The homoeopathic principle applied to insanity : a proposal to treat lunacy by spiritualism / by James John Garth Wilkinson.

  • Wilkinson, James John Garth, 1812-1899.
Date:
1857
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The homoeopathic principle applied to insanity : a proposal to treat lunacy by spiritualism / by James John Garth Wilkinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    If you choose to say, it is your own spirit, I have no objections ; but only aver that it is a new and unused fac- ulty, or power of faculty. And so, without fixing whose spirit it is, I call it Spirit. Of course, this is no place for discussing this problem at length. But how many, viewing the wonders of the spirit pen and pencil, may say it is the Devil. Let it be judged by its works. If it effects a general madhouse delivery, the Lord and Heaven are the Doer. His name be praised. The Devil would like the credit of such a work, but he shall not have it. The routine and officiality which stood against such a result, would be his easy-chair. Routine will indeed have a very changed time of it, from the moment when insanity begins to be treated on the spiritual plan. For then cure will be within hail; and although the deep ocean has comparatively few duties, and the deck is lazy then, yet when we come near the coast, skill begins again, anxious nights, looking out ahead, heaving the line, and sighting the beacons. So with the coming cure. It will come in crises and exasperations preliminary to recovered sanity. Crises is a part of hope, and is the anxious side of it. And therefore routine will probably be unable to cope with such new hopes and fears, and will seek another berth. And indeed when the new machinery is at work, the amount of supervision necessary, the constant call upon skill and sympathy, and the amount of presence of mind demanded, will be incalculable compared to the present conditions. All the madness will be on the move, strug- gling, fermenting, heaving with sanity. The asylum, no longer a swamp of incurables, will be a burning fiery fur- nace in which souls and minds are being purified. One of the busiest scenes probably on earth! holding inter- course and commerce with the invisible ; as it were a col- lective apparition of the Saviour, stimulating and yet