The philosophy of sleep / [Robert Macnish].

  • Robert Macnish
Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The philosophy of sleep / [Robert Macnish]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    84/320 page 78
    know nothing of in health; and in drunkenness events are brought to the memory which desert it in a state of sobriety.* Analogous peculiarities occur in dreams. Forgotten facts are restored to the mind. Sometimes those adhere to it and are remembered when we awake: at other times—as ean be proved in cases of sleep-talking—they vanish with the dream which called them into existence, and are recollected no more. I believe that the dreams of the aged, like their memory, relate chiefly to the events of early life, and less to those of more recent occurrence. My friend, Dr. Cumin, has mentioned to me the case of one of his patients, a middle-aged man, whose visions assumed this character in consequence of Severe mental anxiety. Owing to misfortunes in trade, his mind had been greatly depressed: he lost his appetite, became restless, nervous, and dejected; such sleep as he had was filled with incessant dreams, which at first were entirely of events connected with the earliest period of his life, so far as he recollected it, and never by any occasioned by the disease, but no longer; for so soon as the state of mind which recalled these impressions was removed, they also disappeared, and she was as ignorant of Welsh as before she was taken ill. * Mr. Combe mentions the case of an Irish porter to a ware- house, who, in one of his drunken fits, left a parcel at the wrong house, and when sober could not recollect what he had done with it; but the next time he got drunk, he recollected where he had left it, and went and recovered it.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3