My dear Martineau,

.  .  .  .  .

        You will believe that the state of your sister's health gives me much concern. She has kindly written twice to me. The second letter tells of formidable fainting fits, which I cannot explain away; yet, as I told her in my reply to her first, her symptoms in general are so similar to my own that I cannot but hope her physician views them too seriously, and does her harm by it. I, on the whole, believe that my own heart is unsound organically (distended), but my experience certainly is that the less I attend to it in detail the better, though I must in prudence avoid impure air and other evils. Her second letter tells me as a decisive proof how very bad she is, that every day she feels shot in the head.

        Now this is exactly the symptom I have for nine months been struggling to subdue, and as my wife knows, I am, week by week, balancing whether to put myself under a doctor for it. . . . The spasm which distresses me comes at the crisis when I ought to go to sleep, and so wakes me up. I could not get rid of it even in the summer, on days on which I had least mental effort, and was in all other respects conscious of great vigour. . . .

        I went to a physician to complain of sleeplessness and got the reply that it was my heart that was diseased. . . . Your sister's body is so subject to her mind that I do not despair that, either through mesmerism restoring sleep or in some other way, she may rally far beyond her present expectation. I know a lady who was dying of brain fever, and could get no sleep until the physician called in a mesmerist; this gained sleep for her, and by that alone she recovered without medicine.

Ever yours,        
F. W. N.