Chapter 74
CURIOUSITIES OF LITERATURE Volume 2 by Isaac Desraeli Medicine and Morals A stroke of personal ridicule is leveled at Dryden when Bayes informs us of his preparations for a course of study by a course of medicine.
When I have found a grand design, says he, I ever take psychic and let blood. For when you would have pure swiftness of thought, and fiery flights of fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part, and fine you must purge the belly. Such was really the practice of the poet, as Le Mott, who was a physician, informs us, and in his medical character, did not perceive that ridicule in the subject which the wits
and most readers unquestionably have enjoyed. The wits here were as cruel against truth as against Dryden, for we must still consider this practice, to use their own words, as an excellent recipe for writing. Among other philosophers, one of the most famous disputants of antiquity, Gamides was accustomed to take copious doses of white hellbore, a great periant, as a preparation to refute the dogmas of the Stoics.
Quote, The thing that gives me the highest spirits, it seems absurd but true, is a dose of salts, but one can't take them like champagne.
End quote. Said Lord Byron. Dryden's practice was neither whimsical nor peculiar to the poet. He was of a full habit,
and, no doubt, had often found by experience the beneficial effects without being aware of the cause, which is nothing less than the reciprocal influence of mind and body. This simple fact is, indeed, connected with one of the most important inquiries in the history of man, the laws which regulate the invisible union
of the soul with the body. In a word, the inscrutable mystery of our being, a secret, but an undoubted intercourse, which probably must ever elude our perceptions. The combination of metaphysics with physics has only been productive of the wildest fairy tales among philosophers. With one party, the soul seems to pass away in its last puff of air, or man seems to perish in, quote, dust to dust, end quote. The other successfully gets rid of
our bodies altogether by denying the existence of matter. We are not certain that mind and matter are distinct existences, since the one may be only a modification of the other. However this great mystery be imagined, we shall find with Dr. Gregory, in his lectures, quote, on the duties and qualifications of a physician, end quote, that it forms an equally necessary inquiry in the sciences of morals and medicine. Whether we consider the vulgar distinction of
mind and body as an union, or as a modified existence, a philosopher denies that a reciprocal action takes place between our moral and physical condition. Of these sympathies, like many other mysteries of nature, the cause remains occult, while the effects are obvious. this close yet inscrutable association this concealed correspondence of parts
seemingly unconnected in a word this reciprocal influence of the mind and the body has long fixed the attention of medical and metaphysical inquirers
the one having the care of our exterior organization the other that of the interior can we conceive the mysterious inhabitant as forming a part of its own inhabitation The tenant and the house are so inseparable that in striking at any part of the dwelling
you inevitably reach the dweller. If the mind be disordered, we may often look for its seat in some corporeal derangement. Often are our thoughts disturbed by a strange irritability, which we do not even pretend to account for. The state of the body, called the fidgets, is a disorder to which the ladies are particularly
liable. A physician of my acquaintance was earnestly entreated by a female patient to give a name to her unknown complaints. This he found no difficulty to do, as he is a sturdiest searcher of the materiality of our nature.
He declared that her disorder was atmospherical. It was the disorder of her frame under damp weather, which was reacting on her mind, and physical means, by operating on her body, might be applied to restore her to her half-lost senses.
Our imagination is higher when our stomach is not overloaded, in spring than in winter, in solitude than amidst company, and in an obscured light than in the blaze and heat of the noon. In all these cases the body is evidently acted on,
and reacts on the mind. Sometimes our dreams present us with images of our restlessness, till we recollect that the seat of our brain may perhaps lie in our stomach, rather than on the pineal gland of Descartes, and that the most artificial logic to make us somewhat reasonable may be swallowed with the blue pill. Our domestic happiness often depends on the state of our
biliary and digestive organs, and the little disturbances of conjugal life may be more efficaciously cured by the physician than by the moralist. For a sermon misapplied will never act directly as a sharp medicine. The learned Gabius, an eminent professor of medicine at Leiden, who called himself, quote, professor of the passions, end quote, gives the case of a lady of too inflammable a constitution, whom her husband, unknown to herself, had gradually reduced
to a model of decorum, a phlebotomy. Her complexion, indeed, lost the roses, which some, perhaps, had too wantonly admired for the repose of her conjugal physician. The art of curing moral disorders by corporeal means has not yet been brought into general practice, although it is probable that some quiet sages of medicine have made use of it on some occasions. The Leiden professor we have just alluded to, delivered at the university a discourse, quote, on the
management and care of the disorders of the mind by application to the body, end quote. Descartes conjectured that as the mind seems so dependent on the disposition of the bodily organs, if any means can be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than they have been hitherto, such a method might be sought from the assistance of medicine. The sciences of morals and of medicine
will therefore be found to have a more intimate connection than has been suspected. Plato thought that a man must have natural dispositions towards virtue to become virtuous, that he cannot be educated,
you cannot make a bad man a good man, which he ascribes to the evil dispositions of the body as well as to a bad education. There are unquestionably constitutional moral disorders. Some good-tempered but passionate persons have acknowledged that they cannot avoid those temporary fits to which they are liable,
in which, they say, they always suffered, quote, from a child, end quote. If they arise from too great a fullness of blood, is it not cruel to abrade rather than to cure them, which might easily be done by taking away their redundant humors, and thus quieting the most passionate man alive. A moral patient, who allows his brain to be disordered by the fumes of liquor, instead of being suffered to be a ridiculous being, might have opiates prescribed, for in
laying him asleep as soon as possible, he removed the cause of his sudden madness. There are crimes for which men are hanged, but of which they might easily have been cured by physical means. Persons out of their senses with love, by throwing themselves into a river, and being dragged out nearly lifeless, have recovered their senses and lost their bewildering passion. Submersion is discovered to be a cure for some mental disorders by altering the state
of the body, as Van Helmont notices, quote, was happily practiced in England, end quote. With the circumstance to which the sage of chemistry alludes, I am unacquainted, but this extraordinary practice was certainly known to the Italians. For in one of the tales of the Poggio, you find a mad doctor of Milan, who was celebrated for curing lunatics and demoniacs in a certain time.
His practice consisted in placing them in a great, high-walled courtyard, in the midst of which there was a deep well full of water, cold as ice. When a demoniac was brought to this physician, he had the patient bound to a pillar in the well, till the water ascended to the knees, or higher, and even to the neck, as he deemed their malady required. In their bodily pain they appeared to have forgot their melancholy. Thus, by the terrors of the repetition of cold water,
a man appears to have been frightened into his senses a physician has informed me of a remarkable case a lady with a disordered mind resolved on death
and swallowed much more than half a pint of laudanum she closed her curtains in the evening took a farewell of her attendance and fired herself she would never awaken from her sleep
in the morning however notwithstanding this incredible dose she awoke in the agonies of death By the usual means, she was unable to get rid of the poison she had so largely taken, and not only recovered her life, but, what is more extraordinary, her perfect senses.
The physician conjectures that it was the influence of her disordered mind over her body which prevented this vast quantity of laudanum from its usual action by terminating in death. Footnote A physician of eminence has told us of the melancholy termination of the life of a gentleman, who in a state of mental aberration, cut his throat, loss of blood restored his mind to a
healthy condition, but the wound, unfortunately, proved fatal. End of footnote. Moral vices or infirmities, which originate in the state of the body, may be cured by topical applications. precepts and ethics in such cases if they seem to produce a momentary cure have only moved the weeds
whose roots lie in the soil it is only by changing the soil itself that we can eradicate these evils the senses are five porches for the physician to enter into the mind to keep it in repair
by altering the state of the body we are changing that of the mind whenever the defects of the mind depend on those of the organization the mind or soul, however distinct its being from the body, is disturbed or excited,
independent of its volition, by the mechanical impulses of the body. A man becomes stupefied when the circulation of the blood is impeded in the viscera. He acts more from instinct than reflection. The nervous fibers are too relaxed or too tense, and he finds a difficulty in moving them. If you heighten his sensations
You awaken new ideas In the stupid being And as we cure the stupid By increasing his sensibility We may believe that a more vivacious fancy
May be promised to those who possess One When the mind and the body play together In one harmonious accord Prescribe the bath
Frictions and fomentations And though it seems a roundabout way You get at the brains by his feet A literary man from long, sanitary habits, could not overcome his fits of melancholy, till his physician doubled
his daily quantity of wine, and the learned Henry Stevens, after a severe aug, had such a disgust of books, the most beloved objects of his whole life, that the very thought of them excited terror for a considerable time. It is evident that the state of the body often indicates that of the mind, and sanity itself often results from some disorder in the human machine. Quote, What is this mind in which men appear so vain? exclaims Fleischer. If considered according
to its nature, it is a fire which sickness in an accident most sensibly puts out. It is a delicate temperament which soon grows disordered, a happy confirmation of organs, which wear out, a combination and a certain motion of the spirits, which exhausts themselves, it is the most lively and the most subtle part of the soul which seems to grow old with the body. It is not wonderful that some have attributed such virtues to their system of diet,
if it has been found productive of certain effects on the human body. Cornaro perhaps imagined more than he experienced. But Apollonius Tienius, when he had the credit of holding an intercourse with the devil by his presumed gift of prophecy, defended himself from the accusation by attributing his clear and prescient views of things to the light ailments he lived on, never indulging in a variety of food. Quote, This mode of life has produced such a perspicuity
in my ideas, that I see as in a glass things past and future. End quote. We may therefore agree with Bayes that, quote, for a sonnet to Amanda and the like, stewed prunes only, end quote, might be sufficient, but for a grand design, nothing less than a more formal and formidable dose. Camus, a French physician, who combined literature with science, the author of Abdecker, or The Art of Cosmetics, which he discovered in Exercise and Temperance, produced another
fanciful work, written in 1753. La Médecine de l'Espirite. His conjectural cases are at least as numerous as his more positive facts, for he is not wanting an imagination. He assures us that having reflected on the physical causes, which by differently modifying the body, varied also the dispositions of the mind, he was convinced that by employing these different causes, or by imitating their powers by art, we might, by means purely mechanical, affect the human mind,
and correct the infirmities of the understanding and the will. He considered this principle only as the aurora of a brighter day. The great difficulty to overcome was to find out a method to root out the defects or the diseases of the soul
in the same manner as physicians cure a flexion from the lungs, a dysentery, a dropsy, and all other infirmities which seem only to attack the body. This, indeed, he says,
is enlarging the domain of medicine by showing how the functions of intellect and the springs of volition are mechanical. The movements and passions of the soul, formally restricted to abstract reasonings,
are by this system reduced to simple ideas, insisting that material causes force the soul and body to act together. The defects of the intellectual operations depend on those of the organization,
which may be altered or destroyed by physical causes. And he properly adds that we are to consider that the soul is material while existing in matter, because it is operated on by matter, such as the theory of la medicine del esprit, which, though physicians will never quote, may perhaps contain some facts worth their attention. Camus' two little volumes seem to have been preceded by a medical discourse
delivered in the Academy of Dijon in 1748, where the moralist compares the infirmities and vices of the mind to parallel diseases of the body. We may safely consider some infirmities and passions of the mind as diseases, and could they be treated as we do the bodily ones, to which they bear an infinity. This would be the great triumph of morals and medicine. The passion of avarice resembles the thirst of dropsical patients. That of envy is a slow-wasting fever. Love is often frenzy and
capricious and sudden restlessness, epileptic fits. There are moral disorders which at times spread like epidemical maladies through towns and countries and even nations. There are hereditary vices and infirmities transmitted from the parent's mind, as there are unquestionably such diseases of the body, the son of a father, of a hot and irritable temperament, inherits the same quickness and warmth.
A daughter is often the counterpart of her mother. Morality, could it be treated medicinally, would require its prescriptions, as all diseases have their specific remedies. The great secret is perhaps discovered by Camus, that of operating on the mind by means of the body. A recent writer seems to have been struck by these curious analogies. Mr. Haslam, in his work on
Sound Mind, says, page 90, quote, There seems to be a considerable similarity between the morbid state of the instruments of voluntary motion, that is, the body, and certain affections of the mental powers, that is, the mind. Thus, paralysis has its counterpart in The Defects of recollection, where the utmost endeavor to remember is ineffectually exerted. Tremor may be compared with incapability of fixing the attention, and this involuntary state of muscles,
ordinarily subjected to the will, also finds a parallel, where the mind loses its influence in the train of thought, and becomes subject to spontaneous intrusions, as may be exemplified in reveries, dreaming, and some species of madness. End quote. Thus one philosopher discovers the analogies of the mind with the body, and another of
the body with the mind. Can we now hesitate to believe that such analogies exist, and, advancing one step farther, trace in this reciprocal influence that a part of the soul is the body, as the body becomes a part of the soul? The most important truth remains undivulged.
and never will in this mental pharmacy but none is more clear than that which led to the view of this subject that in this mutual intercourse of body and mind the superior is often governed by the inferior others think the mind is more wilfully outrageous than the body plutarch in his essays has a familiar illustration which he borrows from some philosopher more ancient than himself should the body sue the mind before a court of judicature for damages it would be found that the mind would prove to have been a ruinous tenant to its landlord The sage of Sharonia do not foresee the hint of Descartes in the discovery of Camus, that by medicine we may alleviate or remove the diseases of the mind, a practice which indeed has not yet been pursued by physicians, though the moralists have been often struck by the close analogies of the mind with the body. A work by the learned Dom Pernetti, Lacunoisse de la morale parcelles de la physique.
We are told is more fortunate in its title than its execution. Probably it is one of the many attempts to develop this imperfect and obscure truth, which hereafter may become more obvious and be universally comprehended. End of Section 74 Recording by Greg Giordano
Newport, Ritchie, Florida
