The insanity of genius and the general inequality of human faculty, physiologically considered / by J.F. Nisbet.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The insanity of genius and the general inequality of human faculty, physiologically considered / by J.F. Nisbet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    celebrity, he astonislied tlie frequenters of Button's coffee- house by the singularity of his actions, and was known for a time as the ' mad parson.' He was always haunted by the dread of going out of his mind. On one occasion, observing by the wayside an elm that had been blasted by lightning, he said to a friend, ' I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.' As old age approached, his condition worsened. He developed violent mania, and had to be placed under a keeper. Some time before his death, however, he lapsed into a state of imbecility, in which he is said to have kept silence for months together. A post-mortem examination revealed extensive serous effusion upon the brain and also softening of the cerebral substance. Ninety years after Swift's death, that is to say in 1835, his bones were exhumed in the course of some alterations made in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and the skull was then found to present abnormal characteristics. ' The con- dition of the cerebral surface of the whole of the frontal region,' said a medical man who examined the skull, ' is of a character indicating the presence during life of diseased action in the subjacent membranes of the brain. The skull in this region is thickened, flattened, and unusually smooth and hard in some places, whilst it is thinned and roughened in others. The marks of the vessels on the bone exhibit, moreover, a very unusual appearance; they look more like the imprints of vessels which had been generated de novo in connection with some diseased action, than as the original arborescent trunks. The impressions of the middle arteries of the dura mater (an enveloping membrane of the brain) are unusually large and deep, and the branches of those vessels, which pass in the direction forwards, are short and thick, and terminate abruptly by dividing into an unusual number of minute twigs, whilst those of the sai^^e trunks that take their course backwards are long and regular, and of graduated size from the beginning to the end of their course. . . . The internal parts corresponding to the frontal protuberances were unequal in concavity,' * From the peculiar formation of the • Wilde : Closing Years of Dean Swiff s L>fe.