Essays In Pastoral MedicineWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Religion
Essays In Pastoral Medicine
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
First aid in illness and injury; Medicine
Insanity is an occasional sequence, with hallucinations, especially of
hearing. Such a patient hears roaring noises and voices; his secret
thoughts are shouted out, he thinks, to crowds; loud screams, shrieks
of murder, and similar noises appall him. Again, he sees swarms of
flies, ants, roaches, which cover him and crawl into his mouth,
nostrils, {117} and ears. He feels bugs crawling under his skin, and
he has a multitude of similar interesting experiences.
Such patients grow homicidal. Like alcoholics, they are jealous and
suspicious of their wives, but, unlike the alcoholic, the cocaine user
is commonly reticent; he is not willing to talk of his troubles.
The prognosis is always bad, even in the best cases. This drug can be
withdrawn from a patient more rapidly than is possible in chronic
poisoning from morphine, but a relapse is to be expected.
In dipsomania, morphinomania, and other drug habits, and in the cases
of vicious and degenerate children, many encouragingly good results
have been reported from the use of hypnotism. Forel, Voisin, Ladame,
Tatzel, Hirt, Nielson, de Jong, Liebeault, Bernheim, van Eeden, van
Renterghem, Hamilton Osgood, Wetterstrand, Schrenck-Notzing,
Kraft-Ebbing, Francis Cruise, Lloyd Tuckey, Kingsbury, Woods, and
others have undoubtedly cured dipsomania by hypnosis.
Wetterstrand alone cured 37 of 51 cases of morphinism by hypnosis. One
of these patients had been using morphine for fourteen years and
morphine with cocaine for an additional four years. All his cases
except one were treated at home--they were not obliged to go to a
hospital or sanitarium.
As to vicious children: Liebeault in 1887 recorded 77 cases, 45 of
whom were boys and 32 girls. By hypnosis 56 of these were cured, 9
improved, 12 were not affected.
As to the so-called dangers of hypnotism in the hands of skilled
physicians, there are none. Forel said: "Liebeault, Bernheim,
Wetterstrand, van Eeden, de Jong, I myself, and the other followers of
the Nancy school, declare absolutely that, although we have seen many
thousands of hypnotised persons, we have never observed a single case
of mental or physical harm caused by hypnosis." Travelling mountebanks
that hypnotise in public can do harm, and they should be prevented
from so doing. On the continent of Europe only physicians are
permitted to use hypnosis.
For a bibliography of hypnosis as a curative agent, see _Allbutt's
System of Medicine_, vol. viii. p. 428 (The Macmillan Co.).
{118}
In Génicot's _Theologiae Moralis Institutiones_, vol. i. p. 162
(Louvain, 1902), is the following passage: "Videtur licitum ebrietatem
inducere ad morbum depellendum, si quando practicum est, ex gr. ad
typhum depellendum, vel ad coercendam vim veneni quod e serpentis
morsu haustum sit (Sabetti. N. 149). Similiter, per se licebit sensus
sopire ope ebrietatis ad magnos dolores levandos: nullum enim
discrimen morale videtur inter hoc medium et alia, ex gr.
chloroformium, quae adhiberi solent."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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