astheny

Noun

asthenia (countable and uncountable, plural asthenias)

1. Weakness; loss of strength.
   • The savage gets a headache when his thought is forced to flow in a stream of representation. In the imbecile, in the idiot we find the same thing manifested. They can only think in concrete sensory terms. In mental asthenia which approaches the state of the higher stages of imbecility and also in...1914, Boris Sidis, The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology
2. (figuratively) weakness
   • You see nothing that might even remotely suggest life, beyond the solitary brave watering the ponies below you; but that is because the asthenia of civilization has left you half blind as well as half deaf, for where you see nothing and hear nothing Geronimo is conscious of life, movement and...1927, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The War Chief