The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English: or, Medicine Simplified, 54th ed., One Million, Six Hundred; and Fifty Thousand
John Stuart Mill · en
noble, moral faculties--Faith, Love, and Devotion--and, whenever
temptation inordinately allures, the course of life is likely to be
characterized by dishonorable, deceptive, and treacherous conduct.
The pangs of hunger cause soldiers to act more like ravenous beasts,
than rational beings. It is animal instinct which impels the soldier to
seek first for the gratification of his appetite. Some persons,
instigated by carnivorous desires, yearn for raw meat, and will not be
satisfied unless their food is flavored with the flesh of animals. Their
bodies increase and thrive, even to repletion. Contrast these
individuals with pale, lean, anæmic people, who crave innutritious
articles of diet, and eat soft stones, slate, chalk, blue clay, and soft
coal. Such perversions of the appetite are manifested only when there is
either a diminution in the volume of blood, deficient alimentation,
defective assimilation, or a general depravity of the nutritive
functions. Morbid conditions generate vitiating tendencies and destroy
the natural appetite.
While alcoholic stimulants affect the medulla oblongata principally,
opium acts chiefly on the cerebrum, and excites reverie, dreamy
ideality, optical delusions, and the creative powers of the imagination;
some of these hallucinations are said to be grotesquely beautiful and
enjoyable. The effects of this agent differ from those of alcoholic
intoxication by not deadening the moral sensibilities, or arousing the
animal propensities. Opium smokers are dreamy and abstracted, not
quarrelsome or violent. Those who use ardent spirits lose their moral
delicacy, their intellect becomes dull, the reason cloudy, and the
judgment is overruled by appetite. It is conceded that the _trophic
center_ is principally in the medulla oblongata; the cerebellum and
lower cerebral ganglia, however, favorably influence the nutritive
functions, and, when these organs are large and active, a plethoric
condition is the natural consequence. Redundancy of blood in the body
indicates preponderance of the basilar organs. These faculties being
vehement in character, an excess of animal characteristics produces
those conditions which result in acute and inflammatory diseases. We may
express these conditions of the system as follows:
The _Animal Faculties_ correspond to the lower instinctive
manifestations.
/ ACQUISITIVENESS,
The elements of character are { SELFISHNESS,
\ COMBATIVENESS
They tend to / TURBULENCE,
\ CRIME.
/ ALIMENTATION,
They relate especially to the { SECRETION,
functions of \ NUTRITION,
\ REPRODUCTION.
/ VITALITY,
A large development of them { PLETHORA,
indicates \ HYPERAEMIA (congestion).