Memorial of D.L. Dix : praying a grant of land for the relief and support of the indigent curable and incurable insane in the United States.

  • Dix, Dorothea Lynde, 1802-1887.
Date:
[1848]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memorial of D.L. Dix : praying a grant of land for the relief and support of the indigent curable and incurable insane in the United States. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    vidual, however obscure, is free to enter upon the race for the highest honors and most exalted stations; where the arena of competition is acces- sible to all who seek the distinctions which acquisition and possession of wealth assures, and the respect accorded to high literary and scholastic attainments. Statesmen, politicians, and merchants, are peculiarly liable to insanity. In the United States, therefore, we behold an illustration of my assertion. The kingdoms of Western Europe, excepting Portugal, Spain, and the lesser islands dependent on Great Britain, rank next to this country in the rapid development of insanity. Sir Andrew Halliday, in a letter to Lord Seymour, states that the number of the insane in Eng- land has become more than tripled in the last twenty years. Russia in Europe, Turkey, and Hungary, together with most of the Asiatic and African countries, exhibit but little insanity. The same is remarked by travellers, especially by Humboldt, of a large part of South America. Those tracts of North America inhabited by Indians, and the sections chiefly occupied by the negro race, produce comparatively very few ex- amples. The colored population is more liable to attacks of insanity than the negro. This terrible malady, the source of indescribable miseries, does increase, and must continue fearfully to increase, in this country, whose free, civil, and religious institutions create constantly various and multiplying sources of mental excitement. Comparatively but little care is given in cultivating the moral affections in proportion with the intellectual development of the people. Here, as in other countries, forcible examples may be cited to show the mischiefs which result alike from religious,* social, civil, and rev- *Note.—I wish to mark carefully the distinction between true religion and extravagant religious excitements. The one is the basis of every virtue, the source of every consolation under the manifold trials and af- flictions which beset the path of every one in the course of this mortal pilgrimage ; while that morbid state which is created by want of calm, earnest meditation, and selt-discipline, by excessive demands upon the physical strength, by protracted attendance upon excited public assem- blies, is ever to be deprecated. The following statistics show how large a part of the patients in some of our best hospitals labor under what is commonly termed religious insanity. 1 offer a pretty full list from the report, for 1843, of the Massachusetts State Hospital, for the sake of com- parison: number of years not recorded : Intemperance - - - - 239 111 health ..... 279 Domestic afflictions .... 179 Religious - - - . - 148 Property - - - - - 98 Disappointed affections - - - 64 Disappointed ambition - - - - 33 Epilepsy - - - . - 45 Puerperal - - . - .47 Wounds on the heid - - - - 21 Abuse of snuff ana tobacco - - 8 Many cases not recorded for two years previous to 1844. Dr. Woodward remarks, that « the coincidence of this table with the