Observations on Madness and Melancholy: Including Practical Remarks on those Diseases together with Cases and an Account of the Morbid Appearances on DissectionHaslam, John
Science
Observations on Madness and Melancholy: Including Practical Remarks on those Diseases together with Cases and an Account of the Morbid Appearances on Dissection
Haslam, John
Depression, Mental; Melancholy; Psychiatry -- Early works to 1900; Psychology, Pathological
_10th._--M. T. Her mother was of sound mind. Her father was in a
melancholic state for two years, before she was born, but this was
afterwards dissipated by active employment. M. T. has two brothers,
younger than herself, who have been attacked with insanity, neither of
whom have recovered. She has two sisters, some years older than herself,
these have never been deranged. M. T. has had nine children. The three
first have been melancholic. The youngest, at the age of five years, used
to imagine she saw persons in the room covered with blood, and other
horrible objects, she afterwards became epileptic and died. The youngest
of her three first children has been married and had three children, one
of whom is afflicted with chorea Sancti Viti, and another is nearly an
ideot.
Of the causes termed moral, the greatest number may, perhaps, be traced to
the errors of education, which often plant in the youthful mind those
seeds of madness which the slightest circumstances readily awaken into
growth.
It should be as much the object of the teachers of youth, to subjugate the
passions, as to discipline the intellect. The tender mind should be
prepared to expect the natural and certain effects of causes: its
propensity to indulge an avaricious thirst for that which is unattainable,
should be quenched: nor should it be suffered to acquire a fixed and
invincible attachment to that which is fleeting and perishable.
Of the more immediate, or, as it is generally termed, the proximate cause
of this disease, I profess to know nothing. Whenever the functions of the
brain shall be fully understood, and the use of its different parts
ascertained, we may then be enabled to judge, how far disease, attacking
any of these parts, may increase, diminish, or otherwise alter its
functions. But this is a degree of knowledge, which we are not likely soon
to attain. It seems, however, not improbable, that the only source, from
whence the most copious and certain information can be drawn, is a strict
attention to the particular appearances which morbid states of this organ
may present.
From the preceding dissections of insane persons, it may be inferred, that
madness has always been connected with disease of the brain and of its
membranes. Having no particular theory to build up, they have been related
purely for the advancement of science and of truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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