1-wane 衰落

2-dub 把……称为

3-ailing 境况不佳的，生病的

In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, Tsar Nicholas of Russia dubbed the ailing state " the sick man of Europe".

4-duly 相应地

This phrase soon proved useful to other contexts, and was duly applied to other countries.

5-some 大约

6-lament 对……表示失望，痛惜

Some 160 years later, in September 2015, Finland's finance minister lamented that " basically, we're the sick man of Europe".

7-ailment 小疾病，不安

8-overdose 过量

No example of this is more extreme than one we found in an edition of the New York Times from 1917 with the headline " Crane Diagnoses Russia's Ailment, " in which it is said that the country is suffering from overdose of exaggerated modernism in socialism reform ideas.

9-simile 明喻

10-quack 庸医

11-administer 医生开药

12-nostrums 老式又欠缺的解决方案，未必奏效的计策

13-invalidism 病弱

14-contend for 争夺

Continuing the simile, he declared that the danger for the patient lay in the fact that too many quacks and ignorant specialists were contending for the right to be admitted to the bedside and administer nostrums whose value in any case was doubtful and which certainly should be tried under other circumstances before being administered under conditions which might result in the death or permanent invalidism of the sufferer.