Health
When he had arrived back in Britain at the end of the war, Baker's doctor had given him a check-up and told him to take six months' rest, the first half in bed, as his heart was in a poor state. The military authorities also recommended two small operations. Baker disregarded their advice and went straight into business.
Baker suffered a nervous breakdown in 1954, which he ascribed to his excessive workload as both a Member of Parliament and a businessman single-handedly running many companies (which were in financial difficulties). He claimed to have had multiple day-time blackouts and to have attempted suicide twice before he became a voluntary patient in a nursing home. In May 1954 he announced that he would not seek re-election due to ill-health. While in the nursing home he agreed to revise his war memoirs "Confession of Faith" and add his post-war life story, which he intended to be published under the title "Testament of Faith".
Read more about this topic: Peter Baker (British Politician)
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The years when we are parenting teenagers are the high point, the crest when everything seems to be in bright colors and in ten-foot letters.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)
“Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented with fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere.—Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)