On the early phases of mental disorder, and their treatment / by W.B. Kesteven.
- Kesteven, W. B. (William Bedford), 1812-1891.
- Date:
- [1881]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On the early phases of mental disorder, and their treatment / by W.B. Kesteven. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![in the one case there are evidences of cerebral disease, which are wanting in the other. History furnishes ns with many notable examples of great men who have narrowly escaped the fate of the lunatic. John^ Bunyan compared himself to the child, who, as he was being brought to Christ, was thrown down by the devil, and wallowed foaming. He believed at one time that he had committed the sin that could never be pardoned—that he had sold his Saviour, &c. He would get out of bed, and go moping about the fields, wandering as a man bereft of life and past recovery. He shrank under hedges in guilt and sorrow, bemoaning the hardness of his fate. Yet all these grievous signs passed away, and left his mind clear enough to leave to all posterity his unequalled allegories, which, as Froude observes, are still dear to men of all ci’eeds.” Of Cowper it were devoutly to be wished that his hypo- chondriasis had not landed him beyond the border-land of insanity. He laboured, during a large portion of his life, under the appalling notion that he had been from the beginning a vessel of wrath fitted and destined only to destruction.* Luther, there can belittle doubt, sometimes trod the very verge of insanity, as when he flung his inkstand at the devil. Oliver Cromwell stood at one jDeriod of his life very close to the outer edge of the border-land of insanity, if even he did not for a time overpass its limits! Dr. Simcott, his jDhysician, assured Sir Philip Warwick that Mr. Cromwell, his patient, was quite a splenetic, and had fancies about the ^erCS]^in the town; that he had been called np to him at midnight, and such unseasonable hours vexy many times, npon a strange phansy, which made him believe that he was theix dying.”f “ His nei'vous melancholic tempera- ment indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him.’^J At an early pei’iod in his life there is little doubt but that the gigantic intellect of Goethe came near to being shaken. His strongly impulsive and emotional nature quivered under the shock of disappointed first love. “• The shock told upon both mind and body; he took to his bed with a fever that threatened the brain, and it was deemed * Dale’s “ Life of Cowper,” prefixed to Tilt and Bogue’s Edition of his Poems, 1841, p. 66. + Noble’s Memoirs, Vol. i., p. lOl. j Carlyle’s “ Heroes and Hero Worship,” 1842, p. 332.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22342837_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
