SABBATH SICKNESS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 12, 1879

SABBATH SICKNESS.

THIS remarkable disease has not yet been treated in books of pathology.

1. This disease is of the intermittent kind, attacking the patient by violent paroxysms, which return every seventh day. These paroxysms return every Lord's day, and hence it is called “Sabbath sickness,” but by the faculty it is technically known by no other name than Dies Domini Morbus.

2. It partakes somewhat of the nature of the ague, especially as it is attended with a great degree of coldness. This coldness is first apparent early in the morning of the Lord's day, and in many cases seizing the patient before he has left his bed. But it begins in the region of the heart, and it is attended with dullness of the head, followed by yawning and lethargy.

3. The patient is sometimes deprived of the use of his limbs, especially the legs and feet, so that he is indisposed to walk to the house of God.

4. In some cases this attack has come upon them after they have gone to the house of God, and has been attended with yawning and slumber.

5. In other cases there has been uneasiness in the house of God, and a disposition to complain of the length of the sermon, though they have been known to sit very contentedly in a play-house several hours at a time, or stand in the street in the cold several hours to listen to a political harangue.

6. Persons affected with this disease never mourn on account of their confinement from public worship.

7. These persons often surprise their neighbors with great activity and health on the day following, however unfavorable the weather may be.

8. Most of the faculty agree that there is a low, feverish heat, technically called febris mundi or fever of the world, which may be detected in these patients during the intervening days of the week.

9. There also seems to be a loss of appetite for savory food, and a want of relish for Panis Vitæ—bread of life—which in this case is the indispensable remedy for this disease.

10. Persons affected with this disease generally have a disrelish for private religious exercises of the closet and the reading of the Scriptures.

11. It is also contagious—neighbors take it from neighbors, and children from parents.—Selected.