Lunacy

“ And most of all, or with most darkness in its train, comes the sickness of the brain—lunacy—which, visiting nearly one thousand in every million, must, in every populous nation, make many ruins in each particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' But there is a sadder even than that,—the sight of a family-ruin wrought by crime is even more appalling. ”

“ He had never definitely aimed at becoming a famous specialist in lunacy. But the pretty lunatics came to him, nevertheless; the lunatics who live at afternoon parties, till the grave yawns at their feet, and they must go down the strange ways of another world, teacup in hand, scandal still fluttering upon their ashy lip; the lunatics who live for themselves, until their eyes are hollow as tombs and their mouths fall in from selfishness, and their cheeks are a greenish white from satiety, and lust's gratified flame beacons on their drawn cheeks and along their crawling wrinkles ”

“ Passing along the streets it is easy to pick out people thus born: their faces and heads betray the unmistakable brand of incipient lunacy; and it requires but little provocation to fan the latent embers into a glowing and terrible flame. The average insane head is smaller in all its dimensions than the sane. ”

“ I have realised and perfectly remember the condition of lunacy, for the real and the imaginary had a place side by side in my memory, and I could not separate them. The plot of the last novel I had read mixed with the experience of my life inextricably; the events of the one holding their place as distinctly as the other. ”

“ All the discoveries of our reason are grounded on them. A remarkable deviation from them, arising from a disorder in the constitution, is called lunacy by all; as when a man believes that he is made of glass: but when a man suffers himself to be reasoned out of them by metaphysical arguments he would call this metaphysical lunacy ”

“ But what is much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked ”

“ Nor shall we rest where we are. It is our belief as well as our hope that, before another generation has gone by, the last vestige of restraint, in the shape of dismal airing-courts, and outside walls, which serve to wound the spirit rather than to enslave the limbs, will pass for ever among us, and only be remembered with the hobbles and the manacles of the past.
It has been asserted by some psychologists that lunacy is on the increase, and that its rapid development of late years has been consequent upon the increased activity of the national mind. ”

“ These chapters are not intended to be read as what my friend of the pamphlet calls them—an onslaught on the medical men engaged in lunacy practice. They are an onslaught on a crying national sin, and all who favour it. Among the men in lunacy practice are men who abhor the system on which any man may be writ down mad. ”

“ Magyar folk-medicine prescribes a curious remedy for {148} lunacy. The head of a corpse is wetted with the patient’s blood and saliva, so that “he may obtain as much intellect as the dead man had”: in other words, the crazy man is brought into such union with the dead as will result, not in the transfer to the latter of his lunacy, but the transfer to the lunatic of the intellect of the dead. ”

“ I can not deny that medical witnesses have sometimes pressed this doctrine of irresistible influence unduly; still, there are undoubtedly cases where the insanity reveals itself chiefly, if not solely, in acts of violence, the consequence of uncontrollable impulse. The popular notions that one man can recognize lunacy as well as another, and that it invariably betrays itself by definite and unmistakable symptoms, are altogether erroneous. ”

“ All that this 'taste' can mean is that no devout delusion should be ridiculed, which is itself one of the greatest pieces of absurdity ever perpetrated. It would shield every form of 'spiritual' lunacy in the world. ”

“ We shall not enter at length into the question which is at once raised by an inquiry into the relation between modern life and insanity—whether lunacy is on the increase in England. Twenty years ago there was one lunatic or idiot officially reported to 577 of the population ”

“ At first two kinds of insanity only seem to have been recognized by English law—idiocy and lunacy: the idiot who, from his nativity, by a perpetual infirmity is non compos, and the lunatic, who hath some-times his understanding, and sometimes not, aliquando gaudet lucidis intervallis, and therefore is non compos mentis, so long as he hath not understanding. ”

“ These paroxysms of apparent lunacy were so frightful, that during their continuance even his oldest and most-faithful domestics dared not approach him; consequently, his hours of agony were never intruded upon, and the mysterious causes of his sufferings appeared likely to remain hidden for ever. ”

“ But the most successful operator on these forms of lunacy is he who applies to them the most effective moral treatment, under which in many cases its symptoms have gradually disappeared. One of these modes of treatment is never to cross the patient on the subject of his delusions. Nothing is more remarkable than the influence which the efficient practitioner can exert over persons suffering from these forms of madness, by the mere energy of his will; a display of mental power analogous to that of strong faith. ”

“ But the spiritual convictions, of which some are hardly conscious, may be rejected even practically without obvious lunacy. And something is gained for those convictions, if it can be shown, as a reductio ad absurdum, that their rejection involves the moral sceptic too in the ‘lunacy’ of universal doubt and pessimist despair. ”

“ The evidence upon which this system rests is so enormous that it would take a very considerable library to contain it, and the witnesses are not shadowy people living in the dim past and inaccessible to our cross-examination, but are our own contemporaries, men of character and intellect whom all must respect. The situation may, as it seems to me, be summed up in a simple alternative. The one supposition is that there has been an outbreak of lunacy extending over two generations of mankind, and two great continents--a lunacy which assails men or women who are otherwise eminently sane. ”

“ The proposition of placing recent and chronic cases of lunacy in distinct establishments is often so put as to beg the question. It is asked if any one can undertake to say categorically that any case of insanity is incurable, and thereupon to transfer it to an asylum for incurables? To the question thus put every humane person will reply in the negative ”

“ It is a very nice point to determine where insanity begins. I was discussing this question lately with the Superintendent of a large lunatic asylum. We agreed that, while putting no premium on crime, we have to recognize that in many cases there is no real responsibility where in general it would be expected. The whole study of lunacy strongly indicates that there is a necessity for a process of elimination and development under more favorable conditions than the present life ordinarily supplies. ”

“ To-day insanity is never referable to demoniacal possession, but eighteen hundred years ago the subject of lunacy had not been so patiently investigated as it has been since. That one man could now be tenanted by several devils is a proposition for which the maintainer would in the present generation incur almost universal contempt ”

“ I regard this as a mild form of lunacy, and have no disposition to debate with men who indulge in such delusions, which have prevailed to some extent, at different times, in all countries, but whose life has been brief, and which have ever shared the fate of other popular delusions. ”

“ The originality of Shakespear's version lay in his taking the lunatic sympathetically and seriously, and thereby making an advance towards the eastern consciousness of the fact that lunacy may be inspiration in disguise, since a man who has more brains than his fellows necessarily appears as mad to them as one who has less. ”

“ Beyond the limits of lunacy it might be possible to define a condition of malignancy or ruthlessness that would justify confiscation, attempts to form corners in the necessities of life, for example, could be taken as evidence of such a condition. ”

“ Yet all the phenomena of possession point to maniacal, and not to harmless lunacy. The number of the cases of mania that occur bears but a small proportion to those of the latter form of derangement. It is true that at times of popular excitement various forms and numerous cases of frenzy manifest themselves ”

“ In addition to these casual forms of lunacy, in which the individual is led to commit crime by a momentary alteration of his moral nature, we find other forms which might be called specific, because the criminal act forms the culminating point of the malady. The sufferers from these forms are less easily distinguished from ordinary criminals and normal persons than are the lunatics of whom we have just spoken. These mental diseases, which should be studied separately, are alcoholism, hysteria, and epilepsy. ”

“ The registration of all lunatics, particularly on the accession of their malady, is exposed to certain objections, none of which, however, are, in our opinion, of sufficient weight to militate against the plan. One great impediment to its adoption, among most persons above the condition of paupers, and in some degree among the poor also, is the desire of secrecy on the part of friends, who endeavour in every way to restrict the knowledge of their relative’s mental disorder to the circle of his own family, and, if possible, to ignore its being actual insanity. ”

“ By some such scheme as this, it seems possible to bring the sufferers from disordered mental power within the cognizance of the public authorities appointed to watch over their interests, and at the same time to rescue them from being classed with the inmates of lunatic asylums, and from the frequently painful impression, in their own minds, that they are publicly considered to be lunatics. ”

“ Judging from the specimens before us, we repeat, we have great misgivings lest a similar searching inquiry into the condition of pauper lunatics in England distributed in the homes of our cottagers and labouring classes, should reveal a state of things no less disgraceful to a civilized country. ”

“ Those who have never come into contact with mentally deranged persons may deem it absurd to mention genius and insanity in the same breath, and still more absurd to seek to demonstrate the existence of flashes of inspiration in insane persons. In the minds of most people, the word lunatic has from earliest childhood conjured up the vision of an incoherent, stupid, or demented being, with wildly streaming hair, raging in paroxysms of maniacal fury, or sunk in imbecile apathy; not, certainly, a sharp-witted individual capable of reasoning logically. ”

“ Mystically, lunatics are mutable and inconstant persons, who at one time serve God and religion, at another the devil and their lusts, according to the words in Ecclus. xxvii. 12—“A holy man continueth in wisdom as the sun, but a fool is changed as the moon.” ”

“ Two classes exist, a fact which is often overlooked, for there are both criminal-lunatics and insane-criminals. In the first case, criminality is the product of insanity, but in the second case insanity is the product of criminality. Not an hereditary product in either case, but a product resulting from a cause within the person's mental or moral self.
The pronounced lunatic, the incapable, irresponsible person whose actions are beyond his power to understand or control, is regarded by society as a being too dangerous to be at large. ”

“ But when such effects are produced in physical matters, what will not the consequence be in those that are purely mental and imaginative? Go to the lunatic asylum or the madhouse, and there it may be seen in all its unreal delusion and positive terror. ”

“ Lady Muriel gave me an approving smile. "But lunatics would always write new books, surely?" she went on. "They couldn't write the sane books over again!"
"True," said Arthur. "But their books would come to an end, also. The number of lunatic books is as finite as the number of lunatics." ”

“ We bound them hand and foot, we punished them sternly for their congenital defects, we shunned 171and hated them, and because they were martyrs to a pitiful disease we made them also the victims of unnecessary and cruel sufferings. Few men to-day could glance without a shudder at the record of our treatment of lunatics. We consign the history gladly to oblivion, and point to changes betokening the better feeling of to-day. “No one thinks of sending a madman to a lunatic asylum for a certain number of days, weeks or months. ”

“ See now what a charge you yourselves bring upon the things which you practise. If these things have been invented for the purpose of lightening sorrow and affording enjoyment, how is it that the invocations of demons are performed in groves and woods? What is the meaning of the insane whirlings, and the slashing of limbs, and the cutting off of members? How is it that mad rage is produced in them? How is insanity produced? How is it that women are driven violently, raging with dishevelled hair? ”

“ Terror dominated my brain, pulsed like molten fire through my blood, until, as the desperation of my situation became more clearly defined, I tottered upon the very verge of insanity, feeling I should soon become a helpless, gibbering imbecile. ”