Essays on hypochondriasis and other nervous affections by John Reid M.D. 1921 : [Review].

Date:
[1822]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on hypochondriasis and other nervous affections by John Reid M.D. 1921 : [Review]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    t not that confidence in our opinions which we feel when more ro- bust. On the contrary, wine dissipates the doubts of sobriety ; and those who have frequently observed their own minds in sickness, must remember occasionally a distinctness of thought, and a confi- dence of belief which was completely dissipated after regaining their ordinary health. Our sensations, emotions, actions, and even con- victions, are capable of being excited by morbid actions of the body. There is, in sickness, a condition of mind bordering on delirium, in which the patient is delirious enough to afford an example of that state, yet collected enough to observe and reason about it, which comes nearer than any phenomenon with which we are ac- quainted, to an experimental demonstration of the double nature of our being, of the physical and moral impulses of our thoughts, w hich are here brought into contact and comparison. In this state, the ideas are moved, one minute by the will, the next by something else; one minute we can command them, another we feel them slip out of our grasp, and whirl across the mind with indescribable fleetness, guided, or rather hurried on, by some impulse strange to and stronger than ourselves. Insanity is a state in which the ope- rations of the mind cease to be governed by intellectual law's, and become subservient to bodily impulses. The dominion of the organs I is not the natural, but a diseased state; the physical theory of in- sanity, so far from leading to materialism, leads us just the other way. This view of the subject removes all that mystery which is so perpetually felt in contemplating the subject. As long as we seek to explain, by intellectual processes, how' this belief or that emo- tion got access to the mind, so long we ‘ find no end, in wandering mazes lost.’ But as soon as we know' that as illness may produce fretfulness, and liver disease low’ spirits, so there are morbid states of the body which are capable of producing emotions, convictions, and actions without the intervention of the moral causes which usually produce them, the mystery vanishes, and we can as readily explain how' a lunatic should believe without any reason, as how a sickly child should be peevish without any provocation, or an hepatic patient low'-spirited without any affliction. It is the only key to those strange cases where persons have been seized with an irresistible desire to destroy those who had done them no injury, for whom they felt no antipathy, or even who had been objects of affection. In these cases we believe that nervous irritation pro- duces directly that thirst for blood, and that act of destruction which, in health, requires the recollection of injury and the passion Df revenge. This state, which is morbid in man, seems to be na- ural in the instincts of animals in whom actions, which seem like vol. xxvii. no. liii. h the