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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    ing about six months before the attack. As the result of a knock on the head a man is said to have forgotten his Greek but nothing else. Abercromby relates that a surgeon whose head was injured by a fall from his horse, could give instruc- tions for treating the wound, but completely forgot the existence of his wife and family for three days. Sharpey tells of a young woman who, after an irresistible tendency to sleep, forgot everything she knew, recognising nobody, not even her parents, and had to begin to learn reading and writing like a child. Amid the wreck of her acquisitions only some knowledge of music remained, but she was not conscious of how or when she had studied music. Double personality is not unknown. There is a recorded case of an hysterical woman who, in her normal state, was 'grave, reserved, and laborious,' but who, after recovering from a fit of unconsciousness, was ' gay, turbulent, imaginative, and coquettish,' this continuing until she was seized with torpor, when she became as before. Forbes Winslow tells of a young married woman who, after a period of debility, lost all sense of the time that had elapsed since the day of her marriage. She remembered with remarkable vividness every previous event of her life ; but when her husband approached her she repudiated all knowledge of or relation to him. She acted in the same way with regard to her child. Her parents and friends by their authority succeeded in persuading her that she was in reality married, and had given birth to a son, but she beheld her husband and child without being able to imagine how she had come by them. Men have been known to forget their own names, and to beg their friends to tell them from time to time who they were. As the result of shock to their nervous system, people in danger of death by drowning or otherwise find memories revived which previously would have seemed to be entirely obliterated from their minds. The long-forgotten languages and prayers of youth return to them, together with pictures of the scenes of their childhood. Luys lays claim to have solved the uses both of the optic thalamus and the corpus striatum. From an anatomical ex- amination of the radiating nerves in connection with these organs, he holds that the optic thalamus collects the sensory