5 68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tional conditions. In either case the intellectual and volitional cen- 

 tres appear unequal to the task of maintaining the balance which nor- 

 mally exists. As a matter of fact, there are certain mental attitudes 

 found in some diseases which are so regularly present, so well marked 

 and pronounced, that they may fairly be included as a part of the 

 rational symptoms. So commonly is mental depression found along 

 with biliary disturbance that the name melancholia was given to these 

 conditions of mental gloom ; and modern observation is but estab- 

 lishing the propriety of the term. 



Allied in essence to melancholia is the panphobia, or " low spirits," 

 common to women generally, but especially found in the habitues of 

 our out-patients' rooms. It is the cry of the suffering brain for better 

 nutrition, for a more liberal supply of arterial blood. There is much 

 emotional mobility and the patient is easily moved to a flood of tears 

 by the slightest exciting cause. Under different circumstances relief 

 from the depression is sought in alcohol, and this is the most depraved, 

 the most hopeless, and the deadliest of all forms of habitual intoxica- 

 tion, the more hopeless from its being based on physical conditions ; 

 or it stimulates the spinster and the widow to a pseudo-religious exist- 

 ence, where the religious fervor is the measure of the cravings of the 

 ungratified physiological aspirations. 



We do not consider, perhaps, because the subject is repugnant to 

 us, how much our psychical attitude, even to religious, the highest of 

 all thought, is based upon conditions of the body ; that body which 

 theologians of the old school denominate vile, which they would tram- 

 ple under foot, nay, even ignore, yet which is reigning supreme and 

 dominating and directing them in their highest aspirations. What a 

 terrible revelation this gives us of the psychological attitude of the 

 monk, who thought to subdue his inborn passions by scourgings, fast- 

 ings, sleeplessness, and religious exercises, when all the while he w r as 

 the victim of their thwarted and riotous activity as they crowded his 

 mental horizon with gloomy or sensual images and presented a future 

 of everlasting damnation to his superstitious vision ! 



Another form of psychical disturbance is furnished by the pertur- 

 bations termed hysterical attacks, and which usually occur under cir- 

 cumstances of repressed passion. There are an excitability and mo- 

 bility about the person which tell how the emotional centres are 

 quivering and vibrating under the tension to which they are subjected, 

 and the emotional oscillations, from weeping to laughing, indicate 

 that the emotions are no longer under the control of the volitional 

 centres. This loss of equilibrium becomes more marked when any 

 disturbance of the bodily health leaves the organism at the mercy 

 of these emotional storms. Hysterical attacks are generally explo- 

 sive discharges of the emotional centres, as epilepsy is of the motor 

 or mania transitoria (demoniacal possession) is of the volitional 

 centres. They all resemble the " blowing of the engine " when it 



