Lunatic

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Even when a lunatic is telling one in fervid language how she has been deprived of her children, or the outrages that have been perpretrated on herself, her eye is never even moist. The ready gush of tears which accompanies the plaint of the sane woman contrasts with the dry-eyed appeal of the lunatic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A lunatic may be 'soothed,' as it is called, for a time, but, in the end, he is very apt to become obstreperous. His cunning, too, is proverbial and great. ”

“ Should I die at this instant, must I be damned?" According to my Jansenists the matter was indubitable, but according to my conscience it appeared quite the contrary: terrified and floating in this cruel uncertainty, I had recourse to the most laughable expedient to resolve my doubts, for which I would willingly shut up any man as a lunatic should I see him practise the same folly. ”

“ I could never look at madmen without feeling troubled.
But the continual capers and uneasy antics of the madman, who was welcomed with laughter on his arrival, soon sickened us all, and in a day or two exhausted our patience. One of them was kept in our ward for three weeks, till we all felt like running away. To make matters worse, another lunatic was brought in at that very time, who made a great impression upon me. ”

“ In mania, when visions are seen, some person or other whose description has been read by the lunatic, or who has really been observed, appears—or something which the individual has seen depicted, or otherwise been told of, presents itself, or there is a strange jumble of reality and possibility—just as in dreams, comical, grotesque, or horrible combinations are common, and cause us no surprise. There is, however, too much consistency in the method in which angels are depicted, to enable us to believe that their form was decided by any lunatic or dreamer. ”

“ We know where we stand, and when I said the man was a lunatic, I meant no more than a figure of speech. All sin may be madness seen one way; but we don't treat all sinners as madmen, else there'd be more ready to be locked up than we could find fellow-creatures to guard them. ”

“ Did you ever talk to a lunatic? On the subject on which he is insane he thinks and talks as you do when you are dreaming; but he may be quite awake and sensible about all other matters. He dreams he is rich, and he goes out and orders cartloads of things from shops. Pray, have you never dreamt that you were rich? Or he dreams that he is a poached egg, and must have a piece of toast to sit down upon. I believe that well-known story of a lunatic to be founded on fact. Have you never dreamt that you were somebody or something quite different from yourself? ”

“ 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 ”

“ Yet it is certainly strange to observe, one may comment, how many people seem to feel vain of their own ungratified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lunatic may be influenced by the same motives that influence the sane person, but he is at the same time impelled by other motives peculiar to himself, and to which we may have no means of access. ”

“ Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane—but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a mate, it is evidence that you are a lunatic. ”

“ A lunatic is properly one whose distemper lies in the brain, and returns with the change of the moon. The devil, by the divine permission, either caused this distemper, or at least concurred with it, to heighten and aggravate it. The child had the falling-sickness, and the hand of Satan was in it ”

“ 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. ”

“ At one monastery the lunatics in the charge of the monks are said to have received ten lashes every day. [643]
The insane have been flogged for various reasons:— (1) Superstitiously, to drive out the devil, and even to scare away a disease; (2) therapeutically, because pain and shock would often subdue the ravings of the patients, although only temporarily; (3) instinctively, as a relief to their keepers’ feelings. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Perhaps lunatics are only people who are perpetually asleep and dreaming with one part of their brains while the other parts are awake. They certainly behave as if that were the matter, and it seems a rational explanation of ordinary insanity, curable or incurable. ”

“ He tries to show his lunatic acquaintance that external influences cannot affect us in any way at all. The lunatic does not agree, becomes impertinent, presents objections, in which, as in the thoughts of many lunatics, nonsensical assertions are mixed with very profound remarks. ”

“ The difference I conceive to be that, in cases of insanity, the mind of the patient is principally affected, while the senses, or organic system, offer in vain to the lunatic their decided testimony against the fantasy of a deranged imagination. Perhaps the nature of this collision—between a disturbed imagination and organs of sense possessed of their usual accuracy—cannot be better described than in the embarrassment expressed by an insane patient confined in the Infirmary of Edinburgh. The poor man’s malady had taken a gay turn. ”

“ 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 ”

“ As was to be expected, he finds that only a small proportion of lunatics are hypnotisable; but the effect produced on these, whether by entrancement or suggestion, is uniformly good. His best subject is a depraved young man, who after many convictions for crimes (including attempted murder) has become a violent lunatic. ”

“ The narrow ideas which are spread in our times respecting madness mislead our historical judgments in the most serious manner, in questions of this kind. A state in which a man says things of which he is not conscious, in which thought is produced without the summons and control of the will, exposes him to being confined as a lunatic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Male, [532] a madness which shews itself in words, and another in actions; a lunatic may be coherent in conversation, but insane in conduct; he may be rational when under the restraint of a mad-house, but when released, and at liberty to act according to the impulse of his hallucination, will shew by his conduct that he is really insane. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, scattered among the recipes for herbs and all the indescribable filthy mixtures which were advocated for insanity, [642] we come across the following prescription, the effects of which would prove anything but imaginary:—“In case a man be a lunatic, take skin of a mereswine or porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man well therewith, soon he will be well. ”

“ Upon the whole, it appears that the power to restrain and confine a lunatic is limited at common law to cases in which it would be dangerous, either as regards others or himself, for the lunatic to be at large ”

“ The period is not remote when lunatics were regarded as beings unsusceptible of mental enjoyment or of bodily pain, and accordingly consigned without remorse, to prisons under the name of mad-houses—in the contrivance of which nothing seems to have been considered, but how to enclose the victim of insanity in a cell, and to cover his misery from the light of day. ”

“ It has been said that if you stop your ears in a ball-room, and then look at the people—reputed sane—skipping about in the new valse or the last galop, you will imagine they must be all lunatics. I did not stop my ears that night, but I opened my eyes and saw hundreds of my fellow-creatures, all with some strange delusions, many with ferocious and vicious propensities, yet all kept in order by a few warders, a handful of girls, and all behaving as decorously as in a real ball-room. And the question which would haunt me all the way home was, which are the sane people, and which the lunatics? ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, in the first place, if a madman is distinguished from all other inoffensive madmen by the grave fact of having killed, or burned, or outraged, it is clear that he cannot ``purely and simply'' return to the same kind of treatment which is given to harmless lunatics. ”

“ For the curators of Bedlam assure us, that some lunaticks are persons of honour, truth, benevolence, and many other virtues, which appear in their highest ravings, although after a wild incoherent manner; while others, on the contrary, discover in every word and action, the utmost baseness and depravity of human minds ”

“ Remember when lunatics, however harmless, become violent, they are put into straight-jackets. I should advise you to attempt no disturbance. It would have no effect upon us and only a very disastrous one upon yourself. ”

“ From the view we have now taken of the propriety of exciting fear, as a means of promoting the cure of insanity, by enabling the patient to control himself, it will, perhaps, be almost superfluous to state as our opinion, that the idea, which has too generally obtained, of it being necessary to commence an acquaintance with lunatics, by an exhibition of strength, or an appearance of austerity, is utterly erroneous. ”