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

  • Amariah Brigham
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    28/98 (page 22)
    where this nnliappy class of persons have no cares, no wants to provide for, and where their minds are not excited, hut soothed by kind words and gentle and atFec- tionate treatment. Sometimes the increased flow of blood to the head is such as wonderfully to increase the powers of the mind. Pine], and other writers on insanity, relate cases of patients, who possessed but weak minds when in their usual state of health, but who exhibited very superior powers of intellect during paroxysms of insanity, which determined more blood to the head than ordinary. Similar facts I have noticed in the insane: sometimes the memorv seems to be wonderfullv increased; at other times, imagination, or wit, &c.; and thus many of the insane are supposed to possess uncommonly brilliant mental powers. I have known an insane person, during a paroxysm of insanity, which usually occurred about once a-montb, exhibit a very animated countenance, and repeat correctly, and with great force and dignity, passages from Shakespeare and other writers, but who, in the intervals of these paroxysms, appeared stupid, thought¬ less, and forgetful. Many instances are on record, of the development of genius by disease during childhood. The celebrated Novalis had his great mind apparently created by a very severe disease when he was in his ninth year.* An increase of power inaj^ be given to the brain by an increased determination of blood to it, just as the senses are often rendered more acute by disease and partial inflammation ; or it may arise from the repose allovved the brain during disease, and its feeble powers not being overtasked and injured by mental application. I might adduce many more cases to prove the very intimate connection between the brain and the mind,— that it is a defective brain which makes the idiot, and a diseased brain which causes delirium and insanity; and that ail the various states of mind produced by alcohol or by opium, &c. arise from the disordered action which these articles produce in the brain ; that the weak mind manifested by the infant, and the feeble mind by the aged, are produced by a small and undeveloped, or an enfeebled and diseased brain, and not by a change of the immaterial mind itself. But cases enough have been cited to prove * Foreign Review.