A Treatise on Insanity; In Which Are Contained the Principles of a New and More Practical Nosology of Maniacal Disorders Than Has Yet Been Offered T

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3textit{SECTION L PERIODICAL OK. INlERMIfTENT INSANITY. 1. Nothing can place the slow progress of medical science, in a more striking point of view, than histories of maniacal paroxysms, taken by different persons and at different periods of time. Aretaeus advanced little more upon the subject of intermittent insanity, than that, if well treated, it is capable of being completely cured; but, that the patient is subject to relapses, from various causes, such as errors in regimen, sallies of passion, and the return of spring. Cffilius Aurelianus textit{(b) notices the redness and the fixed direction of the eyes, the distension of the veins, the heightened colour of the cheeks, and the increase of strength, which usually take place in fits of periodical insanity. Those writers, however, give us no instructions with respect to the causes of those (4) Ca-1, Aiueliua. de moib. chronic. Lib. i. Cap. vi. complaints, their peculiar symptoms, their successive periods, their varied forms, their duration, termination and prognosis. It has always been more easy to compile than to observe; to indulge in fruitless theory, than to establish positive facts. Authors, therefore, without number, both ancient and modern, have acquitted themselves in a manner worthy of this inglorious facility, and have been ever writing what their predecessors had written before them. The particular histories, which we meet with in different works, are chiefly remarkable for a few unconnected facts which they detail. The important method of descriptive history has been too much neglected. textit{The great object of the physician and the author has almost uniformly been to recommend a favourite remedy, (c) as if the treatment of every disease, without accurate knowledge of its symptoms, involved in it neither danger nor uncertainty. ...