Insanity tested by science, and shown to be a disease rarely connected with permanent organic lesion of the brain. And on that account far more susceptible of cure than has hitherto been supposed / [Charles Mountford Burnett].

  • Burnett, C. M. (Charles Mountford), 1807-1866
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity tested by science, and shown to be a disease rarely connected with permanent organic lesion of the brain. And on that account far more susceptible of cure than has hitherto been supposed / [Charles Mountford Burnett]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    77/128 (page 69)
    ing the walks, eking out their prolonged and miserable life, full of aches and sorrows, created by their excessive indulgence in the luxuries of the table. After this, he will not be surprised to learn that in our remedial efforts to restore such cases to their right mind, the long and diligent attention to these hygienic points are almost the only treatment left at our disposal, that can be called curative. For what will medicine do towards restoring the elements of the blood, which in these cases are exhausted by the almost complete suspension of the digestive powers : The bare statement that every adult human being must, in the course of 24 hours, take into his lungs 1,152,000 cubic inches of some sort of air, is sufficient to bring conviction to the mind that it is quite possible for the blood to be very much altered for better or for worse, and vice versa, by this channel. Long before people lose their minds, those that are predisposed to it in all classes of society, either from fashion, necessity, or bad legislation, are brought under the baneful effects of a vicious atmosphere. That this state of things points the way to insanity, is unhappily too clearly proved by what takes place in cretinism, so common in Carinthia and the Valais, and many other valleys in the Alps and Pyrenees, as well as in other parts of the world. Here, then, exists a disease in which the brain and nerves are greatly involved, and which Saussure* first showed was entirely dependent upon the depressed state of the air in the deep valleys, acted upon as it is by moisture and the reflected rays of the sun. Nothing can prove more strongly that * Travels in the Alps. The disease was first pointed out by Felix Plater (F. Plateri Praxeos Medice, cap. iii, Basil, 1656). See also Ackermann’s Institutiones Historia Medicine; Fodéré, Essai sur le Goitre et Crétinisme. Amount of air taken into the lungs in twenty-four hours. Vitiated air the cause of cretinism.