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 filth and noise of the crowded streets soon destroy the elasticity of health which belongs to the country boy.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“In the continual enterprise of trying to guide appropriately, renegotiate with, listen to and just generally coexist with our teenage children, we ourselves are changed. We learn even more clearly what our base-line virtues are. We listen to our teenagers and change our minds about some things, stretching our own limits. We learn our own capacity for flexibility, firmness and endurance.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)