570 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



discipline, not correction of the mind through the soul's portals, for she 

 was a truly good and high-minded woman, but a remedying of the 

 bodily condition on which the mental state causally depended. As a 

 matter of fact, well-directed treatment produced a restoration of the 

 normal feelings and emotions which all the spiritual exercises had sig- 

 nally failed to achieve. 



Another peculiar and fairly-pronounced mental attitude is that 

 furnished by the victim of cancer. The form assumed here is that of 

 sullen and defiant submission to the inevitable. There is rarely any 

 active and positive attempt made by the sufferers themselves to avert 

 their doom. There is, as it were, a volitional control exercised over 

 the impulses, which is marked, and the sufferer submits to a grip he 

 sees no chance of eluding. But it must not be supposed that there is 

 an abolition of the instinct of self-preservation ; it is merely subordi- 

 nated. That this is the actual attitude is shown by the fact that 

 when the mind is wandering at the last, especially in gastric cancer, 

 which interferes so much with nutrition, the patients in their delirium 

 commonly ask for a knife in order to excise the hostile malignant 

 growth which is involving their existence. 



The mental attitude of pyaemia (alteration of the blood by pus) is, 

 again, quite distinct from any of the foregoing. It is that of abso- 

 lute indifference. From the first long shivering fit which marks the 

 initiation of the fateful disease, the mental attitude is usually that 

 of imperturbable indifference. Marked by utter unconcern as to the 

 course of the disease, it contrasts very strikingly with the ill-founded 

 hopefulness of hectic, and especially of pulmonary phthisis. Of course 

 it is not asserted that the mental attitudes described are invariable 

 and ever present in the different diseases ; only that they are so com- 

 mon that they cannot be regarded as mere coincidences. 



In diabetes mellitus, too, there is a condition of mental languor 

 and depression, which is as marked as the muscular lethargy and las- 

 situde manifested by sufferers from that affection, and which often 

 precedes those physical symptoms which we are too much inclined to 

 regard as the chief indications of that disease. 



The condition of the mind in the delirium of fever is a subject of 

 much interest, albeit it is surrounded by many difficulties. The great 

 one is that people at large are too much accustomed and inclined to 

 regard delirium as aimless, objectless mental action a chaos of bro- 

 ken ideas and unconnected thoughts, or an uncovering of the sewers 

 of the mind, the revealing of secrets not always innocent. The first is 

 the way in which they regard it in others, the latter, the form in 

 which they apprehend it in themselves, so that there is not given to 

 it that intelligent attention the subject deserves ; nor are those imme- 

 diately and constantly around the delirious patient likely to possess a 

 calm, dispassionate, and competent capacity to attend to what is going 

 on in his mind, so far as it finds expression in words. The anxious 



