated herself on the rough bed. From time to time, she went to the crevice, and stared out over the wild landscape longingly. But the height gave her a vertigo if she stepped forth upon the ledge. For that reason, she did not venture outside the crevice after a single attempt, which set her brain reeling. She remained instead well within the cleft, where she was unaffected by the height, while able ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily

... of vertigo suddenly built up in her again. This one was stronger than most; for a moment she couldn't be sure whether she was going to be sick or not. She stood up, stepped over to the door a few feet away, pulled it open and went through, drawing it ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz

... as she returned from a great ball, she suddenly was seized with vertigo. She did not think much of it, but sent for a cup ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... occasions. Hargens speaks of a woman in whom the slightest bit of opium in any form produced considerable salivation. Gastric disturbances are quite common, severe vomiting being produced by minimum doses; not infrequently, intense mental confusion, vertigo, and headache, lasting hours and even days, sometimes referable to the frontal region and sometimes to the occipital, are seen in certain nervous individuals after a dose of from 1/4 to 5/6 gr. of opium. These symptoms were ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... horses, and becomes so numerous in their stomachs, as sometimes to destroy them; it climbs into the nostrils of sheep and calves, and producing a nest of young in a transparent hydatide in the frontal sinus, occasions the vertigo or turn of those animals. In Lapland it so attacks the rein deer that the natives annually travel with the herds from the woods to ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... not without a species of vertigo or dizziness in my head, which would probably have struck me lifeless at his feet, had not a thought like that of ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... FRIEND: As I am suffering from an attack of vertigo, I answer your letter by the hand of my wife. Enclosed is my contribution toward defraying the expenses of your convention. Strong as is the Constitutional argument for woman suffrage, I nevertheless hope that your convention ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... expression immediately changed to a sort of constrained merriment, combined, however, with a certain suspicious attention to my movements. He laughed, and said that I must bear with him; that he was at certain moments subject to a species of vertigo, which betrayed itself in incoherent speeches, and that the attacks passed off as rapidly as they came. He put his weapon aside while making this explanation, and endeavored, with some success, to assume a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... speculations contain vertigo; no, there is nothing to indicate that he risked his mind in apocalypses. The apostle may be daring, but the bishop must be timid. He would probably have felt a scruple at sounding too far in advance certain problems which are, in a manner, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... pilots recognize a balloon when they see one? If they are flying at night, odd things can happen to their vision. There is the problem of vertigo as well as disorientation brought on by flying without points of reference. Night fighters have told dozens of stories of ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... as if seized with vertigo; and a stunned, chaotic sense of mortal peril shot through his brain, as Marie's solemn warning with respect to Derville rose up ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various

... eyeballs fixed, neck contorted, and lips covered with foam, was rolling on the ground, and beating the soil with his limbs. Some one cried out that he was poisoned. All then believed themselves poisoned. They fell upon the slaves, a terrible clamour was raised, and a vertigo of destruction came like a whirlwind upon the drunken army. They struck about them at random, they smashed, they slew; some hurled torches into the foliage; others, leaning over the lions' balustrade, massacred the animals ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... that day, I awoke to a consciousness of suffering. I had lost my appetite, was troubled with vertigo, and obstructed breathing, which were sure indications that the sudden change from heated rooms to the clear, cold air, sweeping over the ice-bound river, had given me a severe influenza. My promise of a tilt with Victor, or participation in further festivity, appeared ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... a sinking sensation and a fearful vertigo. The snapping animals faded. Ahead of them was the forest of vines, and they saw the safe hurled into it, crashing, plunging into the tangled mass. The whole view crumpled and moved upwards like a swirl of leaves in a wind, and then vanished ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer

... glass, and once more to eat such things as they serve at Kenley's! The idea could not be lightly dismissed. Besides he felt suddenly giddy and weak. He frequently felt so these days, and if he accepted he could rest quietly until the vertigo passed. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... same time put his arms round his wife so as to protect her body. I was on one side towards the middle of the sort of hurdle which serves as a balcony. I was on my knees and clinging to two ropes. Montgolfier, Thirion, and Saint Felix were near me. The balloon descended so rapidly that it gave us the vertigo. The air, which we had left so calm above, became a violent wind as we neared the earth. 'We are going to throw down the anchors,' said Godard, 'hold tight!' Ah! the car struck the earth with tremendous violence. I cannot imagine how it was that my arms were not broken. ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne

... back by the doctor, requesting him to dismiss the congregation; which he did, with the physician's assurance that the trouble was no more than vertigo, and that Arthur was even now quite able to proceed home in the farmer vestryman's rockaway. The people noticed that the physician went ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable

... understand. To-day the vertigo is more pronounced than usual; especially with the hair like this. Did ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... When the vertigo went out of his legs, Ling Foo cat-stepped over to the scattered embroidered jackets and began mechanically to replace them on the counter—all but two, for these were speckled with blood. He contemplated them for a space, and at last picked them up daintily ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath

... water about a foot deep on a narrow ledge of rock protruding a yard or so into the pool. It was deep enough beneath to drown an elephant; the din of that roaring foss and the swirl of the waters bordered on vertigo and deafness. But there it was to ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... occasionally she stopped against a vertigo that went with it, wiped up under the curtain of purple veil at the beads of perspiration which would spring out along her upper lip. She was quite washed of rouge, except just a swift finger-stroke ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... I moved the mark maybe ... here now is the part he was reading to me himself ... "the remedies for diseases belonging to the skins next the brain: headache, vertigo, cramp, convulsions, palsy, incubus, ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats

... with me?" he asked himself. "No, she is not a mere creature, but a whole creation. Of her world, even through veils and clouds, I have caught echoes like the memory of sufferings healed, like the dazzling vertigo of dreams in which we hear the plaints of generations mingling with the harmonies of some higher sphere where all is Light and all is Love. Am I awake? Do I still sleep? Are these the eyes before which the luminous ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... only to have it drop from her nerveless fingers. But her thoughts were uncontrollable, she was drawn continually to the edge of that precipice which hung over the waters whence they had dragged her, never knowing when the vertigo would seize her. And once Sally Drover, on the alert for just such an occurrence, pursued her down Dalton Street and forced her ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... he had spent with some forgotten object of his adoration in the past, he had spent five with Joan. The thought alarmed him. It came to this. If by rational reduction you translated each flare into hours, the vertigo of his summer with Joan became at once in contrast equivalent to years. And by every law his infatuation should have stopped the sooner. How much longer would it linger? What if Christmas still found ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... incubation stage is taken from the date of infection to the first appearance of the local lesion at the sight of inoculation. It varies from three to ten weeks. The symptoms are vague, possibly palpitation, vertigo, edema of the limbs and eyelids. The primary stage begins with the initial lesion, which consists of a papule which may be found most anywhere on the body. This papule ulcerates. The secondary stage commences about ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... disgust. If swallowed, it excites violent convulsions of the stomach and of the bowels to eject the poison either upward or downward. If it be not very speedily and entirety ejected, it produces great anxiety, vertigo, faintness, and prostration of all the senses; and, in some instances, death has followed." The oil of this plant, he adds, is one of the strongest vegetable poisons, insomuch that we know of no animal that can resist its mortal effects. ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler

... Rohan, in a vertigo of satisfaction, indited his justification, forwarded it to the Queen by the hand of the Countess, and some days later received a note in the Queen's hand upon blue-edged paper adorned by ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... the post of science master at the school, and, having seen Late kill a man many years before and escape punishment, gets it. Every time you see Vertigo's name ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various

... incubator. The currency question is one you know all about. Everybody does—especially the corner-grocery politician. He understands it from A to Izzard—knows almost as much about it as a hello-girl does of the nature of electricity. Prof. Jevon truly says that "a kind of intellectual vertigo appears to seize people when they talk of money." Perhaps the Goddess of Liberty on the silver ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... ready to burst forth. He imagined he heard cries of distress from kings, who appealed to him for help, and the furious shouts of the populace. He fancied he felt the territory of France trembling and crumbling beneath his feet. His feeble and fatigued sight failed him. His weak head was attacked by vertigo, which threw all his blood ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... thing for me I had the forethought to trim her down; otherwise I should have had to cut away a lot of canvas. And how Cappy Ricks would scream at the sail bill later on! We were hove to overnight when Borden and Jacobsen died, on the thirteenth. McBain complained of a headache and vertigo on the morning of the fourteenth; so I laid to until he died, last night. I was not with him when he passed. What good would it have done? I had breakfast; and after breakfast I found him in his berth, dead. I tossed him overboard, and every last rag of clothing, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... depth, nor determine his shallowness—she did not even guess which it might be. She was irresistibly drawn to him; yet she was on her guard, as one who, looking down from a great height, in fear of vertigo clings to the parapet over which he leans. The parapet she clung to was her own good American common sense. Yet she feared she did not know what. A little gleam in Giovanni's dark eyes, a curious, deliberate, intentionally produced expression ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... thus bring along with them the resistless desire for its repetition." More than fifty per cent. of common spirits are alcohol, this deadly substance, holding rank with henbane, hemlock, prussic acid, foxglove, poison sumach. Nausea, vertigo, vomiting, exhilaration of spirits for a time, and subsequent stupor, and even total insensibility and death, are their accompaniments. Broussais remarks, "A single portion of ardent spirit taken into the stomach produces a temporary phlogosis." Now, I submit ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... of it closer than, if as close as, some passages of the Book of Proverbs (which are actually quoted), and, above all, there is no hint of any satisfaction whatever being derived from the sins by the sinner. His course in this respect might have been a succession of fits of vertigo or epilepsy as far as pleasure goes. There is even a rather fine piece of real psychology as to his state of mind after his first succumbing to temptation. But all this abstinence and reticence, however laudable ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... in their pipes with fragrant herbs. Cascarilla bark is a favorite with some smokers; it is a simple aromatic and tonic, but, when smoked, is said sometimes to occasion vertigo and intoxication. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... Jacob's-ladder, whereby man might mount into very Heaven. That he, our poor Friend, should ever win for himself one of these Gracefuls (Holden)—Ach Gott! how could he hope it; should he not have died under it? There was a certain delirious vertigo in ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... a laughing maiden. Directly this gentleman joined her circle, and her eyes had rested upon him, Madame Imperia felt herself bitten by a strong desire, which stretched the harp strings of her nature, and produced therefrom a sound she had not heard for many a day. She was seized with such a vertigo of true love at the sight of this freshness of youth, that but for her imperial dignity she would have kissed the good cheeks ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac

... peak piercing the heavens, shadowing the earth. It was on a peak such as that the young emperors of old Rome balanced themselves, a precipice on either side. Did they look below, a vertigo rose to meet them; from above delirium came, while the horizon, though it hemmed the limits of vision, could not mark the frontiers of their dream. In addition there was the exaltation that altitudes produce. ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus

... his life as a passing emotion familiar to all creative artists at certain stages in their work. It was a natural, almost inevitable, way of looking at it! He sat for a moment gazing abstractedly at his littered table, clutching the edges of it with both hands, resisting a momentary vertigo ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... Naomi in her blind and sudden terror at the first sounds that had reached her of human voices. Her face was blanched, her eyelids were trembling, her lips were restless, her nostrils quivered, her whole being seemed to be overcome by a vertigo of dread, and, in the horrible disarray of all her sensations her brain, on its wakening from its dolorous sleep of three delirious days, was tottering and reeling at its welcome in this ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine

... frantic love of freedom, or rather with a sudden attack of vertigo, sprang out of the window one day, crossed the street, climbed the fence of the Parc Saint-James, which faces our house, and vanished. In spite of our utmost endeavours, we never managed to hear ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier

... destined to be for me a very disheartening time. I had just passed through a rheumatic fever, which left my health more broken than before, and one morning shortly after I was settled in the capital, I woke to find the room going round me like a wheel. It was the beginning of a vertigo which lasted for six months, and which I began to fight with various devices and must yield to at last. I tried medicine and exercise, but it was useless, and my father came to take my letters off my hands while I gave myself some ineffectual ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Strand! A friend of mine (who does not wish his name mentioned) assures me that he was proceeding from the Gaiety Restaurant, where he had been lunching, towards Charing Cross, when he was "attacked by VERTIGO" in broad day-light! Comment is needless. If dangerous foreign bandits like this VERTIGO—who from his name must be an Italian—are permitted to plunder innocent pedestrians with impunity, the sooner we abolish our Police Force and save the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various

... victims when the steel went home were heard on all sides. At times the soldiers could not see on account of the sweat and blood pouring from their faces; the very air was foul from the steam from the living and the dead. They could not breathe; a sort of vertigo overpowered them, and they only kept their feet by grappling with ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... fighting an impulse to faint. She remembered, with terror, previous sensations, and fought off the vertigo, biting down into her lips. She wanted to smile, but her mouth felt numb, as if it dragged instead ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... is one of the most active and certain anthelmintics for children. It is indigenous to the United States. When taken in too large quantities, it is apt to purge, give rise to vertigo, dimness of vision, and even to convulsions; therefore, it should be combined with some cathartic. Dose—Of the infusion, one ounce at night, followed by physic in ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... terminates in health, or the patient sinks into one kind of apoplexy, and perishes. Many symptoms, which attend inirritative fevers, accompany this disease, as cold hands and feet at periodic times, scurf on the tongue, want of appetite, muddy urine, with pains of the head, and sometimes vertigo, and vomiting. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... little into account in looking into the future which is preparing for America. They persist in presenting to us two great confederacies, and, in some sort, two United States, called to divide the continent. If any thing like this could occur, it could not endure. Doubtless, there are hours of vertigo from which we may look for every thing, even the impossible; and, who knows? perhaps the impossible most of all; nevertheless, the border States cannot attach themselves forever to a cause which is not their own. By the side of the manifestations which have taken place in ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... in some measure be attributable to the want of a more nutritious diet; yet the disorder of the nerves was evidently its chief cause, and the loss of appetite, as well as the necessity for support by wine, were its effects. Loss of voice, occasional blindness, vertigo, complete insanity, with sleeplessness, frequent weeping without any ostensible cause, were all usual symptoms. Many patients found relief from being placed in swings or rocked in cradles; others required to be roused from their state of suffering by severe blows on the soles of their feet; ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... blood rushed to his head and drew a veil of mist before his eyes, and there was a roar in his ears as if he were going to be seized with vertigo. In the midst of the fever of excitement into which he had been thrown by these books, these pictures, the maddening discourses of his host, a furious instinct rose out of the blind depths of his being, the same brutal impetus which he had already experienced ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... chin, that delicious part of the throat whose warm satin he involuntarily touched. She had on a gown cut sloping in the neck, and through the opening he inhaled all the living perfume of the woman, the pure fragrance of her youth, warmed by the sunshine. All at once a vertigo seized him and he thought ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... pavement in the middle, and on one side of this the most loathsome trench I ever beheld, such a one as I think could not be found in the foulest slum of the dirtiest city in Europe, not only loathsome to the eye, but emitting a stench which even on that cool day might produce vertigo, and this under the very eye of the magistrate, and not more than thirty feet from ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... Pipelet endeavored to find some reasonable motive for the outrageous conduct of Cabrion, and on this subject he posed himself with a thousand insoluble questions. Thus, sometimes, a new Paschal, he felt himself seized with a vertigo in trying to sound the bottomless abyss which the infernal genius of the painter had dug under his feet. How many times, in the overflowings of his imagination, he had been forced to commune within himself thanks to the frenzied skepticism of Madame Pipelet, who, only looking ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... went on. "You see one hundred and twenty-five millimeters is the normal pressure. Kitty Carr is absolutely abnormal. I do not know, but I think that she suffers from periodical attacks of vertigo. Almost all kleptomaniacs do. During an attack they ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve

... baths shall be the juice of July-flowers, Spirit of roses, and of violets, The milk of unicorns, and panthers' breath Gather'd in bags, and mixt with Cretan wines. Our drink shall be prepared gold and amber; Which we will take, until my roof whirl round With the vertigo: and my dwarf shall dance, My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic. Whilst we, in changed shapes, act Ovid's tales, Thou, like Europa now, and I like Jove, Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine: So, of the rest, till we have ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... Then a vertigo seizes the gods. They stagger, fall into convulsions, and vomit forth their existences. Their crowns break to pieces; their standards fly away. They get rid of their attributes and their sexes, fling over their shoulders the cups from which they drink immortality, strangle themselves ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... not agree with me. It is true that I was exceedingly vigorous at first, and actually planted with my own hands two or three long rows of potatoes; after which I got a turn of rheumatism in my shoulder, which lasted me a week. Stooping down to plant beets and radishes gave me a vertigo, so that I was obliged to content myself with a general superintendence of the garden; that is to say, I charged my Englishman to see that my Irishman did his duty properly, and then got on to my horse and rode to the city. But about one part of the ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... the "horse-dealer," without catching his meaning. But I was presently seized with a vertigo of horror at the idea that my children, who might unfortunately have escaped the death which their far-sighted mother had intended for them, might be carried to Italy to fulfill such a monstrous destiny. I felt neither anger nor fury, ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue

... vertigo, paralysis of limbs, vomiting, sciatica, or incontinence or suppression of urine, spitting of blood; others, again, simulate ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... prepared himself by receiving Holy Communion in the Sisters' chapel. Almighty God was pleased to glorify His servant by a second prodigy on this occasion, for the painter had no sooner taken his brush in hand, than he was seized with an excruciating vertigo and was compelled to desist. Nor would it have been possible for him to resume, but that he felt inspired to apply to his head a small portion of the hair of the deceased, upon doing which he was instantly cured, and completed the picture, which is to be seen still ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.



Words linked to "Vertigo" :   symptom, lightheadedness, vertiginous



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