Life & Wisdom Quote by William Falconer

Falconer is smuggling a radical health claim into the dry language of public accounting: your worries belong on a spreadsheet of the dead. The line’s power comes from its tonal mash-up. He takes “mental agitations and eating cares” - phrases that sound almost quaint, like domestic clutter - and bolts them to the hard machinery of “bills of mortality,” the era’s grim ledger of deaths. It’s not just that anxiety harms you; it’s that anxiety is statistically undercounted, a silent category error in how society tallies risk.

The intent is corrective and faintly prosecutorial. Falconer isn’t offering a poetic meditation on nerves; he’s arguing that the culture of his day systematically misreads causality. People blame contagion, weather, or fate, while the slow violence of stress, grief, and relentless labor hides in plain sight, dispersed across individual lives and therefore easy to dismiss. “Could their effects be collected” is the key phrase: he’s imagining an epidemiology of the mind before the term exists, insisting that private distress has public-scale consequences.

Context sharpens the edge. Mid-18th-century Britain is urbanizing, commercializing, and measuring itself with new bureaucratic tools; mortality tables are modernity’s paperwork. Falconer, a poet with a seafarer’s biography and a medical-adjacent vocabulary, turns that paperwork into satire-lite: the most dangerous poison isn’t in the air but in the head and the pantry, where “eating cares” hints at scarcity, digestion, and the daily negotiations of survival. The subtext is moral without being preachy: if a society produces constant agitation, it shouldn’t be surprised by shortened lives.