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HAS INSANITY INCREASED?

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fluence of some higher impulse. Genius-decided mental ability in a particular direction-is most rarely in contradiction with itself and overtaken by disease: if it be, however, the case attracts so much attention that it scarcely fails to wax and multiply in the narration that is made of the event.-One man of genius becomes insane, therefore genius is prone to insanity; such is the reasoning.

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Every man who gets beyond his contemporaries in ingenuity, in ability, in character, is very commonly spoken of as eccentric-perhaps as mad. historical cases, too, it is always indispensable to inquire into particulars: when it is narrated of the author of the Jerusalem Delivered that he was mentally insane, it still remains to be proven that he was so in reality; and then, if he were, to ask what brought him to so sad a pass?

The most richly endowed nature may unquestionably become mentally diseased as well as the most poverty stricken in point of intellect; but in the one it will be regarded as an accident and unusual, in the other as likely and not uncommon.

To regard the culture of the mental powers at large, or of one or more among them, as a ground of their derangement or destruction, is certainly a somewhat hasty procedure. It is not culture, but half culture, that has a pernicious influence upon the mind*. The more numerous and the better the

* See Riecke's Medical Topography of Wirtemberg, Tubing. 1833; Fuch's Medical Statistics of Insanity, in Friedreich's Neue Magazin für Seelenkunde, Würzb. 1833.

educational institutions of a country are, the less numerous are the insane*. The more the whole of the mental faculties are brought into play, the more certainly will imperfections be set aside. Inaction occasions derangement still more frequently than activity+.

How rarely do we see men of letters, who labour in peace and due measure, become the subjects of insanity! It is not, in truth, even intense application of the higher faculties in the noblest ends of life that overthrows the mind, but passion and the changing accidents of fortune, against which, in sooth, elevation of soul supplies the truest remedy. When we see it asserted, therefore, by a late respectable authority§, that suicide has become more common with the progress of civilization, as it is called, it is a pseudo-civilization that is to blame, not real civilization, which leads us, at an early period of our intercourse with her, to know that the end of life is not mere sensual enjoyment, and that each sore proof to which we are put must be manfully borne.

As an insanity among animals has even been made subject of discussion of late years, and the activity of observers has laid the foundation of a comparative

*Fuchs, op. cit. p. 88.

According to Louis Raybaud, in Quetelet, op. cit.
Fuchs, 1. c. p. 114.

§ Bernoulli on Population, Ulm, 1811. Diez (on Suicide, Tubing. 1838), warns us, however, that the assertion of M. Ch. Dupin, "that with the increasing civilization of communities the number of murders or assassinations decreased as certainly and remarkably as that of suicides augmented," is not to be taken, for a truth, without considerable limitation.

HAS INSANITY INCREASED?

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psychiatria*. many might be disposed to search for the cause of the apparent increase of such accidents in the increase of civilization. But we do not see that our domestic animals are now worse fed, or lodged, or accommodated, than formerly; on the contrary, their management is better understood than ever it was: and then is it not quite certain that the more general application of purely mechanical forces has long tended, and still tends, continually to lessen the demands made upon animals for extraordinary efforts? If there be increase of psychical disease among animals, therefore, the civilization of man can have nothing to do with it.

Whether the relative number of insane persons is actually greater now than it was in former times cannot be precisely ascertained. The very latest lists we have from our establishments for lunatics are not altogether unimpeachable. Even as little as the court-fools of the olden time can be referred to the category of insane persons, so little do all who are now confined as lunatics truly belong to it. One at least of the persons now shut up in Bethlem Hospital, as a lunatic, is not insane.

It is not very long since those who were so unfortunate as to be visited with insanity were commonly enough concealed in the private parts of dwelling-houses, on various grounds: now, to conceal the family misfor

*Pierquin, De la Folie des Animaux, de ses rapports avec celle de l'homme et les législations actuelles. Paris, 1809, 2 tom. 8vo.

tune the disgrace as it was held-and again to escape the public interference with relatives, &c. In the present day, insane persons are all but invariably placed in establishments especially destined for their reception, and held under the supervision of the state. These once served merely as places of confinement; every effort has of late years been made to render them places of cure. Formerly, the insane used to be visited, or means taken for their recovery, only when they became alarmingly ill, and towards the end of their disease; now they are placed under treatment from the first dawn of their distemper*. This is one grand cause for the necessity of the larger space and the new establishments which we see devoted, of late years, to the accommodation of the insane; and then, the lunatic, considered as an object of special medical care, is found to require more room than another patient, if he would have the best chance given him for recovery: when the object was merely to seclude the madman, very little space sufficed; when humanity insists that the object is to restore him to reason, he must have better entertainment.

Even as little, therefore, as civilization in general can be regarded as the nurse of mental disease, in the same proportion, on the other side, does she step forward as the requirer of the purest humanity in its treatment. Sympathy with man in his afflictions

* More than two-thirds of all the recoveries take place in the course of the first year.

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the devotion which, in utter unselfishness, makes sacrifice of itself, never put forth fairer blossoms than do many among our present establishments for the treatment of insanity.

The more we advance in our knowledge of this kind of disease, the greater the number of forms which it assumes do we distinguish. But we do not infer from this that the same diversity did not obtain in former times. On the contrary, some shapes of mental aberration which we find indicated by our predecessors seem to have disappeared, others to be becoming rarer and rarer in their occurrence. One species of madness, lykanthropy, has ceased entirely, although in the third and fourth centuries, maniacs who roved about at nights in solitary places, and howled in churchyards like wolves, were extant in many countries, and in no inconsiderable numbers*.

Congenital idiocy, particularly cretinism, hitherto held hopeless and irremediable, has nevertheless, in these days, been assailed, and the visitation sought to be made more tolerable by a skilful combination of medical art with the means suggested by enlightened humanity.

The lower animals are often characterised as dumb; and there is a certain sympathy with their condition, and pity that they are without any means of intercourse, implied in the expression. But it is only in very recent times that society has shown the least

* Sprengel, History of Medicine, 3d edit. 2d vol. p. 243.

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