Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1755

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

October 18, 1936

I am sending you an excerpt from a medical book regarding the abdominal support for T. An abdominal support should fit closely to the symphisis pubis and Poupart’s ligaments below; above, it should not extend higher than the umbilicus...

In the French dictionary they speak of a special thing for this ptosis of the stomach, in French of course. These things seem rather unconvincing. And if it is to fit closely to certain Latin things as well as to Poupart’s affairs, how can it be done without measuring?

T’s temperature shot up suddenly to 103.4°, and has remained so. Don’t know why. Maybe constipation.

? Merely with constipation this persistence of high fever?

His urinary symptoms are better.

How far? and in what way? No pain? no albumen? or very little?

Y says he felt a descent of Power producing an indescribable sensation in the head, and followed by numbness of the extremities, feeling like nausea, throbbing in the head, giddiness, etc. All these symptoms point towards a high blood-pressure which, he says, is normal... Can descent produce such a havoc?

A descent cannot possibly produce nausea and vomiting etc. There can, if one pulls down too much force, be produced a headache or giddiness; both of these go if one keeps quiet a little, ceases pulling and assimilates. A descent cannot produce blood pressure, madness or apoplexy or heart failure or any other illness.

What I gather from Y’s letter and D’s is that he felt great intensity of descent (much greater than he had before) and got into a panic (because of the indescribable sensation) and thought he might be going mad like P (P’s madness was not the result of a descent), so nervous that he upset his stomach and possibly his circulation also. That is the only possible explanation if it is not an attack of illness on which it is for the doctors to pronounce, not me.