Curiosities of Medical ExperienceMillingen, J. G. (John Gideon)
Philosophy
Curiosities of Medical Experience
Millingen, J. G. (John Gideon)
Medicine
It has been generally remarked that cases of daemonomania are more common
amongst women than in men. Their greater susceptibility to nervous
affections, their warmth of imagination and strong passions, which habit
and education compel them to restrain, produce a state of concentration
that must cause increased excitement, and render them more liable to those
terrific impressions that constitute the disease. These terrors, from
false notions of the Deity, make them anticipate in this world the
sufferings denounced in the next. One woman has been known to become
daemonomaniac after an intense perusal of the Apocalypse, and another by
the constant reading of the works of Thomas a Kempis. Women, moreover, at
certain critical periods are subject to great mental depression, which
they have not the power to relieve by exciting pursuits, like men.
Melancholy succeeds a dull sameness. Religion, viewed in a false light,
becomes her refuge; more especially at an advanced period of life, when
loss of youth and beauty is bitterly felt, as galled vanity compares the
present with the past. Hysteric symptoms are now developed: the passions,
which are too frequently increased even to intensity, rather than cooled,
by years, prompt her to rebellious thoughts that religion and virtuous
feelings strive to restrain; and these powerful agents, acting upon a
predisposition morbidly impressionable from ignorance or the errors of
education, accelerate the invasion of this cruel malady. Jacobi informs
us, that this is still the character which, in some catholic countries,
insanity connected with superstition frequently assumes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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