51�Թ�

“When one of their symptoms is relieved, another mysteriously appears in its place,” Groves writes about one variation of what British physicians call “heartsink patients.”

The less immense, more finite items, of a size allowing the mind to get a handhold, like nations, or space technology, or New York, are hard to think about without drifting toward heartsink.

A 1988 research paper by Tom O’Dowd coined a term describing such patients and the feeling doctors get when they have one: heartsink.

It was with a dreadful heartsink that he ran there.