MARRIAGE AND INSANITY. 105 







Often the imaginary troubles of the melancholiac are 

 long borne in silence. Frequently the sufferer lets 

 his unreal woes " like a worm i' the bud " eat at 

 his vitals unknown to the world, and, if not betrayed 

 by his worn and gloomy exterior, having lost hope 

 of relief in this world, seeks it in the next, taking 

 his secret with him. 



A good example of the wonderful influence of in- 

 herited taint is seen in those painful cases of melan- 

 cholia which we so frequently meet with among those 

 of atheromatous habit who have passed the meridian 

 of life. In these cases, when the vessels become so 

 loaded with earthy matter as to be impervious to the 

 blood, the surrounding tissue undergoes the usual 

 degenerative changes consequent on starvation. Now, 

 if the patient be of stable nervous temperament, he 

 will, as the nervous degeneration proceeds, sink quietly 

 through his second childishness into the oblivion of 

 dotage; but if, on the other hand, he has inherited 

 the insane diathesis, delusions of persecution, of im- 

 pending poverty, or of eternal condemnation will arise 

 to make miserable the evening of his life. 



These, then suicide, dipsomania, and melancholia 

 are the forms of mental disease which are most 

 frequently transmitted unaltered along the family line, 

 but the others (as mania, monomania, moral insanity, 

 propensity to crime and idiocy) may, and sometimes 

 do, appear again and again in families. Lucas quotes 

 Haller, who gives the case of "two noble families in 

 which idiocy had appeared for nearly a century when 



