Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / [Amariah Brigham].

  • Amariah Brigham
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health / [Amariah Brigham]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    81 Professor Broussais, a man of great learning and genius, and one of the most distinguished physicians, of the present age, thus alludes to this subject. “ In- tellectual labours give rise, in early life, to effects cor- resjioiiding with the actual state of the individual con- stitution. Thus the brain, the growth of which is not complete, acquires, by ihe e.vercise of thought, an ex- traordinary energy and volume; the moral facidties become truly prodigious : but this advantage is sadly counterbalanced by cerebral inflammations, vvliich give rise to hydrocephalus, and by a langour in the rest of the body, the development of which remains imper- fect. “ It is easy to conceive what a number of evils must result from a kind of life so little in harmony with the wants of youth ; hence we rarely see all those jirodigies of premature intellectual education ])rospering. If encephalitis does not carry them off, they infallildy perish with gastritis or scrofula; most generally, all these evils oppress them at once; and if they do not sink under them in infancy', they carry along with them in mature age, an irritability which does not allow of their resisting the morbific influences, in the midst of which man is necessarily forced to live. They are seen to decay and die in the prime of life, if they are not destroyed, in spite of all the efforts of the art, by the first violent inflammation that attacks them.”-'’^ Similar opinions have been inculcated in England, by some of the most distinguished medical men of that country ; and particularly by the celebrated Dr. James