His frequent attacks of indigestion made him at times a perfect picture of misery and wretchedness. It clothed everything with a gloomy aspect, made him quarrel with his friends and domestics, and he has been known to say that he sighed for death as a reprieve from mental and bodily agony. Sir Samuel Garth was frequently consulted when he had these attacks; and it was only by exacting a strict attention to diet and exhibiting medicine that he was enabled to restore the mind of the poet to a healthy tone. This physical ailment, as it often does when long continued, ultimately affected the cerebral functions. At times he had symptoms of pressure on the brain, or at least of an unequal and imperfect distribution of blood to that organ. Spence says, he frequently complained of seeing everything in the room as through a curtain, and on other occasions, of seeing false colours on certain objects. At another period, on a sick-bed, he asked Dodsley what arm it was that had the appearance of coming out from the wall. When the disposition to suicide is present, the physician should carefully ascertain whether the patient is not labouring under cerebral congestion, or a determination of blood to the head. The loss of a small quantity of blood has frequently been known to remove the propensity to self-destruction. A case is referred to by Schlegel of a woman who was liable to periodical fits of suicidal mania whenever she allowed a redundancy of blood to accumulate in the system. On two occasions she attempted suicide. On the first indications of a return of her delirium, she was generally bled, and relief was instantaneously afforded. A gentleman who had received, during the peninsular campaign, a sabre cut in the head, felt for some years, whenever he was exposed to great mental excitement, or allowed himself to over-indulge in the use of spirits, a kind of suicidal delirium. Twice he was detected in the act of attempting to commit suicide, and was fortunately prevented from doing so. The local abstraction of blood from the neighbourhood of the head was the only remedy which appeared to subdue the disposition. The cases which are related in another chapter of individuals who were insane at the moment when the act of self-destruction was attempted, but who recovered the use of their reasoning after having inflicted a wound attended with loss of blood, fully testify the importance of general and local depletion in certain cases of cerebral disease attended by this unfortunate propensity. A blow on the head has been known to develope this feeling. The affection of the sentient organ may remain latent for many years, and then suddenly manifest itself. A man had received, when young, a kick from a horse, which produced at the time no very urgent symptoms. Six years after the accident, he, without giving any indications of previous derangement of mind, cut his throat. Upon examining the brain, it was found extensively diseased.