And yet how well the physician, poet, autocrat and professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, knows and sympathizes with this weakness in us! He touches the truth in a direct way that wrings a sigh of familiar pain from many a patient soul.
"Some people have a scale of your whole nervous system and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semi-tones, touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument.

I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance.

Married life is the school in which the most accomplished artists in this department are found.

A delicate woman is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities.

From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses." And again he speaks of the less serious affection of the nerves as: ...