BODILY ILLNESS AS A MENTAL STIMULANT. 237 



sessed when in health. The quality of his brain was such, 

 it appears, that with the ordinary activity of the circulation, the 

 ordinary vitality of the organ, mental action was uncertain 

 and feeble ; but when the circulation had all but ceased, when 

 the nervous powers were all but prostrate, the feeble brain, 

 though it may have become no stronger actually, became 

 relatively stronger, in such sort that for the time specified, 

 a mere moment before dissolution, the idiot became an 

 intelligent being. 



A somewhat similar case is on record in which an insane 

 person, during that stage of typhus fever in which sane 

 persons are apt to become delirious, became perfectly sane 

 and reasonable, his insanity returning with returning health. 

 Persons of strongest mind in health are often delirious for a 

 short time before death. Since, then, the idiot in the same 

 stage of approaching dissolution may become intelligent, 

 while the insane may become sane under the conditions which 

 make the sane become delirious, we recognise a relationship 

 between the mental and bodily states which might be of con- 

 siderable use in the treatment of mental diseases. It may 

 well be that conditions of the nervous system which are to 

 be avoided by persons of normal mental qualities may be 

 advantageously superinduced in the case of those of abnor- 

 mally weak or abnormally violent mind. It is noteworthy 

 that different conditions would seem to be necessary for the 

 idiotic and for the insane, if the cases cited sufficed to 

 afford basis for generalisation. For the idiot of Miss Mar- 

 tineau's story became intelligent during the intense depres- 

 sion of the bodily powers immediately preceding dissolution, 

 whereas the insane person became sane during that height 

 of fever when delirium commonly makes its appearance. 



Sir H. Holland mentions a case which shows that great 

 bodily depression may affect a person of ordinary clear and 

 powerful mind. * I descended on one and the same day,' 

 he says, ' two very deep mines in the Hartz Mountains, re- 

 maining some hours under ground in each. While in the 

 second mine, and exhausted both from fatigue and inanition, 



