A contribution to the study of the so-called puerperal insanity / by J. Thompson Dickson.

  • Dickson, John Thompson, 1842?-1874.
Date:
[1870]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A contribution to the study of the so-called puerperal insanity / by J. Thompson Dickson. 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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    she should be at night; and she kept her promise. Between ten and eleven at night she was furious, and commenced beat- ing the side of her bed violently with her hands. The next morning she was quiet. She desired to get up and dress, and I allowed her to do so; and she sat by the lire in a list- less, dejected condition. Her lacteal secretion had disap- peared on the invasion of the attack, but her breasts were healthy. Her pulse was very feeble, her skin dry and hot, her bowels confined, and she had a distaste for food. I asked her how she was, and she said she was uncomfortable; that her head felt as though full of wool; that she could not help the noise she made, as she thought in the night that the devil was tearing her up. I ordered her a mild purge, and ad- ditional diet of brandy, eggs, milk, and beef-tea; a portion of the brandy and milk to tie given at bed time. The next night she was less noisy, and the following morning she con- sented to remain in bed. In ten days I allowed her to get up, and in sixteen days, though still very weak, she was quite free from delusions, was sleeping well at night, her secreting and excreting organs were acting fairly well; her bowels alone requiring every few days the stimulus of a little castor oil. After twenty-four days’ residence she had quite recovered from her insanity; hut as she continued very weak she re- mained nearly a month afterwards in the hospital. One day she asked me if I would allow her to see a patient in another ward, who she heard was very ill. The patient she asked to see was the subject of mania, and was dying of phthisis. I asked her why she wished to see her, when she told me that the patient was her mother. Her friends had kept her in ignorance of her mother’s insanity, fearing that the know- ledge of it might increase her own liability to attack on her confinement. The patient herself suggested that she should put on her bonnet and shawl before visiting her mother, in order that the latter might he saved from any excitement that might be engendered from a knowledge that she (the daugh- ter) had been an inmate of the hospital. The relatives of these patients had studiously kept me in ignorance of the relation- ship until I heard it from the daughter. The fact of the relationship, however, is in the highest degree instructive and important, as pointing to the potentiality of insanity in the daughter, which became manifest whenever her general con- dition was low and reduced. Her insanity thus was traceable to a potentiality. She became insane not because of her confinement, or from any circumstance connected with it,