An essay on headachs [sic] and on their cure / [Walter Vaughan].

  • Vaughan, Walter
Date:
1825
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on headachs [sic] and on their cure / [Walter Vaughan]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    confined to particular facts and. circumstances, connected with their own preservation: but man, even in what is called his mental derangement, abstracts, generalises, and exercises general reasoning, to the use of which, language, as an instrument of thought, is indispensably requisite. After a most impartial and patient considera- tion of the opinions, arguments, and authorities of Physicians of the greatest celebrity, concern- ing madness, insanity, or whatever it should be called, and after all that I have seen of it, Iam inclined to agree with the learned Dr. Mead, that both species, Melancholia and Mania, consist in the strength of imagination; for as this same Physician afterwards remarks, ‘there is nothing ‘“ how incredibly silly soever, and contrary to “good sense, but may affect a depraved ima- ‘“‘ oination.” Now imagination is not a simple faculty : for it consists in so combining the parts of different objects as to form new wholes, which have no real existence. And if a person modify and combine the parts of different objects in so extraordinary a manner, that the new whole of his own creation gives no pleasure to any one, except to himself, and if he believe in the actual existence of that whole, then we say, that he has a depraved imagination, or that he is insane.* * There is much truth, but much vague and unsupported assumption too, in what Richerand asserts: Le Traitement moral est de beaucoup preferable: il faut eloigner I’ aliéné des Causes de son Délire, entrer dans l’ Ordre de ses Idées, et l’ amener peu a peu a en sentir la Fausseté. Les Idees fixes sout la Cause la plus frequente de la Manie. Se com- plaire et s’ arreter trop long Temps a une méme Idée est le