A treatise on the nature, symptoms, causes, and treatment of insanity : with practical observations on lunatic asylums and a description of the Pauper Lunatic Asylum for the county of Middlesex, at Hanwell.

  • Ellis, William Charles, Sir, 1780-1839.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the nature, symptoms, causes, and treatment of insanity : with practical observations on lunatic asylums and a description of the Pauper Lunatic Asylum for the county of Middlesex, at Hanwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    confinement; and when at liberty, she could not resist the pleasure of breaking any thing she met with. In one instance she saw some tea-cups on a table, and for some time walked backwards and for- wards, and checked the inclination; but eventually the temptation proved too strong, and she swept them at once on the floor. She afterwards regretted the circumstance ; but the impulse was too powerful to be resisted. Numbers of similar cases, and of instances of change in the conversation and demea- nour of virtuous females, might, if necessary, be enumerated ; but it will be more to the purpose to try to explain the causes on rational principles. In a state of sanity the various feelings and propen- sities are kept under control, partly by their mutual inflence upon each other, partly from moral causes, and partly from the restraints imposed by society. And where careful education and religious feeling have rendered their due regulation habitual, strong propensities may exist unknown and unsuspected, except by the individual. Now insanity does not create any new class of feelings or propensities. It is, I am aware, a very common opinion, that persons, in consequence of their becoming insane, acquire a new set of faculties, and especially that they become endowed with a great share of cunning. This is quite an error. There is no doubt but that this faculty may be often found very powerfully and actively developed amongst them ; but where this is the case, it must have existed in the character