The mental aspects of ordinary disease / by J. Milner Fothergill.

  • Fothergill, J. Milner (John Milner), 1841-1888.
Date:
[1874]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The mental aspects of ordinary disease / by J. Milner Fothergill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    insight are vouchsafed to them. The wonderful eloquence of Robert Hall was doubtless greatly owing to the stimulating influence of a terrible spinal malady. Dr. Conolly mentions a gentleman whose mental faculties never reached their full power except under the irritation of a blister. Abnormal and unsound conditions of the bodily organs sometimes give us glimpses of mental powers and possibilities far exceeding anything of which ordinary health is capable. The pheno¬ mena of some nervous disorders are positive revelations, and most startling ones, of what the human intellect disengaged from matter, or under favourable material conditions, might achieve and learn.” Greg is led away into poetical metaphor when he talks of intellect disengaged from matter, which is, however, per¬ missible and allowable in one who is lyot a professed physio¬ logist. We are all familiar with the effects of alcohol upon the intellectual powers, especially when combined with others, as in wine. Two cases illustrating the effect of paroxysms of mania upon the intellectual powers are given by Aber¬ crombie.* A gentleman mentioned by Dr. Willis, who was liable to periodical attacks of insanity, said that he expected the paroxysms with impatience, because he enjoyed during them a high degree of pleasure. “ Everything appeared easy to me. No obstacles presented themselves, either in theory or practice. My memory, all of a sudden, acquired a sin¬ gular degree of perfection. Long passages of Latin authors occurred to my mind. In general I have great difficulty in finding rhythmical terminations, but then I could write verses with as great facility as prose.” “I have often,” says Pinel, “ stopped at the chamber-door of a literary gentleman, who, during his paroxysms, appears to soar above the medio¬ crity of intellect that was familiar to him, solely to admire his newly-acquired powers of eloquence. He declaimed upon the subject of the Revolution with all the force, the dignity, and the purity of language that this very, interesting subject would admit of. At other times he was a man of very ordinary abilities.” Had these manifestations of intellectual power stood alone, these maniacal paroxysms would have formed intervals of inspiration, of prophetic ecstasy. There are two distinct physical conditions under which the intellect seems to possess a power and a brilliancy much ex¬ ceeding the ordinary and normal standard. These two con¬ ditions are (l)the initial or pre-tubercular stage of pulmonary * Intellectual Powers. Section IV. Insanity.