EDUCATION OF BRAIN-CELLS. 201 



obvious practical inferences in respect to the treatment of what I con- 

 ceive to be a not uncommon cerebral condition. 



In 1858 I was requested to see a daily governess and teacher of 

 music, who had been suddenly attacked with what Avas thought to be 

 acute mania. I found a spare, somewhat angular, eccentric-looking 

 young woman, aged twenty-six, in a state of great excitement, hysterical 

 and choreic. Within a few hours — after a paroxysm of considerable 

 violence, during which she talked and sang wildly and was with diffi- 

 culty restrained by those around her — she fell into a state verging on 

 suspended animation, which lasted a week. The skin was cold, and pre- 

 sented a dark, mottled appearance ; the pulse was scarcely perceptible 

 at the wrist ; the breathing slow and seldom deep ; there seemed to 

 be complete loss of consciousness, and scarcely any trace of sensibility. 

 The muscles were cataleptic, and the extremities dropped slowly when 

 raised. It was barely possible to feed the patient by the mouth, by 

 holding forward the larynx and placing the fluid far back in the 

 pharynx with a spoon, when it seemed to flow down the oesophagus as 

 through a flaccid tube. This condition, which was treated with the 

 interrupted current from the occiput and nape to the hypogastrium, 

 and mustard-poultices down the spine, subsided very gradually. Then 

 came the state I am chiefly interested to note. There had clearly been 

 an exciting cause for the attack in religious excitement, acting on a 

 nervous system exhausted by protracted toil as a teacher. 



When consciousness began to return, the latest sane ideas formed 

 previous to the illness mingled curiously Avith the new impressions 

 received, as in the case of a person awakening slowly from a dream. 

 When propped up with pillows in bed near the window, so that pass- 

 ers in the street could be seen, the patient described the moving ob- 

 jects as "trees walking " ; and, when asked where she saw these things, 

 she invariably replied, "In the other gospel." In short, her mental 

 state was one in which the real and the ideal were not separable. Her 

 recollections on recovery, and for some time afterward, were indistinct, 

 and, in regard to a large class of common topics which must have 

 formed the staple material of thought up to the period of the attack, 

 memory was blank. Special subjects of thought immediately anterior 

 to the malady seemed to have saturated the mind so completely that 

 the early impressions received after recovery commenced Avere imbued 

 with them, while the cerebral record of penultimate brain-work in the 

 life before the morbid state was, as it were, obliterated. For example, 

 although this young woman had supported herself by daily duty as a 

 governess, she had no recollection of so simple a matter as the use of 

 a writing implement. When a pen or pencil was placed in her hand,"^ 

 as it might be thrust between the fingers of a child, the act of grasp- 

 ing it was not excited, even reflexly : the touch or sight of the instru- 

 ment awoke no association of ideas. The most perfect destruction of 

 brain-tissue could not have more completely effaced the constructive 



