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
He did not have very good health on the farm, and so he was advised to
try the effect of life at sea. A position as assistant steward was
obtained for him on a coastwise vessel. In this position he gained
rapidly in weight and seemed to have excellent health. All tendencies
to moroseness of disposition disappeared. After a time he was promoted
to a stewardship and later became the purser of a rather important
vessel. He has given excellent satisfaction and feels in every way
that he is in a much more balanced condition than ever before.
He still insists that he remembers nothing of how the two almost fatal
incidents in his life came about. All his family are convinced that it
was not a responsible state of mind that led him to attempt either of
the crimes. It seems not improbable that this is one of those
fortunately rare cases in which an attack of psychic epilepsy
sometimes obliterates for a moment the individuality of a patient. At
times these attacks last much longer, and the change to a secondary
personality may represent a rather long interval. A number of cases of
what are called ambulatory epilepsy have been brought to the attention
of the general public of late years because of certain interesting
features of the cases that have been exploited in the daily press.
Patients suffering from this form of nervous disease may wander from
their homes, and while performing automatically a number of actions,
such as buying tickets, travelling on cars and railroad trains, or
even arranging the details of their journey for a long distance, may
yet be in a state of mind that is not their ordinary consciousness.
Men may leave home under the circumstances and find themselves after
months in a strange town where they have established themselves in
some quite different occupation from that to which they were formerly
accustomed, or for which their early training fitted them. There seems
to be an absolute division between the {262} states of consciousness
that rule the individual during the intervals of ordinary and
extraordinary personality. There are, of course, many reasons for
thinking that at times such a change of personality might be feigned;
but many of the cases have been followed with too much care to allow
this thought to serve as an explanation for all of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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