Morbid appetites of the insane / by W.A.F. Browne.

  • William A. F. Browne
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Morbid appetites of the insane / 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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    retains his consciousness in other respects, but imagines himself | to be changed into some animal, and acts, up to a certain point,, in conformity with that persuasion. Those who imagined! themselves changed into wolves howled like wolves, and, there- is reason to believe, accused themselves falsely of bloodshed. I Others imitated the cries of dogs ; it is said that others thought I themselves nightingales, lions, cats, or cocks, and these crowed | like a cock. We attended a lady who conceived herself trans- muted into a cow, but did not frequent the “ pastures sweet.” I In many classes of the insane the eating garbage, excrement, I even grass, is a symptom both of general debasement and of I a perverted craving for unsuitable and innutritious diet. If I Nebuchadnezzar’s punishment, then, be regarded as alienation, .| involving the greatest conceivable amount of degradation, the “ eating grass as oxen,” the expulsion from the society of liis fellow-men, and the exposure to the elements may be viewed | as most graphic features of his disease, and of the cruel treat- ment to which, in those and in much more recent days, such i an affection subjected the sufferer. There is a traditionary belief that a melancholic, suspecting I his meals to be poisoned or adulterated, was sustained for along: period upon the contents of cocoa-nuts. We have had several I patients who took no support but that of bread; one of whom I exercised this self-denial in order that his fellow-sufferers might I benefit by his abstinence, and greatly impaired his strength by I such abstinence, as well as by secluding himself in a closet traversed by hot-water pipes, so that a larger am oimt of warmth,.! according to his estimate, might reach and cheer his companions. I This was a delusion, or an erroneous judgment; but if we I recollect that millions of our fellow-creatures in India are, at this moment, granivorous, guided partly by superstition and I partly by the products of the country and climate; that large,.I but perhaps not so large, numbers in other parts of the world I are frugivorous; that we ourselves, in a certain stage of our | life-progress, have depended almost entirely upon cerials; that Creed, for ages, limited ascetics to farinaceous food; that a | misinterpretation of physiology has converted thousands into enthusiastic but rigid vegetarians; we cannot justifiably re- gard phytophagism as more than a deviation from modern I customs, as a morbid tendency, as the exaltation of a desire for | a particular kind of food, which has been over-laid or obscured by usage, luxury, or special circumstances, but which reappears | when these superinduced or superincumbent veils or disguises have been torn off by disease, and the rudimentary strata of our instincts and propensities laid bare. The Gymnosophists were | both nudifiers and vegetarians.