creased momentum, or from the afflux of blood by reaction after a partial collapse of the emptied vessels.

Dr. Parry says, he has seen all the symptoms of incipient-fever removed in a few seconds by the mere operation of fear.* A sudden and strong emotion will check the course of incipient insanity, as it will of other diseases. Fear will check, as well as cause insanity. So especially will terror. It is by producing the latter impression, and the consequent re-action, that the bath of surprise has sometimes cured mania; but the re-action has been occasionally so powerful as to destroy the equilibrium between the nervous and vascular systems, and fatuity or apoplexy has followed.

Terror is analogous, in its ultimate effects on the nervous system, to anger and courage. It will stimulate extraordinary efforts for self-preservation, far exceeding the natural strength; but when the occasion which excited the effort ceases, the consequence may subvert the mind. A British naval officer had an intrigue with the wife of a native of Monte Video. Coming from his rendezvous one night, he was attacked by assassins. He was a man of great strength and tried courage, and defended himself so strenuously, that he escaped unhurt, and took refuge in a place of safety. But while in this place, he was almost immediately afterwards seized with furious mania. In this condition he was sent to England. He recovered, and was restored to the service; and although he afterwards served many years in a torrid clime, he experienced no recurrence of insanity. Insanity from sudden fright, however, is generally cured with difficulty; especially if it produce menstrual obstructions, which from this cause are always obstinate.

The secretions and excretions are singularly affected

Elements of Pathology and Therapeutics, 1815.

by fright. Hufeland relates a striking instance occurring in the practice of Dr. Tourtual, of Munster: a mother was so agitated by fright, that, upon afterwards suckling her infant, and its quitting the nipple, it exhibited symptoms of great inquietude, and died in its mother's arms. This, he concludes, was occasioned by the milk being so changed as to operate as a quick poison.

The tendency of excessive grief to induce determination of blood to the brain, and consequent madness, is too familiar to need illustration.

Joy, however, is more likely to occasion sudden insanity than grief,-because the former cannot, like the latter, find relief in tears; and tears are the natural solution of cerebral congestion and excitation. If intense grief do not find this natural vent for increased cerebral excitement, mental derangement, especially with propensity to suicide, is a frequent consequence.

Sudden transitions from joy to grief occasion the greatest shocks to the feelings, and produce the most durable effects on the mind.

Joyous impressions, Esquirol says, are rarely the cause of insanity; and he adds, it is singular that the excess of joy, which will destroy life, never deprives of reason; whilst trouble and chagrin provoke so often the loss of it. This author thinks Mead mistaken in supposing he has seen cases in England of persons suddenly enriched becoming insane; and believes that such an effect has arisen because they have quitted their former habits, or that their riches being the fruit of some hazardous speculation, an inquietude dangerous to their health or peace of mind has resulted; and that when insanity has immediately succeeded an unexpected access of fortune, such effect was produced by the fear of losing it, rather than by the sudden possession of it.

This is surely a gratuitous assumption. I have met with but two instances of mental derangement from

excessive joy. One was in a young man of humble expectations, who had an unexpected fortune bequeathed to him. He was of Scotch birth, and had received an excellent education; but he certainly never possessed a strong mind. Ten years have nearly passed; and though improved, he has never recovered his former intellectual faculties.

Assuredly, no impression is more calculated to subvert ordinary minds than the sudden and unexpected influx of great wealth. When thus acquired, many become deranged from being elevated to a sphere for which they were never intended; and previous education furnishing no other resources, ennui and tædium vitæ follow. Many such, abounding in riches, fancy they will live to want common necessaries; but I never knew one become insane from the apprehension of losing his fortune again.

Actual losses, or disappointments in pecuniary speculations, do not appear to occasion insanity so frequently as unexpected or immense wealth. In the six months succeeding the extensive failures, and consequent distress, of the winter of 1825-6, in this metropolis, there were fewer returns of insane persons in the London district than in any corresponding period for many years past.*

Particular passions exercise distinct effects on the corporeal functions: desire produces an increase of the seminal secretion; the smell, or even the expectation of savoury food, excites the salivary glands; maternal feeling, the secretion of milk; and dislike, both in the human and brute creation, prevents the flow of it; fear incites the intestines, kidneys, and skin, by diarrhoea, incontinence of urine, and sweat; grief, the stomach and lachrymal ducts; anger, the liver; terror, the nerves, inducing palsy; extreme hope, the respiration.

This curious fact I state upon the authority of Dr. J. Bright, Secretary to the Commissioners for licensing Houses for the Reception of Lunatics.

The spontaneous separation of warts, by what is termed charming them, is an instance of the influence of the mind on the body.

The rapid change of the natural colour of the hair to white, is another instance.

Change of temperature of the body is produced by the passions: lust increases heat, aversion or fear occasions cold.

The mental affection known as nostalgia, or an intense desire to return to one's native country, is a disease purely arising from a moral source; but it produces a -positive organic lesion,- for Avenbruger says, that on dissecting the bodies of those who have died of it, the lungs are always found adhering firmly to the pleura, &c.

Corvisart describes a mental affection which he pronounces to be unnoticed, as being little known, yet actually often existing; and the effects of which are analogous to those of nostalgia. He denominates it "infant jealousy." This pathologist minutely describes the attendant symptoms in a girl of about three years old, all of which he conceives to be the effects of a profound moral affection. She recovered in consequence of his discovering the real nature of the case; but had she died, he believed he should have found some organic lesion of the lungs or the heart. Making due allowance for Corvisart's pathological bias, I know not why the mind even of a child may not be strongly affected by a moral impression, and her bodily health sympathise with it.

The heart being responsive to all impressions on the sensorium, its functions are proportionably excited. If the impression be often repeated, the organ itself takes on a morbid action, and becomes at length disorganised. The physical effect produced on the circulation by a

* Comment. sur Avenbruger.

C

powerful moral impression, cannot be better described than in the language of a modern novelist :

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'Every word had been torture; I felt the blood rush in volumes to my head, and my temples throb almost to bursting; and then, by a sudden revulsion, it was again thrown back upon my heart, and lay a load upon my life-springs."

Hence it appears, that all the passions, and every emotion which powerfully acts on the sensorium, rank among the moral causes, and become accessary to the physical causes of insanity.

But many of the causes inducing intellectual derangement, and which are called moral, have their origin not in individual passions or feelings, but in the state of society at large; and the more artificial, i. e. civilised, society is, the more do these causes multiply and extensively operate. The vices of civilisation, of course, most conduce to their increase; but even the moral virtues, religion, politics, nay philosophy itself, and all the best feelings of our nature, if too enthusiastically incited, class among the causes producing intellectual disorders. The circumstances influencing their occurrence are to be sought in all the various relations of life, in constitutional propensities, and, above all, perhaps, in education.

The upper classes, who are supposed to be most subject to maladies of the nervous system, have also been deemed almost exclusively liable to insanity. This, however, is a vulgar error, which an inspection of any of the pauper asylums for the insane instantly refutes. Habitual luxury, and the vices of refinement, are peculiar to the rich; and, consequently, a greater degree of susceptibility and irritability is superinduced. The lower orders, who ought more generally to be exempt from the concomitant of wealth and indolence, that is, disease, unhappily provoke it by their excesses; and