The homoeopathic principle applied to insanity : a proposal to treat lunacy by spiritualism / by James John Garth Wilkinson ... ; reprinted from the London edition.

  • Wilkinson, James John Garth, 1812-1899.
Date:
1857
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The homoeopathic principle applied to insanity : a proposal to treat lunacy by spiritualism / by James John Garth Wilkinson ... ; reprinted from the London edition. 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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    cyarrms, Iron, etc., etc., etc. These drugs undoubtedly combat bodily symptoms, and parry the fatality of boculy disease. They tend, when skilfully chosen, to keep lunatics in good health. And where the mental disease is transient, they obliterate its functional effects in the bodily organs; while time, which is the long slumber of every mind, enables the deranged faculties to recover their composure. But no drug can touch the mind, if it be per se aberrant. And no drug can hasten the day of health and sanity, when the mind is broken. In a word, although medicinal substances are beautifully homoeopathic to disordered cerebral and bodily conditions, no medicinal substance is homoeopathic to deranged mental states depending upon purely mental or affectional causes, whose cessation, more- over, is not worked by lapse of time. Drug can be curative to body ; mind can be curative to mind; and spirit can be curative to spirit. The higher, also, or spirit, can restore the lower; but not by homoeo- pathic, but by redemptive energy. Now, in looking over the known world to find the cure of some very common forms of insanity, our first homoeo- pathic question is, What agent is there that in experience does sometimes clearly produce insanity ? It is not neces- sary that it should always produce it, because agents operate differently on natural classes of individuals ; thus, opium is a narcotic, though it does not send some people to sleep; and wine an exhilarant, though it makes some melancholy, and others furious. In looking for our insanity-producing agent, my attention was directed by great cries proceeding from varied quarters, in the direction of Spiritualism, which some at one time feared would turn the brains of all the world; and I said to myself, alone in the human wood, That is one of the Lord's plants for curing insanity. There is a concurrence of divers wit- nesses, a concurrence beyond collusion, to the fact that it can, and does, produce insanity; the homoeopathic law,