A dissertation on the effects of partial insanity upon all the mental faculties of a testator : when exposed to the artifices of a cognizant, fraudulent player on disordered animal machinery, exhibiting a review and report of the trials of the last wills and testaments of Charles Hall & Michael Deaderick, of Davidson County, Tennessee : including a philosophical analysis of mind ... / by a medical observer of Nashville.

Date:: 1829

Credit: A dissertation on the effects of partial insanity upon all the mental faculties of a testator : when exposed to the artifices of a cognizant, fraudulent player on disordered animal machinery, exhibiting a review and report of the trials of the last wills and testaments of Charles Hall & Michael Deaderick, of Davidson County, Tennessee : including a philosophical analysis of mind ... / by a medical observer of Nashville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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ft By Mind is to be understood all its faculties, which are divided into Memory, Imagination, Understanding, Will, Passions and Moral Powers, the latter being divided into Moral Faculty, Sense of Deity and Consciousness: and however distinct in their number and separate in their situation in the sensorial bow], they consti- tute a wonderful unity and symmetry in their harmonious concert. Secondly. That every act of the Will and all the intellectual ope- rations depend on certain motions excited in the cercbcllous, cere- bral and spinal apartments—the trinar) chambers of mental go- vernment, by external impressions upon the corporeal senses, the well known avenues to the mental citadel. It is quite imma- terial in the prosecution of the present inquiry, whether these motions depend on an ether or electroid fluid, it being sufficient that they are excited by external and internal stimuli. Thirdly. We must assume, that from the phenomena of several diseases, obstruction, debility or inaction, call them what we may, they are more or less of disorder, unsoundness or non compos mentis state in the brain, that organ where these faculties are seated, or that instrument referred to by poets, and composed of the nervous cords or faculties which we are endeavoring to expose to the comprehension of the jury. Fourthly. We are to take for granted that the perfect exercise of our faculties depends upon a certain medium of the brain: this medium or temperature depending on a certain consistency and firmness in the sensorium, disclosed by anatomical dissections. Hence, the softness of this organ in children and the hardness thereof in old age and certain dis- eases, as misplaced gout, madness, torpor of mind from exces- sive spirituous potation, instilling into the stomach the juice, by mastication and absorption, of the odious narcotic-nicotian bane, the aliment of the African goat, the maniac's stupifter, and the mentor of the slave and savage, disqualifies this organ for proper exercise or motion. Memory is the most astonishing faculty of our minds, and is much employed in volition and devising of estates. It is the power of recalling past scenes, of putting us in reminiscence of our duties and obligations, and would appear as wonderful as being able to predict future events, if we were not accustomed to its daily and hourly exercise. Imagination embraces present as well as future events. Understanding is so essential to our minds, that the mind is often designated by it; and it is the business of this sublime faculty to receive impressions, both external and internal, and without it memory would be a mere magazine of ideas and imaginations. By the Will, the fourth original attribute, is meant that impor- tant faculty of mind by which we are impelled to do good and to

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