Religio-psycho medici. Part 2 / by W.A.F. Browne.

  • William A. F. Browne
Date:
[1877?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religio-psycho medici. Part 2 / by W.A.F. Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    durance with which such feelings, if they he not convictions, exercise influence, let the extatic and melancholic prove! Martyrs have courted and caressed the very fire by which they were devoured. Cranmer thrust his offending right hand into the orthodox flame, and pious fanaticism has sustained and set at nought every form of pain, deprivation, and discomfort. It may be that a divine or supernatural insensibility or tolerance imparted courage or intensified resignation. It may be that any grand or genuine faith or emotion spreads anaesthesia like an invulnerable armour over the frame; but the firmness and fortitude of the lunatic exceeds, or at least equals, all that has been told of the triumphs of exalted devotion or noble daring, and this when neither aid from without or from within could well be predicated. It would scarcely point the moral to cite the wounds, the injuries, the jubilant self-murders and mutila- tions of the Convulsionnaires, as they may be claimed by hagiology; but their sufferings, if suffer they did, cannot fairly be compared with those of the lunatic, who, in lengthened misery long drawn out, bears and cherishes a self-inflicted agony of remorse; who conceals and perishes under some frightful and loathsome malady; who meditates, and may attempt, suicide, or what in his conviction may be annihilation or eternal punishment, daily or hourly; or seeks extinction by the gradual process of inanition, the very remedy for which, compulsory feeding, must seem to a perverted and conscience- stricken imagination to resemble the horrible accompaniments of violent death. There are several instances on record where, with a similar travesty of the circumstances and significance of the grand typical act, Crucifixion has been chosen as a mode of self- destruction. One in which the attitude of a hystero-epileptic imitated the sacred symbol repeatedly, and for several hours.* A second, where a homicidal maniac, or, in more euphonious terms, a religious enthusiast, after killing her sister and wounding herself severely, as without shedding of blood there could be no remission, caused herself to be bound and nailed to the wall, in the attitude of the crucified, by surviving relatives, and, these sanguinary measures having failed to produce death, was killed by having the heart transfixed by a nail.f A third, where a cobbler, a pietistic melancholic, having been foiled in an attempt to crucify himself in a public street in Venice, constructed a cross, and binding himself so far as he could to its surface, ingeniously suspended himself in a net * Bcchcrchcs sur F Epileptic et VHystiric, pnr Bourneville. 1876, p. 142. ,„..t I)r- Pagan> quoted in Spiritualistic Madness, by Dr. L. S. Forbes Winslow.