INFLUENCE OF MIND ON BODY.

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alyze for a time all the bodily and mental functions, or cause instant death. It may, again, produce epilepsy, apoplexy, or insanity; while a prolonged state of depression and anxiety is sometimes an important agent in the causation of chronic disease, such as diabetes and heart-disease. Can it be doubted, too, that the strong belief that a bodily disorder will be cured by some appliance, itself innocent of good or harm, may so affect beneficially the nutrition of the part as actually to effect a cure? To me it seems not unreasonable to suppose that the mind may stamp its tone, if not its very features, on the individual elements of the body, inspiring them with hope and energy, or infecting them with despair and feebleness. A separated portion of the body, so little that our naked eye can make nothing of it, the spermatozoon of the male and the ovum of the female, does at any rate contain, in a latent state, the essential characters of the mind and body of the individual from whom it has proceeded; and, as we are utterly ignorant how this mysterious effect is accomplished, we are certainly not in a position to deny that what is true of the spermatozoon and ovum may be true of other organic elements. And, if this be so, then those who profess to discover the character of the individual in the character of the nose, the hand the features, or other part of the body, may have a foundation of truth for speculations which are yet only vague, fanciful, and valueless.

Perhaps we do not, as physicians, consider sufficiently the influence of mental states in the production of disease, and their importance as symptoms, or take all the advantage which we might take of them in our efforts to cure it. Quackery seems to have here got hold of a truth which legitimate medicine fails to appreciate and use adequately. Assuredly the most successful physician is he who, inspiring the greatest confidence in his remedies, strengthens and exalts the imagination of his patient: if he orders a few drops of peppermint-water with the confident air of curing the disease, will

he not really do more sometimes for the patient than one who treats him in the most approved scientific way, but without inspiring a conviction of recovery? Ceremonies, charms, gesticulations, amulets, and the like, have in all ages and among all nations been greatly esteemed and largely used in the treatment of disease; and it may be speciously presumed that they have derived their power, not from any contract with the supernatural, but, as Bacon observes, by strengthening and exalting the imagination of him who used them. Entirely ignorant as we are, and probably ever shall be, of the nature of mind, groping feebly for the laws of its operation, we certainly cannot venture to set bounds to its power over those intimate and insensible molecular movements which are the basis of all our visible bodily functions, any more than we can justly venture to set bounds to its action in the vast and ever-progressing evolution of Nature, of which all our thoughts and works are but a part. This much we do know: that as, on the one hand, in the macrocosm of Nature, it is certain that the true idea once evolved is imperishable—that it passes from individual to individual, from nation to nation, from generation to generation, becoming the eternal and exalting possession of man-so, on the other hand, in the microcosm of the body, which some ignorantly despise, there are many more things in the reciprocal action of mind and organic element than are yet dreamed of in our philosophy.

LECTURE II.

GENTLEMEN: In my last lecture I gave a general survey of the physiology of our mental functions, showing how indissolubly they are bound up with the bodily functions, and how barren must of necessity be a study of mind apart from body. I pointed out that the higher mental operations were functions of the supreme nerve-centres; but that, though of a higher and more complex nature than the functions of the lower nerve-centres, they obeyed the same physiological laws of evolution, and could be best approached through a knowledge of them. I now propose to show that the phenomena of the derangement of mind bear out fully this view of its nature; that we have not to deal with disease of a metaphysical entity, which the method of inductive inquiry cannot reach, nor the resources of the medical art touch, but with disease of the nervous system, disclosing itself by physical and mental symptoms. I say advisedly physical and mental, because in most, if not all, cases of insanity, at one period or other of their course, there are, in addition to the prominent mental features, symptoms of disordered nutrition and secretion, of disordered sensibility, or of disordered motility. Neither in health nor in disease is the mind imprisoned in one corner of the body; and, when a person is lunatic, he is, as Dr. Bucknill has remarked, lunatic to his fingers' ends.

Mental disorders are neither more nor less than nervous diseases in which mental symptoms predominate, and their entire separation from other nervous diseases has been a sad hin

derance to progress. When a blow on the head has paralyzed sensibility and movement, in consequence of the disease in the brain which it has initiated, the patient is sent to the hospital; but when a blow on the head has caused mental derangement, in consequence of the disease of brain which it has initiated, the patient is sent to an asylum. In like manner, one man who has unluckily swallowed the eggs of a tænia, and has got a cysticercus in the brain, may go to the hospital; another who has been similarly unlucky goes to an asylum. Syphilitic disease of the brain or its arteries lands one person in an asylum with mental symptoms predominant, another in a hospital with sensory and motor disorder predominant. The same cause produces different symptoms, according to the part of the brain which it particularly affects. No doubt it is right that mental derangements should have, as they often require, the special appliances of an asylum, but it is certainly not right that the separation which is necessary for treatment should reach to their pathology and to the method of its study. So long as this is the case, we shall labor in vain to get exact scientific ideas concerning their causation, their pathology, and their treatment.

What is the scientific mean

pass, as every They are mys

Clearing, then, the question as completely as possible from the haze which metaphysics has cast around it, let us ask— How comes idiocy, or insanity? ing of them? We may take it to be beyond question that they are not accidents; that they come to other event in Nature does, by natural law. terious visitations only because we understand not the laws of their production, appear casualties only because we are ignorant of their causality. When a blow on the head or an inflammation of the membranes of the brain has produced derangement of mind, we need not look farther for a cause: the actual harm done to structure is sufficient to account for disorder of function in the best-constituted and best-developed brain. But it is only in a small proportion of cases of insanity that we can discover such a direct physical occasion of disease.

In a great many cases-in more than half, certainly, and perhaps in five out of six-there is something in the nervous organization of the person, some native peculiarity, which, however we name it, predisposes him to an outbreak of insanity. When two persons undergo a similar moral shock, or a similar prolonged anxiety, and one of them goes mad in consequence, while the other goes to sleep and goes to work and recovers his equanimity, it is plain that all the coöperating conditions have not been the same, that the entire cause has been different. What, then, has been the difference? In the former case there has been present a most important element, which was happily wanting in the latterthere has been a certain hereditary neurosis, an unknown and variable quantity in the equation.

Perhaps of all the erroneous notions concerning mind which metaphysics has engendered or abetted, there is none more false than that which tacitly assumes or explicitly declares that men are born with equal original mental capacity, opportunities and education determining the differences of subsequent development. The opinion is as cruel as it is false. What man can by taking thought add one cubit either to his mental or to his bodily stature? Multitudes of human beings come into the world weighted with a destiny against which they have neither the will nor the power to contend; they are the step-children of Nature, and groan under the worst of all tyrannies-the tyranny of a bad organization. Men differ, indeed, in the fundamental characters of their minds, as they do in the features of their countenances, or in the habits of their bodies; and between those who are born with the potentiality of a full and complete mental development, under favorable circumstances, and those who are born with an innate incapacity of mental development, under any circumstances, there exists every gradation. What teaching could ever raise the congenital idiot to the common level of human intelligence? What teaching could ever keep the inspired mind of the man of genius at that level?