AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 5J 



change of his head, which unceasingly occurred to him. A keen 

 and unanswerable stroke of pleasantry seemed best adapted to cor- 

 rect this fantastic whim. Another convalescent, of a gay and face- 

 tious humour, instructed in the part he should play in this comedy, 

 adroitly turned the conversation to the subject of the famous mira- 

 cle of St. Denis, in which it will be recollected that the holy man, 

 after decapitation, walked away with his head under his arm, which 

 he kissed, and condoled with it for its misfortune. Our mechani- 

 cian strongly maintained the possibility of the fact, and sought to 

 confirm it by an appeal to his own case. The other set up a loud 

 laugh, and replied, with a tone of the keenest ridicule, n Madman 

 as thou art, how could St. Denis kiss his own head ? Was it with 

 his heels ?" This equally unexpected and unanswerable retort for- 

 cibly struck the maniac. He retired confused amid the peals of 

 laughter which were provoked at his expense, and never afterwards 

 mentioned the exchange of his head.* This is a very instructive 

 case, inasmuch as it illustrates, in the clearest point of view, the 

 moral treatment of the insane. It shews us the kind of mental 

 remedies which are likely to be successful in the cure of disordered 

 intellect. This disease was purely of the Imagination, and the 

 causes which produced it did not lie very deep, neither were they 

 such as, under proper management, were likely to produce any per- 

 manent alienation of mind. An intense application to the more 

 speculative parts of his trade, had fixed his Imagination upon the 

 discovery of perpetual motion ; mingling with this, when his judg- 

 ment was half dethroned, came the idea of. losing his own head, and 

 getting a wrong one. And at a time when heads were falling in- 

 discriminately around him, this second freak of the Imagination, 

 acting as a kind of interlude or bye-play to the first, was one of 

 the most natural that could be supposed. From the same reason 

 that this person ran mad in attempting to discover perpetual motion, 

 does the astronomer, of whose mind religious veneration forms a 

 part, make the sun his god, and worship him as the creator of the 

 world. From the same cause does the enthusiast spend whole 

 nights in prayer, and the poet speak constantly in rhyme. Of the 

 latter form of insanity I once saw a lady who never spoke in prose ; 

 her rhyme was easy and natural, and the facility with which it was 

 composed and uttered wonderful. The ideas which produced this 

 man's insanity were rather of a whimsical cast ; springing from a 



* Ph. Pinel, Traite Medko-Philosophiquc sur V Alienation Mentale, &c. — 

 Paris, 1809. 



VOL. V. NO. XVII. H 



