Thirty-sixth annual report of the directors of James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics, near Perth. June, 1863.

  • James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thirty-sixth annual report of the directors of James Murray's Royal Asylum for Lunatics, near Perth. June, 1863. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    bowls, a considerable amount of pleasant muscular exercise is involved. Proportion of About 30 per cent, of either sex are altogether and persistently idletheIdle’ and apathetic—so far as concerns any species of regular and useful occupation. Due cognizance must also be taken of individual idiosyncrasies, T.. . . both those which are healthy or physiological, innate or congenital, relation to Diet, permanent and persistent, and those which are morbid and acquired, transient and accidental. That natural and congenital idiosyncrasies materially affect diet and digestion may be illustrated by the very familiar fact of the production of Urticaria, or still more serious or disagreeable results, by the ingestion by particular persons of parti¬ cular foods and fruits. In such a case pre-eminently “ What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison;” for an article of diet, such as second- quality flour, which is most nutritious and most wholesome in itself, and which is palatable to, and easily digested by, the great bulk of his fellow countrymen, may act as a poison on the unfortunate indi¬ vidual who is the subject of this peculiar predisposition or idiosyncrasy. There are differences in the quality and character of the nervous Quality of * Nervous organisation, that determine those susceptibilities to certain classes of Organization, healthy or diseased action, which characterise individuals, and which may be said indeed to distinguish every individual from every other individual. The nervous sensibility or irritability, using these terms in a physiological sense, differs as greatly in different classes of men as between different breeds of the lower animals; and a full consideration pf these differences in the latter—where they have become the subject of direct experiment—might lead to a more thorough understanding of Lose in man. Professor Claude Bernard of Paris, one of the most eminent living experimental Physiologists, in his excellent Lectures on “ Idiosyncrasies in Animals,” * remarks as the result of long idiosyncrasies in observation that, while the higher breeds of dogs are endowed with such mais ^niustra- oxtreme sensitiveness and such an amount of nervous irritability, Man.°f th°se m 'using all these terms in a strictly physiological sense), or are charac¬ terised by what in a similar sense may be denominated “ nervousness ” to such extent, that the slightest operation induces fever and materially interferes with every function of the economy, beginning with digestion and nutrition:—the lower breeds are characterised by such a degree Differences in of bodily endurance and hardihood, by so much greater obtuseness of sation^roliuced ‘unction, by so much less exquisite a nervous sensibility, that the samet?on ofSed in >perations elicit scarcely any pain; “the animal hardly attempts toAmmals‘ 1 move and scarcely seems to suffer: the appetite remains unimpaired * and the secretions normal; in short, the various functions of 1 the economy pursue their natural course.” t Equally great * “Medical Times and Gazette,” February 4, I860, page 109. f ]bid page 110.