Essay on the Classification of the InsaneAllen, M. (Physician)
Science
Essay on the Classification of the Insane
Allen, M. (Physician)
Mental illness
She has now been upwards of three years in the world, engaged in useful
and active duties, and though she may be liable to extremes, and be too
susceptible of the action of exciting causes, yet I have every reason to
believe, that experience has taught her the necessity of counteracting
and restraining their baneful influence. I am told by her friends, that
now collision with the world having smoothed down the peculiarities which
her long seclusion had contracted, her character appears much improved.
I might detail many such cases, and prove that cures have apparently been
effected by this intellectual and delicate attention, and more especially
in some slight and incipient cases. But I may also state, that many
cases of the most serious kind have been so treated, and have recovered.
I particularly have in view, two cases of the most determined suicidal
melancholy, that were so delicately treated and watched, that they were
not themselves aware for months, they were even in a place of
confinement, or they had an eye of anxiety constantly watching over them.
To this watchfulness and constant exertion to amuse and divert them, I
principally attribute the gradual diminution of their melancholy, and
ultimately their recovery. These cases, No. 412, and 373, have each
returned three or four times of their own accord, and have each time,
under this system, gradually recovered.
Is it not then of importance that we should do every thing possible to
lessen the present feelings of horror associated with such places? then
might we expect to find them come of their own accord, have confidence in
their medical friend, concur and co-operate in the plan marked out for
their cure, and the consequence would be, that we should find them
generally recover.
_No._ 373 _came of his own choice_,
And was a most distressing case of hypochondria, which had from various
causes been increasing upon him for about twenty years; and when he so
came, he was in the most depressed and melancholy state possible. His
whole mucous membrane had long suffered from chronic inflammation, and
was in a state of the greatest irritability. He was, in less than nine
months, altogether another being; his habits were altered, and his health
greatly re-established; and this person was one whose cure was partly to
be attributed to my mode of amusing him. I do not mean to enter into his
particular history, or his medical treatment, for it would itself make a
volume; but I introduce a brief notice of his cure, for the sake of
illustrating the foregoing principles of Classification, and to show that
a variety of methods are necessary to accomplish the object we ought ever
to have in view, and that it would never answer to apply indiscriminately
the same medical or moral treatment to any two cases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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