Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley.

  • Henry Maudsley
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Responsibility in mental disease / by Henry Maudsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    46/356 page 10
    person took a religious turn, and his life was a fanaticaj practice of some extraordinary penance—if, like St. Macarius, he slept for months together in a marsh, exposing his naked body to the stings of venomous flies,— or, like St. Simeon Stylites, he spent the greater part of his life on a pillar sixty feet high,—or, like St. Anthony, the patriarch of monachism, he had never, in extreme old age, been guilty of washing his feet,—he was thought to have reached the ideal of human excellence, and was canonized as a saint; more often his state was deemed to be a possession by the devil or other evil spirit, or the degrading effect of a soul enslaved by sin; from some cause or other he was a just victim of divine displeasure, and had been cast down in consequence from his high human estate. It was the natural result of such views of madness that men should treat him whom they believed to have a devil in him as they would have treated the devil could they have had the good fortune to lay hold of him. When he was not put to death as a heretic or a criminal, he was confined in a dungeon, where he lay chained on straw; his food was thrown in, and the straw raked out through the bars; sight-seers went to see him, as they went to see the wild beasts, for amusement; he was cowed by the whip, or other instrument of punishment, and was more neglected and worse treated than if he had been a wild beast. Many insane persons, too, were acknowledging such, a preparation and disposition of the body through distemper of humours, which giveth great advantage to the devil to work upon • which distemper being cured by physical drugs and potions, the devil is driven away, and hath no more power over the same bodies.
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